Winners' Circle
By: Business Intelligence Group Winners' Circle
Language: en
Categories: Business, Marketing
Winners’ Circle is where the spotlight shifts from the awards stage to the real conversations that keep the momentum going. It’s where past winners, volunteer judges, and the marketing and PR pros behind the scenes gather for frank, relevant business discussions that pull back the curtain on how recognition turns into results. We talk about the campaigns that worked, the leadership choices that mattered, and the strategies that kept a win from being a one-day headline. You’ll hear how cybersecurity innovators secure industry credibility, how customer service champions turn feedback into loyalty, how marketers and PR teams turn a pres...
Episodes
2026 Budget Season: Turning Recognition into Marketing ROI
Jan 08, 2026Summary
In this conversation, Russ Fordyce and Eliana Starbird discuss the importance of awards in branding and employee recognition, particularly in the context of the upcoming 2026 budget season. They explore various award categories, including Best Places to Work, AI Excellence, and Sustainability Awards, emphasizing the strategic benefits of each. The discussion highlights the role of employee satisfaction surveys, the significance of advisory boards in shaping award programs, and the overall value of winning awards for organizations. The conversation concludes with a call to action for increased engagement and recognition of employees.
Chapters
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Duration: 00:53:45Climbing the Spiral: Laurie Oswald on Women in Leadership, AI, and 100-Year Companies
Jan 06, 2026Chief Commercial Officer Laurie Oswald joins host Ruth Redding on Winners Circle to talk about leading commercial transformation at two century old companies, C and D Technologies and Trojan Battery Company, while championing women in leadership and global diversity.
Laurie shares how she oversees sales, marketing, product, customer service and inside sales across both businesses, powering critical infrastructure like data centers, telecom networks and utilities on the C and D side, and motive applications like golf carts and aerial work platforms on the Trojan side. She explains how these companies are modernizing with new battery ch...
Duration: 00:26:10Multilingual AI, Data Readiness, and Mentorship with Krish Banavalikar
Dec 23, 2025Modernizing with AI is not just about more GPUs or chatbots. In this Winner’s Circle episode, host Russ Fordyce talks with all star judge and Cloud Engagement Manager Krish (Radhakrishna) Banavalikar about what real transformation looks like when you blend data, AI, and human insight. Krish shares his journey from an Indian village to leading global cloud and AI programs, and why he calls himself a “serial learner and unlearner.”
He explains how he helps enterprises move from experiments to value, using agentic AI to design products, shape campaigns, and feed customer feedback back into the...
Duration: 00:30:03Human Conversations in an AI World: Inside PhoneBurner With Sammy Winner Chris Sorensen
Dec 16, 2025What happens to sales when AI can flood every inbox, feed, and phone line, but real human attention is scarcer than ever? In this Winners Circle episode, Russ Fordyce sits down with Sammy Award winner Chris Sorensen, CEO of PhoneBurner, to unpack what “responsible dialing” really means in 2025 and why authentic conversations still win.
Chris explains how PhoneBurner helps quota carrying reps hit their numbers the old fashioned way, by having real, one to one calls with people who actually pick up, while using modern infrastructure, analytics, and AI to keep answer rates high. He pull...
Duration: 00:24:27Human + AI at Scale: Inside SupportYourApp With Herizon Winner Daria Leshchenko
Dec 09, 2025Herizon Award winner Daria Leshchenko, CEO of SupportYourApp, joins Russ Fordyce on The Winners’ Circle to share how she built a global “support-as-a-service” company that blends human empathy with AI-driven efficiency. Starting as a customer support rep herself and becoming CEO at 24, Daria grew SupportYourApp from a small team serving Mac developers in Ukraine into an international operation supporting software, e-commerce, telecom, and more in 60+ languages, 24/7. Along the way, she led through COVID, war, and rapid expansion into markets from Argentina to West Africa.
Daria opens up about what it really takes to scale a remote-f...
Duration: 00:32:40AI as a Universal Teacher: Ravi Bhushan on Raising Curious, Future-Ready Kids
Dec 02, 2025In this episode of The Winners’ Circle, host Russ Fordyce sits down with Ravi Bhushan, founder and CEO of Brightchamps, to explore how AI is reshaping what kids learn, how they learn, and who gets left behind when education does not keep up.
Ravi shares the origin story of Brightchamps, founded in 2020 at the peak of the pandemic to give kids around the world access to “new age skills” that traditional K–12 systems were not designed to teach. From technology and coding to financial literacy, robotics, public speaking, and now math taught through adaptive AI, Brightcham...
Duration: 00:28:02Empowering Women and AI in Communication with Sophie Reymond on Mentorship and Innovation
Nov 25, 2025Sophie Reymond, founder of SRPR and Coworker, joins Russ Fordyce on The Winners' Circle to explore how mentorship and AI are shaping modern communication careers. Sophie shares her journey from corporate burnout to leading a boutique PR consultancy focused on AI-driven tech startups, and how she helps professionals integrate AI in ways that enhance creativity and efficiency.
She also introduces Coworker, an upcoming global mentorship platform designed to connect women across industries for guidance, support, and career growth. Born from Sophie’s own challenges in navigating male-dominated workplaces without mentorship, Coworker will use a matchmaking approach to fo...
Duration: 00:23:12Harshit Kohli on Data, AI, and the Human Edge in Innovation
Nov 18, 2025Join Harshit Kohli, Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS and recognized expert in data analytics and enterprise IT, for an insightful conversation about what’s truly shaping the future of business and technology. In this episode, Harshit shares his unique journey through the cloud ecosystem, moving from hands-on problem solver to trusted advisor for leading organizations embracing next-generation AI and big data.
Get ready to hear how the role of “big data” has evolved from just another buzzword to the engine behind digital transformation, with Harshit clarifying why actionable insights—not just data volume—drive success. He unpacks ho...
Duration: 00:25:33Driving Sustainability at Scale: Joe Wiltshire on Leadership, Safety, and Smarter Operations
Nov 11, 2025In this episode of The Winners’ Circle, host Russ Fordyce sits down with Joe Wiltshire, Corporate EHS & Sustainability Manager at Fastenal, to explore how one of the world’s largest industrial supply companies is redefining what it means to be safe, sustainable, and scalable in today’s global economy.
Fastenal operates across 25 countries, supporting more than 20,000 employees and over 3,200 branches and onsite locations. Joe leads the teams responsible for environmental, health, and safety (EHS) programs, OSHA and EPA compliance, security initia...
Duration: 00:22:04Building Trust in Healthcare AI: Naren Santhanam on Data, Decisions, and Doing It Right
Nov 04, 2025When artificial intelligence meets healthcare, there’s no room for guesswork. Every insight, every prediction, every decision has real-world consequences.
In this episode of Winners’ Circle, host Russ Fordyce sits down with Naren Santhanam, Director of Analytics at Counterpart Health, to explore how explainable AI is helping rebuild trust in healthcare analytics — and why doing it “the right way” matters more than doing it fast.
With more than 20 years of experience turning complex data into actionable healthcare insights, Naren has worked across claims systems, quality metrics, and risk analytics. Today, he’...
Duration: 00:35:30BlinkNow's Maggie Doyne: How Compassion Sparked a Global Model for Change
Oct 28, 2025In this inspiring episode of Winners’ Circle, host Russ Fordyce sits down with Maggie Doyne, award-winning humanitarian and co-founder of BlinkNow—an organization transforming how the world thinks about orphan care, sustainability, and community empowerment.
At just 19 years old, Maggie left her suburban New Jersey home with a backpack and curiosity about the world. Traveling through India and Nepal, she came across children breaking rocks in a riverbed to survive. That moment changed everything. Instead of moving on, she decided to stay—and help. What began as one child’s tuition payment...
Duration: 00:26:52Winners' Circle with Tangoe's Paolo Sellari
Oct 14, 2025In this episode of the Winners’ Circle Podcast, we sit down with Paolo Sellari, Director of Product Management at Tangoe, to explore how his team is helping global enterprises find control, clarity, and confidence in the age of cloud and AI.
With over two decades in technology and product management, Paolo has built a career around transforming complexity into simplicity. At Tangoe, he leads efforts to help organizations manage and optimize IT, cloud, and AI costs across more than $34 billion in managed spend and 200+ countries. His work helps companies uncover hidden co...
Duration: 00:25:56Winners' Circle with Amazon's Aryyama Kumar Jana - 003
Sep 23, 2025In this episode of the Winners’ Circle Podcast, we sit down with Aryyama Kumar Jana, Software Development Engineer and Tech Lead at Amazon Devices, who has built his career at the intersection of research and impact.
Aryyama holds a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence and has spent more than a decade working across industries including energy, manufacturing, and technology. He has authored papers, mentored startups, and even collaborated on research with Nobel Prize-winning professors. Today, his work at Amazon focuses on the Peregrine Initiative, which forecasts reverse logistics — predicting not only what will sell but also what w...
Duration: 00:24:19T. Rowe Price AI Leader Sasibhushan Rao Chanthati – 002
Sep 16, 2025In this episode of the Winners’ Circle Podcast, we sit down with Sasibhushan Rao Chanthati, AVP and Senior IEEE at T. Rowe Price and a longtime judge with the Winners’ Circle awards programs.
Sasi has built his career on the front lines of FinTech, AI, and large-scale systems engineering. He has authored papers, received U.S. copyrights, and mentored technologists around the world. Now, he is focused on building secure, scalable systems that keep up with the nonstop pace of financial technology.
In our conversation, Sasi shares:
Why continuous improvement is essential in f... Duration: 00:24:56Meta AI Developer Maneet Bansal - 001
Sep 02, 2025What does it take to design the next generation of AI systems responsibly? In this episode of the Winners’ Circle Podcast, we sit down with Maneet Bansal, a senior leader at Meta and longtime judge in our awards programs, to explore how observability, transparency, and trust are becoming essential in building AI at scale.
Maneet explains how AI workloads fundamentally differ from traditional cloud computing. In cloud environments, you can route requests across a pool of servers behind a load balancer. With AI, however, every request has unique demands on GPU memory, system resources, and downstream protections. It is...
Duration: 00:26:34