DeJon Gaines

I joined TLCx as the final C-suite hire with a clear mandate: lead the company's evolution from a traditional voice and chat contact center provider into an AI-forward digital customer experience platform. The CX market is bifurcating. Hyperscale incumbents are pushing complexity and cost; mid-market providers are getting squeezed. My remit is to build the technology foundation and platform strategy that lets us compete on capability while moving with the speed and agility a veteran-owned, founder-led company can uniquely bring. That work spans three lanes: - Platform productization — taking AI-powered customer engagement, unified customer data, and quality intelligence capabilities and packaging them into tiered offerings that are easier to adopt, faster to deploy, and priced for the mid-market. - Enterprise modernization — rationalizing the legacy infrastructure, vendor stack, and cloud posture inherited from a 30-year operating history, and rebuilding it on a modern, AI-native foundation. - Industry voice — representing the company in analyst, partner, and customer conversations that shape where the CX category is headed, including ongoing engagement with Everest Group, Microsoft, and the broader contact center ecosystem. After 21 years driving enterprise transformation at scale — most recently as CIO of a $3B customer experience division — I made a deliberate move to a place where technology decisions translate directly into customer outcomes, without the friction of large-enterprise inertia. The pace is faster. The impact is closer. The work is more fun.

As CIO of Conduent's customer experience division — a $3B business serving 2,000+ enterprise clients across healthcare, financial services, and government — I led the technology strategy and digital transformation that repositioned the division from legacy BPO operator to AI-forward customer experience leader. The mandate was scope, scale, and speed. I owned a $900M technology budget and a 2,000-person global IT organization spanning four continents, with accountability for everything from contact center platforms supporting 25,000 CX associates to the cybersecurity, cloud, and data infrastructure underneath. The work that mattered most: - Cloud-first transformation — migrated 50+ mission-critical applications to AWS and Azure, delivering 40% infrastructure savings and 30% application performance improvement. - AI-powered CX — deployed analytics and AI capabilities into contact center operations, lifting CSAT 25% and reducing average handle time 35% across the client portfolio. - Operational leverage — generated $54M in annual savings through transformational IT strategy while expanding capability, directly improving division profitability. - Security and trust — established an enterprise cybersecurity framework aligned to ISO 27001, NIST, and CIS standards across 2,000+ client implementations. - Industry positioning — contributed to the division's recognition as a Major Contender in Everest Group's 2024 Americas CXM PEAK Matrix, and represented Conduent at industry events including Genesys Xperience. Six years in, I'd built what I came to build. Time for the next chapter.

I joined Conduent in 2017 and given the initiative of driving the digital transformation venture and IT service delivery for a customer experience division following a strategic pivot by the new CEO. During my tenure as Vice President, I stabilized the existing infrastructure while simultaneously developing and implementing a digital-first strategy that revitalized operations and drove future growth. I managed the technology budget and a team of IT professionals, including architects, developers, engineers, analysts, and consultants. Notable Accomplishments: Led and implemented enterprise-wide Agile/DevOps transformation, accelerating software deployment time by 60% and increasing release frequency from monthly to weekly, enhancing agility and time-to-market. Designed and executed a three-year IT strategic roadmap, aligning technology investments with business objectives and driving $25M in operational savings.

I became part of the Xerox Services family as the Vice President of the IT Service Management division. Through my leadership, I established and implemented a service management framework across the enterprise, enhancing operational maturity and standardization. Operational efficiency was also strengthened during my tenure with the implementation and enforcement of ITIL-based processes, including incident, problem, change, capacity, and business relationship management. I led the successful deployment of a unified service desk to streamline business interactions and request intake. Notable Accomplishments: Realized a 60% reduction in Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)by leveraging standardization incident management protocols. Achieved $12M in annual costs savings, spearheading the process of streamlining IT service delivery and reducing downtime.

In 2004, I was recruited to manage the IT operations verticals across multiple delivery centers that was responsible for supporting 15,000 associates, providing hands-on experience with enterprise-class hardware and infrastructure. Following the successful implementation of transformative technology initiatives, my role was later expanded to include both national and Global IT leadership. I created and managed virtual machines using VMware tools and technologies.