Cresta Crew is back with a peek into our team who is responsible for building Cresta AI Agent.
In this series, we shine a spotlight on the many different departments at Cresta and the talented, interesting, and dynamic people who work within them.
Read on to hear from Henry on his career, why he chose Cresta, and what trends he envisions for the year ahead.
Tell us about yourself - what is your background?
My journey began as a robotics engineer, evolving into a full-stack software engineer with experience across frontend, backend, and infrastructure. My focus then shifted to machine learning, leading me to roles as a data scientist at Bloomberg and an applied machine learning engineer at Google.
This engineering foundation inspired me to co-found an educational startup, guiding Canadian students through their transition to university. This entrepreneurial venture ignited a passion for business, leading me to spend over four years in management consulting at McKinsey. There, I partnered with senior executives, solving diverse strategic challenges, from investment strategy to company turnarounds. In my final year at McKinsey, I led AI Agent R&D globally as part of the QuantumBlack group.
What inspired you to join Cresta?
I joined Cresta because I am confident it will be a market leader in contact center AI in the coming decades.
First, with global contact centers spending over $300-350 billion annually on labor, there's an unparalleled opportunity to enhance efficiency and experience.
Second, as humans are crucial in contact centers, Cresta's unified platform strategy is clearly a winning approach.
Third, I was incredibly impressed by the team during my interviews, featuring top engineers from Google and Meta. Based on all of this, Cresta is exceptionally well-positioned to dominate in contact center AI.
What is your role at Cresta?
As a Product Manager on the AI Agent team, I am responsible for the end-user experience, including the voice experience (e.g., natural sound, low latency), and the omnichannel AI agent experience.
I also work closely with ML engineers to ensure Cresta’s AI Agents reliably achieve business objectives and adhere to policy guardrails.
How did you get into this line of work?
I was introduced by a colleague from both McKinsey and Cresta, and the AI Agent PM role was an excellent fit.
What does a typical day look like?
Every day brings new challenges, but I find myself energized by the following activities:
- Envisioning a bold future for human-AI collaboration.
- Delving into the specifics of feature implementation with our engineering team.
- Engineering prompts, building tools, evaluating AI agents, optimizing systems, and repeating!
- Geeking out with ML researchers and engineers, discussing papers, and exploring new concepts.
- Co-creating the future state of contact centers alongside our prospects and customers.
- Interacting with AI agents (sometimes for too long).
What about the product gets you excited?
I’m excited that our omnichannel AI Agent makes customer experience feel human—one continuous, multimodal conversation that flows between chat, voice, and visuals without losing context.
Customers can show, not just tell—snapping a photo for troubleshooting, jumping to a quick call, or getting a timely text follow-up—while the AI Agent preserves the full history across channels. It collaborates with human experts seamlessly, handing off or co-piloting as needed so there’s no friction or repetition.
The payoff is faster resolutions for urgent problems, happier customers, and lower costs—but more importantly, support that matches how people naturally communicate.
What big trends in this space do you envision over the next year?
I anticipate three key trends:
- Voice AI agents will achieve such sophistication that discerning them from highly articulate human speakers will become challenging.
- Ensuring AI agent responses are consistently reliable and precise will persist as a machine learning hurdle.
- The reduced cost of AI will facilitate broader enterprise adoption, even within offshore contact centers, by strengthening the business case.
What do you think is the most important skill for a new Crestan to have?
The ability to take initiative and solve ambiguous problems is a critical skill, especially in a fast-paced environment like Cresta, where many challenges are still undefined. It demands high agency to tackle these issues and ensure rapid progress.
What are some of your earliest learnings from working with our customers?
Cresta’s customers are ambitious adopters of technology, prepared to make significant initial investments to achieve a dramatic transformation in end-user experience and substantial cost reduction.
What do you love to do with your time when you're not at work?
I'm an avid urban and nature cyclist, and when the temperature rises, you'll find me making a splash. My mind finds its peace between the pages of an audiobook.
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