Dalet Elevates Customer Experience as AI and SaaS Complexity Accelerate

/ AI, Application Development, SaaS
Dalet Elevates Customer Experience as AI and SaaS Complexity Accelerate

The News

Dalet announced the appointment of Gwen Braygreen as Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer, a newly created role designed to own the full customer lifecycle as the company expands its SaaS platform and AI-driven innovations. To read more, visit the original press release here.

Analysis

Customer Experience Becomes an Operational Priority in AppDev

Across application development and SaaS markets, customer experience is increasingly tied to operational execution rather than post-sales support alone. As platforms introduce AI-driven features, faster release cycles, and more frequent updates, the burden on onboarding, adoption, and value realization has intensified. theCUBE Research and ECI data consistently shows that organizations embedding AI into production workflows are also raising expectations around reliability, transparency, and time-to-value. This shift is pushing vendors to treat customer success as a core operating function, not a downstream service layer.

Why Dalet’s Move Matters to the Application Development Market

Dalet’s creation of an EVP-level Chief Customer Officer role signals a broader market pattern: SaaS and platform providers are restructuring leadership to better manage lifecycle complexity. As media organizations adopt cloud-native workflows and AI-assisted production tools, they are effectively running continuous software programs, not one-time deployments. Centralizing accountability for onboarding, adoption, expansion, and renewal reflects an understanding that customer outcomes are now inseparable from platform architecture, release velocity, and operational consistency.

Market Challenges and Insights: From Features to Outcomes

Developers and platform teams across industries are grappling with similar challenges such as rapid innovation cycles, increasing configuration complexity, and higher customer expectations around uptime and predictability. More than 90% of organizations now track service-level objectives for internally developed applications, underscoring how availability and user confidence have become primary success metrics. In this environment, fragmented ownership of customer touchpoints can slow adoption and dilute perceived value, particularly when AI capabilities are introduced faster than customers can operationalize them.

How This News May Shape Developer and Platform Strategies

By aligning customer success more tightly with product, engineering, and services, Dalet appears to be positioning itself to shorten feedback loops between real-world usage and roadmap decisions. For developers, this approach may translate into clearer onboarding patterns, more predictable upgrade paths, and faster iteration based on operational insights. More broadly, it reflects a market shift toward designing customer experience into platform operations (using shared standards, telemetry, and feedback mechanisms) rather than attempting to fix adoption gaps after deployment. While outcomes will depend on execution, this model is increasingly viewed as table stakes for AI-enabled SaaS platforms.

Looking Ahead

As AI becomes embedded deeper into media production and distribution workflows, the application development market is likely to see more vendors elevate customer success to an executive, cross-functional mandate. This trend aligns with broader industry movement toward operational maturity, where customer confidence, not feature velocity alone, determines platform success.

For Dalet, the appointment of a Chief Customer Officer suggests a focus on scaling innovation without sacrificing consistency or trust. If executed effectively, this structure could help the company navigate the growing complexity of AI-driven SaaS while setting expectations for how customer experience leadership evolves across the broader application development ecosystem.

Author

  • Paul Nashawaty

    Paul Nashawaty, Practice Leader and Lead Principal Analyst, specializes in application modernization across build, release and operations. With a wealth of expertise in digital transformation initiatives spanning front-end and back-end systems, he also possesses comprehensive knowledge of the underlying infrastructure ecosystem crucial for supporting modernization endeavors. With over 25 years of experience, Paul has a proven track record in implementing effective go-to-market strategies, including the identification of new market channels, the growth and cultivation of partner ecosystems, and the successful execution of strategic plans resulting in positive business outcomes for his clients.

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