Making life easier for people and brands everywhere through trusted Conversational AI

Rob LoCascio is the founder of LivePerson, Inc. and has been its chief executive officer since its inception in 1995, making him one of the longest-standing founding CEOs of a tech company today. As the inventor of online chat for brands, Rob disrupted the way people communicate with companies around the world, removing the need for 1-800 numbers, long wait times, and endlessly scanning websites for information.

In 2016, Rob again led the company to the forefront of conversational commerce by making it easy for consumers to connect with brands on messaging via platforms including SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, and even brand apps and websites. In 2018, Rob delivered on his vision for AI-powered conversations, opening the doors for brands to message at massive scale while still providing outstanding customer experiences. Now in 2020, Rob is a leading voice on reforming the future of work, helping cultivate innovative new systems that support the needs of LivePerson's global staff, and challenging the reliance on physical office spaces.

As someone who has been on the entrepreneurial journey for over two decades, Rob's mission is to inspire and help others who are on that same path. LivePerson has come a long way since its early years, having survived the dot-com crash and grown to become the leader in Conversational AI and automation solutions, currently serving over 18,000 clients, with 1,200 employees worldwide.

Beyond his decades of work at LivePerson, Rob's interests extend past his business and reflect his close ties to New York City and his journey as an entrepreneur and humanitarian. He is a founding member of EqualAI, which works with companies, policy makers, and experts to reduce bias in AI, and the NYC Entrepreneurs Council of the Partnership for New York City. In 2001, he started the Dream Big Foundation with its first program, FeedingNYC, which gives families in need a Thanksgiving dinner. To date, FeedingNYC has donated more than 85,000 meals. Its second program, the Dream Big Entrepreneurship Initiative, launched in 2014 to fund, mentor, coach, and empower local entrepreneurs in underserved communities.

Tony Owens leads LivePerson’s global field strategy and operations — inclusive of its markets, partner ecosystem, sales operations, midmarket, and marketing organizations — with a focus on aggressively accelerating the company’s growth.

Owens has led world-class sales and operations teams for more than 20 years, building and managing large, high-growth technology sales organizations at world-renowned tech companies. Prior to LivePerson, Owens was at Salesforce.com for ten years with progressive responsibilities running its field operation in the Americas — its largest territory — and was a key leader as the company grew from $1.4 billion in revenue to well over $20 billion. Previously, he served as Group Vice President at Oracle. 

Owens is passionate about giving back and was an executive sponsor for Salesforce’s women’s network and Boldforce, a diversity and inclusion initiative. He is an active sponsor for communities including the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Autism Speaks, and the Navy SEAL Foundation. Owens attended Brigham Young University and lives in the Bay Area with his wife of 25 years and his four kids.

Angelo leads Banking and Consumer Services at LivePerson. With more than 19 years of experience in the banking industry driving technology, marketing and digital transformation programs, he conceived and founded buddybank®, the first conversational bank in the world that offers banking and lifestyle services through messaging.

buddybank® is a conversational banking experience designed for iPhone with a 24/7 messaging-concierge and it is part of UniCredit, one of the largest pan-European banks.

Formerly, he served UniCredit as Head of Open Innovation, launching initiatives including an online banking service designed for and with senior citizens. Angelo is an expert in transforming how banks interact with their consumers, proving that conversational commerce can turn customers into ambassadors.

Manlio is an integral leader in strategic initiatives across LivePerson's global organization. Previously, he oversaw the company's flagship enterprise software business worldwide. Before joining LivePerson, he served as CEO for multiple consumer and business messaging companies he helped launch.

Manlio was CMO and head of product strategy for Intermedia, a global leader in cloud services and the world's largest independent provider of Microsoft email. From 2005 through 2009, he was CEO of The Carrelli Group where he worked directly with CEOs, CMOs, and heads of sales at Fortune 500 firms and a portfolio of venture-backed SaaS start-ups to transform their operations for higher growth. Manlio previously led marketing for TradeCard (now Infor), a SaaS supply chain company with $100 billion in transaction volume.

Drawing on his experience as a founder, data scientist, and institutional investor, John Collins brings a modern vision and skillset to the role of CFO. Before his appointment to CFO, John led the development of automations and machine learning to support strategic decision-making and predictive analytics as LivePerson’s SVP of Quantitative Strategy.

Prior to LivePerson, John pioneered approaches for transforming third-party data exhaust into investment signals as Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Thasos. John also served as Portfolio Manager for a systematic equities strategy while Thasos incubated inside an NYC-based fund with over $10 billion in assets under management.

John’s previous financial services experience includes closing over $3 billion in transactions at Credit Suisse and building automated equity surveillance systems to detect suspicious trading activity at the New York Stock Exchange.

John holds an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, a JD from Chicago-Kent College of Law, and a BS from the University of Central Florida.

Monica brings to LivePerson extensive experience in executive management in the software and internet industries. She oversees a wide variety of corporate and strategic matters at LivePerson, including strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, and commercial transactions as well as the company's corporate legal affairs.

Prior to joining LivePerson, Monica served as VP, general counsel of Nuance Communications, Inc., a leading provider of speech recognition software. Previously, Monica was associated with the law firms of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, CA, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York, NY.

Monica holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD from Boston University School of Law.

Andrew leads day-to-day operations for LivePerson, with a focus on optimizing the company’s ability to grow and scale. He is helping reimagine the future of work, moving from an office-centric model to an employee-centric workforce that better integrates work and life through asynchronous means. Andrew also steers LivePerson’s business-to-consumer strategy and execution. In addition to running large technical services and organizations serving hundreds of millions of customers on a daily basis, he has extensive experience in using AI to deliver improved, personalized customer journeys.

Before joining LivePerson, Andrew was VP, Customer Experience Technology and Machine Learning at Amazon. At Amazon, he led the development of the company’s recommendation engines, search function, and other machine learning-powered experiences. Prior to his eleven years with Amazon, Andrew held leadership positions at tech organizations including Tacit Software, Infoseek, and Tumbleweed.

Andrew graduated from California State University and is on the board of the A Breeze of Hope Foundation.

Marc heads up the global distribution group, which is responsible for enabling LivePerson brands to engage consumers in emerging messaging media, including Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, Google Home, Google My Business, Google Rich Business Messaging, WhatsApp, and more.

Prior to joining LivePerson, Marc was the founder of Contact At Once!, which was acquired by LivePerson in 2014. He was previously an associate partner with Accenture responsible for messaging and eCRM practice areas. Marc graduated from Clemson University.

Avi oversees LivePerson’s global commercial business group, which is focused on growing mid-market and small business accounts through direct and indirect channels. Avi previously led global customer success at LivePerson — and during his first years at the company, he served as the VP of Product where he led the development of the LiveEngage platform.

Prior to joining LivePerson, Avi was the CEO of Amadesa, which he founded in 2005 and was acquired by LivePerson in 2012.

Avi holds an MBA from the Kellogg-Recanati International Executive Program and graduated cum laude in computer science from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.

Monica Pool Knox oversees LivePerson's global human resources strategy — including leadership development, organizational effectiveness, talent management, learning, total rewards, talent acquisition, people operations, DEI, and Modern Workplace — and focuses on continuing to align compassionate and ethical AI as a foundation of LivePerson's culture. She has extensive experience leading HR organizations and strategies to attract, develop, and retain world-class talent within high-performance companies. 

Prior to joining LivePerson, Pool Knox led human resources for a global workforce of over 8,000 focused on cloud and AI at Microsoft. She has held executive HR positions at Twitter, Sony, CBS Interactive, PepsiCo, The Walt Disney Company, and Verizon. Pool Knox serves as a Board Director of Swedish Health Systems and on the Board of Howard University's School of Communications. She earned her MBA from the University of Texas at Austin and BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Liran leads the consumer group at LivePerson. It operates the world’s largest online marketplace for expert advice, continuously connecting people with more than 200,000 experts in 600+ fields through chat, phone, email, and online Q&A, among other channels. Liran was previously LivePerson consumer group’s head of product. Prior that, Liran was a CEO and partner at Badook, a business index platform. He has also led product management at several start-ups. Liran holds a BSc in industrial engineering.

Alex leads the technology organization at LivePerson, overseeing all R&D globally. Prior to LivePerson, he was global head of Alexa OS for Amazon.com, running a large, distributed team of developers around the world and leading the development of the core software systems and capabilities that underpin the Alexa platform.

Before joining Amazon, Alex served as CTO of McCann Worldgroup — one of the world’s largest marketing organizations with 24,000 staff across more than 100 countries — and CTO for North America and Asia-Pacific at AXA Technologies, where he built large-scale grid computing for predictive modeling. At Thomson Reuters, he oversaw product and technology for news and media, including real-time, AI-driven news curation for financial professionals.

He has also held executive technology leadership positions at TheStreet.com and MTV Networks as CTO of Comedy Central. Alex started his career as an engineer in New York City, working on real-time data feeds. He has an MBA from Duke University.