Chris Kairinos, senior director of global modern workplace technology, client services and technology operations at broadcasting and entertainment specialist A+E Global Media, says adaptability and a willingness to embrace change mark out great IT leaders in the digital age.
“CTOs and CIOs at the peak of their careers are noticing a giant shift when it comes to the technology and the application landscape,” he says, reflecting on the digital transformation occurring across the IT industry and within his own business. “These are the guys that predict the future a lot of the time, and you can see that future playing out in front of us.”
Kairinos moved to the US in October 2019. Having managed international technical support for A+E Global Media since 2017 from the firm’s London office and helped to establish the first technology function outside the US for its international employees, he was offered a role in the New York headquarters.
“I jumped at that opportunity,” he says. Seven years and one promotion later, Kairinos is firmly ensconced in the US business. He adds that the experiences gained have helped him grow as a digital leader. “I probably found it easier because I was doing a lot of collaborative stuff with the US anyway. This kind of role helps instil a global sense of the business when it comes to cultural differences around the world.”
Being versatile
In his current position, Kairinos is driving global technology operations and workplace transformations across enterprise environments. He’s putting into practice a broad range of skills developed over a wide-ranging career.
“Working at the ground level and working your way up gives you a better understanding of how everything works,” he says. “So, when you’re making decisions, or you’re trying to take into consideration how a process should work, you’re connecting the dots a little bit more naturally, rather than neglecting little things that certain areas might take for granted but which are all part of the bigger machine.”
Kairinos started in IT support roles with the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) in Newcastle before moving to London, where he worked as a technical lead on a big MoD IT migration project. He then moved to financial services publications, where he ran the IT service desk at Euromoney. In January 2017, he joined A+E Global Media, owner of the History Channel.
“I haven’t stayed in the same industry, which I enjoy, because you get variety,” he says, reflecting on his career moves. “Everywhere does something differently. I loved the rigidity and hierarchy of working for the military and government. When you move into the media industry, you find a very different approach, so you’ve got to be adaptable.”
While organisations can vary, Kairinos says the technology challenges you find are often the same, particularly when it comes to helping people make the most of their IT products. “If anything, I jumped in at the deep end and learned to swim,” he says. “I’ve gone from supporting 250,000 people to 2,500. But now my role is all about management.”
Kairinos reports to the senior vice-president of technology and global strategy at A+E Global Media. He runs IT operations, manages infrastructure and hones the employee experience. As well as owning key enterprise technology platforms, he runs agentic AI support where he’s leading the shift to AI-assisted self-service. It’s a role he relishes.
“There’s a lot of versatility,” he says. “I’m working across many different areas of technology. I would drive myself crazy if I got pigeonholed doing one thing. The breadth that I’m responsible for keeps the work interesting and also gives me a bigger picture of how technology operates within other areas of the business.”
Embracing automation
When Kairinos moved to his current role at A+E Global Media in late 2022, he assumed a broader responsibility for overall technology operations.
“From an employee standpoint, no one should know what I do or be impacted by what I do, because that means something’s broken,” he says. “No news is good news from an operations standpoint, because that means everything’s working as expected.”
Kairinos says improved customer satisfaction is one of his key achievements. Internal customer services scores have improved from around 70% to 97.5%. He’s redesigned service models, enforced tight service level agreements and established strong escalation paths – now, he’s looking to do more.
“Success is about analysing the entire ecosystem proactively and saying, ‘Look, if somebody’s machine’s broken, it’s a bad experience, whether they report it or not’,” he says. “People shouldn’t work with something that they feel is slow – that’s a bad experience, whether they tell you or not. Now, we’re trying to be proactive at a higher level. That’s where we have the biggest shifts in approach.”
Kairinos also points to automation’s operational impact. He says AI receives hype because it’s viewed as holding game-changing potential. While machine learning and agents have their place, it’s also important to use emerging technology correctly. For many repeatable tasks, service automation creates the impact the business requires. For A+E Global Media, a blended approach to operations and services generates the right outputs.
“We’ve been able to automate over 30 of our service catalogue items, which resulted in about 5,000 service requests last year. The average time to resolve was about 17 hours. It’s now down to minutes. So, it’s like over a 99.7% reduction in mean time to resolution for basic bread-and-butter requests,” he says.
“Our end-users are starting to see there’s a reason we’re telling you not to email in. There’s a reason we’re telling you to use our AI assistant or go to our help portal – we’re not trying to make your life more difficult. Legacy processes don’t work as well. When users get a much better experience, there’s company-wide buy-in.”
Simplifying processes
As part of the move towards automation, Kairinos has driven a large-scale workplace transformation programme using Freshworks across IT and business functions.
A+E Global Media uses the Freshservice platform to manage ticketing and workflows. When he joined the firm it was using ServiceNow, but Kairinos saw the company wasn’t making the most of the technology. The firm was looking for an implementation that supported its inherently agile nature.
After completing an request for proposal process during the coronavirus pandemic, the company implemented Freshservice in October 2020. Kairinos says the implementation only took two to three months.
“We saw that Freshworks allowed us to start from scratch, build on the foundations that maybe weren’t done right in the first place, and save a lot of money,” he says. “It was definitely the smart choice for us, because the technology fits our business.”
“From an employee standpoint, no one should know what I do or be impacted by what I do, because that means something’s broken”
Chris Kairinos, A+E Global Media
In addition to using Freshservice to streamline employee service management and IT support workflows, there are plans for A+E Global Media to roll the technology across other lines of business, including legal, finance and accounts payable teams. After bedding the system down, Kairinos says people across the organisation are starting to reap the benefits.
“I don’t see this as a tool anymore – it’s more like an ecosystem,” he says. “If you have everything in one platform, and that platform has been stable for so long, and technology is the biggest user of the platform, once you add other functions, it’s not going to rock the boat that much. It helps us standardise operations across the company.”
Kairinos says Freshworks has become a single point of entry for better employee experiences at A+E Global Media. He advises other business and digital leaders to explore the benefits of the technology, especially those wedded to legacy ways of working, where people might be, as he suggests, trying to fit square pegs into round holes.
“Freshworks allows you to simplify the process,” he says. “Yes, it’s a daunting task to think about completely overhauling your operations. But don’t look three weeks ahead or six months ahead. Look three or six years ahead. We started to reap the benefits quickly.”
Exploring innovations
Computer Weekly spoke with Kairinos at Freshworks Refresh 2026 in New York City, where the technology specialist outlined its aim to create an agile, open platform for connecting assets and incidents, with the company’s Freddy AI technology at the heart of an agentic approach to customer support.
During the past six years, Kairinos has continued to hone his company’s use of Freshservice. He’s impressed with some of the platform’s new features, particularly Agent Studio. As his company, like so many others, plots a roadmap towards agentic AI, it’s crucial to stay open to emerging innovations.
“You’ve got to,” he says, “but you’ve got to pick and choose the right things. There are definitely opportunities to start putting agents into certain areas to address the low-hanging fruit in operations. We need to service people proactively – that’s the return on investment people need to start looking at, as opposed to focusing on how we are saving time from tasks, it’s about how we stop downtime from an employee standpoint.”
In addition to exploring Freshworks’ agentic capabilities, Kairinos is the product owner for the agentic AI support platform Moveworks. A+E Global Media uses this platform to support its move to AI-assisted self-service. The company is also exploring how AI can support the content creation process. The message is clear, says Kairinos – data-powered services are the future of modern business operations.
“Technology will increasingly be seen as a revenue enabler,” he says. “This issue means there’s a lot more proof of concepts taking place. But again, it’s having that crutch to rely on. In technology, digital leaders must make sure they’re providing the business with the most effective tools that enable people to do things better.”
