Mushtak Najarali

Mushtak Najarali is Executive Vice President of North American Customer Operations at TD, where he leads more than 12,000 employees across contact centers, customer assistance, and roughly 6,000 ATMs. After more than three decades at the bank, he has watched customer expectations change with each new wave of technology, but his approach to CX has remained grounded in one question: how can TD make it easier for people to get the help they need?

Najarali has pushed TD’s operations leaders to work more seamlessly across channels and use data and generative AI to improve what they know about customer interactions. The goal is to add more digital options and to make those channels work together so customers don't have to navigate the bank’s internal structure themselves.

Najarali has argued that leaders now have to “run and transform the business at the same time,” which makes change management part of the operating model. He also sees culture as something leaders create through what they prioritize, tolerate, and celebrate.

In his view, AI is particularly useful when it helps employees reach the right answer faster. Najarali’s organization handles close to 60 million customer calls each year, so even modest improvements in how quickly colleagues can find information matter at scale. 

Najarali’s approach points toward a model of banking in which AI increasingly handles the work of finding, organizing, and surfacing information while employees spend more of their time solving problems and advising customers. After three decades of watching new technologies promise transformation, he’s less focused on novelty and more on whether they can make a large, complex bank feel simpler, faster, and easier to deal with.