Itamar Arel

companies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and enterprise applications. In 2017, he founded Apprente, which developed conversational AI for the food and service industries using deep learning, natural language understanding, and reinforcement learning. McDonald's Corporation acquired Apprente in October 2019, after which Arel served as Corporate Vice President within McD Tech Labs, leading the deployment of voice AI systems across McDonald's global operations. In April 2022, Arel co-founded Tenyx, Inc. and served as its Chief Executive Officer. Tenyx built AI-driven voice agents for customer service, combining advanced machine learning architectures with operational insights. Salesforce acquired Tenyx in September 2024, bringing Arel and his team in to strengthen the company's Voice AI capabilities. Earlier in his entrepreneurial career, Arel co-founded Binatix Labs in 2008, where he served as Chief Technology Officer, applying proprietary machine learning techniques to financial analytics, including market prediction and risk analysis. He also co-founded TeraCross, Inc. in 2000, serving as Chief Scientist and contributing to telecommunications and networking systems development. Arel earned his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, along with an M.B.A., from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He spent more than a decade as a tenured professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he founded and directed the Machine Intelligence Lab. He also served as a visiting associate professor at Stanford University's Computer Science Department from 2014 to 2015. His honors include the U.S. Department of Energy CAREER Award for Young Investigators and the Intel Scholarship for Excellence in Doctoral Studies. Arel holds senior memberships in IEEE, ACM, AAAI, and the BICA Society, and is the named inventor on multiple patents covering hierarchical machine learning, reinforcement learning architectures, and synthetic-data-trained conversational pipelines.