Audyence Names Horst Carreño-Bauer VP of Customer Experience

What happened

Audyence has appointed Horst Carreño-Bauer as its Vice President of Customer Experience, creating a dedicated senior leadership role for CX as the B2B media platform continues to scale. The move formalises customer experience as a standing function within the company's executive structure rather than a responsibility distributed across other departments.

Audyence operates in the B2B media space, and the appointment signals an intent to strengthen how the company manages relationships with clients and partners as it grows. Beyond confirming the hire and title, the available reporting does not detail specific mandates, team size or timelines for the role.

Why it matters

Appointing a dedicated VP of Customer Experience is itself a signal about organisational priorities. When a company elevates CX to a named executive function, it typically indicates that customer relationships and retention are being treated as a strategic lever for growth rather than an operational afterthought handled by account management or support teams.

For B2B platforms in particular, this kind of move often reflects a recognition that experience quality — onboarding, responsiveness, account health, renewal conversations — increasingly differentiates providers in crowded markets. Formalising the role gives customer experience a seat in leadership discussions where product, commercial and operational trade-offs are made, rather than leaving CX to advocate for its priorities after decisions are set.

The Renascence take

Executive appointments like this are easy to treat as routine personnel news, but they are worth watching closely as leading indicators of where a company expects friction to emerge as it scales.

Naming a VP of Customer Experience is a governance decision as much as a hiring decision — it determines whether CX has a vote in strategy or merely a voice after the fact. The real test isn't the title; it's whether the role carries budget authority, access to product roadmaps and a mandate to change how the business operates, not just how it apologises. Companies that get this right treat the appointment as the start of restructuring incentives and decision rights around the customer, not the end of the story. Those that don't will find the title absorbed into existing reporting lines within a year, with little visible change to the experience customers actually receive.