"How did they do that? How did they get there?" Companies succeed because of the people who build them - operating leaders who scale businesses to new heights and make decisions every day that can impact entire industries. Our Operator Spotlight gives you the inside track from one of our incredible operator Limited Partners (LPs) who are changing the game and operating some of the world's most successful companies. Read on for lessons learned and mistakes made, perspectives from the top, practical advice, and ideas on what's next.
Ashley Kramer is Chief Revenue Officer at ElevenLabs, where she leads the company's global go-to-market organization as businesses use voice and conversational AI to create content, serve customers, and build new experiences. She started her career as a software engineer and has since led teams across engineering, product, marketing, strategy, and sales at companies in the middle of major technology shifts. At OpenAI, she helped grow the enterprise business as generative AI moved from experiments to company-wide adoption. Before that, she held executive roles across sales, marketing, and engineering at GitLab as the company grew nearly 4x after its IPO, helped Alteryx post multiple consecutive years of more than 50% growth, and built Tableau Online into Tableau's fastest-growing product during its move to the cloud. She serves on the board of dbt Labs and is an advisor, angel investor, and limited partner in high-growth technology companies.
You've been at the center of several major technology shifts: Tableau's move to the cloud, GitLab after its IPO, and generative AI at OpenAI. What told you voice and conversational AI is the next one, and why ElevenLabs?
Ashley: I’m a strong believer that every major technology breakthrough creates the foundation for the next. Cloud made software easy to access and scale, which created an explosion of data. That data fueled the rise of AI, and advances in AI created an entirely new opportunity to rethink how people interact with technology. Each wave builds on the last, and I've always been drawn to being part of what's next. We now have incredibly powerful AI, but how people interact with it is still evolving. For me, ElevenLabs felt like the right place to be part of building what’s next. That’s because ElevenLabs has the research, technology and ambition to make those interactions more natural, intelligent and accessible to everyone. That's an enormous opportunity, and exactly the kind of company I want to help build.
You've written that the interaction layer for AI is dramatically underbuilt. What does that look like from the customer's side? Where do enterprises get stuck today?
Ashley: Intelligence has advanced faster than the experience. Customers still wait on hold, they repeat themselves, they navigate disconnected systems and they have to start over every time they change channels. Enterprises don't need another chatbot. They need AI that understands intent, takes action across systems and carries context through every interaction. That's where the next wave of enterprise value will come from.
You're ElevenLabs' first CRO, and you joined as enterprise crossed half of the company's revenue. What are you building in your first six months, and what are you keeping in tact from a founder-led sales perspective?
Ashley: My focus is building a GTM organization that's as innovative as our technology. That means deepening our technical and industry expertise, building strategic relationships across the enterprise, tapping AI agents just like we hope our clients will, all with the goal of helping our customers unlock value across more of their business. We're also investing in the people, systems and global reach to support our next stage of growth.
What I love about our founder-led culture is the speed, ambition and willingness to build alongside customers. We have an incredible bias toward action and a team that genuinely understands the technology. I want to amplify those strengths as we scale. The opportunity is to combine the best of a startup with the reach and execution of a global enterprise.
You were at OpenAI as enterprises went from AI pilots to company-wide rollouts. What did you learn about how large organizations actually adopt AI, and what surprised you?
Ashley: One of the biggest things I learned at OpenAI is that technology is rarely the biggest barrier to enterprise adoption. It's the organizational change required to deploy it at scale. The companies making the most progress were rethinking workflows, establishing executive ownership, building technical capabilities and measuring business outcomes. What surprised me was how quickly ambition outpaced organizational readiness. The companies moving fastest weren't necessarily spending the most. They were learning, adapting and executing better.
When a market moves that fast, a sales playbook can go stale in a quarter. How did you decide which parts of the motion to formalize, and which to leave flexible? How did you bring your team along with you?
Ashley: I believe in being disciplined about how you run the business and flexible about how you win. At ElevenLabs, we're building global consistency around account planning, forecasting and customer engagement, while giving regional teams the flexibility to adapt to local markets, industries and customer needs. Our AI models are all about culture and context, and our GTM teams should be too. What works in the US won't always work in Japan or Brazil. The best ideas come from the people closest to our customers, so we're building the playbook together, learning across regions and scaling what's working. The goal is to operate as one global team while preserving the speed, creativity and local expertise that drive our growth.
Companies are rebuilding their orgs around AI, what’s one piece of advice you have for fellow CROs who are making that evolution?
Ashley: Don't start with where AI fits into your existing org chart. Start with what your revenue organization would look like if you were building it from scratch today. Which workflows should be automated? Where does human judgment create the most value? Where can technical expertise accelerate outcomes? AI isn't just a productivity tool. It's an opportunity to fundamentally redesign how revenue teams operate.
Which jobs on a revenue team will look most different in two years: AEs, SEs, customer success, RevOps? What should people in those roles be learning today?
Ashley: All of them, but I think customer success and technical sales will change the most. As AI automates more of the sales process, differentiation shifts toward solving complex problems, deployment and delivering measurable value. AEs become more strategic, technical teams become central to growth, and RevOps increasingly builds automated systems rather than just reporting on them. Everyone needs to learn to work with AI, not simply use AI tools.
ElevenLabs sells AI agents that talk to customers. How is your own revenue team using the product?
Ashley: We're our own customer. Our AI SDR, Dom, qualifies inbound leads in more than 70 languages, responds in minutes and has generated roughly $1 million in qualified pipeline in a month while giving our team back 180 hours. That's just the beginning. We're looking across the entire customer lifecycle, from prospecting and qualification through onboarding, support and expansion. We want to prove internally what's possible for our customers.
You started your career as a software engineer - at NASA! What from those years still shows up in how you run a sales org?
Ashley: Systems thinking. Engineering teaches you to break complex problems into smaller pieces, understand dependencies and solve for root causes. I approach revenue organizations the same way. I also learned to be comfortable not having all the answers. Ask good questions, experiment, use data and iterate. Those habits matter just as much in sales leadership as they do in engineering.
What pulled you from engineering to the commercial side, and when did you know it was the right move?
Ashley: I loved building technology, but I became increasingly interested in why customers adopted it, how it changed their businesses and what it took to bring it to market. Moving to the commercial side felt like a natural way to combine my technical background with customer strategy and business growth. I’ve seen the results of bringing great technology to thousands of customers, and the businesses they could build around it, which made it clear I'd made the right move.
What's a piece of advice you would give to yourself 10 years ago, if you had the opportunity?
Ashley: Don't be so focused on the next step in your career that you miss the bigger opportunity. Some of the best decisions I've made meant stepping into unfamiliar roles, taking risks and betting on markets that were still being defined. Surround yourself with exceptional people, stay curious and never underestimate your ability to reinvent yourself. The biggest opportunities rarely come with a clear playbook.
What's a recent insight you picked up, from a book, a podcast, an article, a movie, that made you really stop and think?
Ashley: Mati, our CEO and founder, recently discussed the importance of focus on a podcast. In a market moving as quickly as AI, there are endless opportunities to pursue. But just because you can build something doesn't mean you should. The question is where you have a unique advantage and can make the biggest impact. That clarity of thinking, combined with the ambition to build something extraordinary, is one of the reasons I joined ElevenLabs. As we scale, the discipline to choose what not to do is just as important as the ambition to go after something big.
Why are you excited to be a part of Operator Collective?
Ashley: I've always believed the best leaders keep learning from other operators. Operator Collective brings together people who've actually built and scaled businesses, who understand the hard decisions behind growth. I love the combination of experience, collaboration and investment. It's an opportunity to learn from exceptional leaders, share what I've learned and help the next generation of companies scale.
