Ashley Kramer, ElevenLabs' Chief Revenue Officer, says executives become AI native by using AI deeply and constantly, and ElevenLabs is customer zero for everything it builds.
ElevenLabs' AI SDR agent Dom, launched weeks before the interview, saved Kramer's SDR team 180 hours in one month and helped close two deals.
Kramer says regulated industries like financial services and healthcare will probably not self-serve, while she argues OpenAI's consumer image reflects brand and perception, not product.
ElevenLabs' revenue chief runs sales on the company's own agents
Ashley Kramer, ElevenLabs' new CRO, argues that executives become AI native only by using AI constantly, and ElevenLabs proves its voice agents by running its own sales team on them. Selling to enterprises means sorting buyers by regulation and use case, since banks and hospitals still want humans in the deal. As models commoditise, she bets the trusted partner with leading research and proven customer results wins.
Takeaways
AI-native leadership starts with constant personal use. Kramer says executives become AI native by using AI deeply, all the time, in every way possible. ElevenLabs is customer zero for what it builds. She doubts token counts measure adoption and prefers asking what personal return someone gets.
ElevenLabs runs its sales team on agents. The Dom AI SDR, launched weeks earlier, handles inbound leads. Kramer says it saved her SDR team 180 hours in one month, and its handoff to an AI account executive closed two deals. An AI customer success agent and AI lawyer are next.
Go-to-market splits by regulation and use case. Regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare will probably not self-serve, and large healthcare buyers need humans to negotiate contracts. Digital natives will self-serve. Kramer separates horizontal uses like call centre support from vertical ones like bank fraud detection.
Voice agents deliver measurable customer results. SevenRooms, a DoorDash company, built a reservation agent on ElevenLabs that serves over 600 restaurants, raised reservations 25 percent and handled over 400,000 calls. Kramer adds that agents can interrupt a caller reading an FAQ, which polite humans rarely do.
Enterprise versus consumer is mostly perception. Grace Gong calls OpenAI more consumer-focused than Anthropic because ChatGPT spread at home. Kramer disagrees. OpenAI already sold enterprise APIs when ChatGPT launched, so the gap is brand and perception, and customer success stories shift it.
Models will commoditise, so trust wins. ElevenLabs' V4 model, launched that morning, supports 90 languages with big gains in Japanese, Mandarin and Brazilian Portuguese. Kramer expects commoditisation and leans on partners and an open architecture, since she cannot hire 100,000 salespeople.
Kramer's path from engineer to CRO
Engineer at NASA Langley after a computer science degree, working on the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment.
Program manager on Amazon's Kindle team, moving book content onto Kindle while preserving quality.
Tableau Software just before its IPO, where she drifted to go-to-market work as a self-described people person.
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On this episode 2
Show 1
GitLab, where Sid Sijbrandij made her chief marketing and strategy officer and added CTO six months later.
OpenAI as it scaled into enterprise, then ElevenLabs, where she had been CRO a little over a month.
How Kramer runs the revenue organisation
She would spend 90 percent of her time with customers if she could.
Her Q4 revenue strategy set top-level priorities, each with its own key results, several owned by her.
Product leaders should seek out customers' problems rather than their proposed solutions.
She explains the reasons behind her direct questions and tries to call out her own mistakes first.
Christian Chabot, Tableau's original CEO, taught her that it is okay to fail.