AI Strategist

About the Role:

As an AI Strategist, you are the embedded AI leader for our customers. You connect what customers are saying in their conversations, what their business needs most, and what Cresta's AI can do, then turn that into a prioritized plan and measurable results. You identify where automation and augmentation will deliver the most value, build the roadmap, and make sure the work ships and pays off.

You will not be building AI Agents from scratch. Our Forward Deployed Engineers and Forward Deployed Product Managers create and deploy them. Your focus is on making deployed AI better: finding the next opportunity, optimizing what is already live, piloting new Cresta capabilities, and proving the business impact. You are analytical, commercially minded, and credible with senior stakeholders in CX, Operations, Product, Sales, and IT. You are technical enough to work closely with FDEs and FDPMs and to give product and engineering a tight feedback loop.

What You'll Do:

AI Strategy and Roadmap

• Identify automation and augmentation opportunities across the customer's contact center and wider customer experience operation.
• Prioritize initiatives by expected ROI and build a business case for each one.
• Build and maintain the customer's enterprise AI roadmap, and keep it current as priorities and Cresta capabilities change.
• Align stakeholders across CX, Operations, Product, Sales, and IT on priorities, sequencing, and success criteria.

Conversation Intelligence and Business Insights

• Use conversation data to surface customer friction and emerging trends before they show up in other metrics.
• Identify operational inefficiencies and the changes that would reduce them.
• Share Voice of Customer insights with customer leadership and with Cresta product teams.
• Measure business impact and report it in terms executives care about, such as containment, handle time, conversion, CSAT, and cost to serve.

AI Innovation and Execution

• Stay current on new Cresta features and bring the relevant ones to customers early.
• Pilot emerging AI capabilities, define how success will be judged, and decide with the customer whether to scale them.
• Optimize live AI Agents by analyzing performance, reviewing conversations, and recommending changes to prompts, workflows, and configurations.
• Coordinate deployments with FDEs, FDPMs, and customer teams, including milestones, timelines, and dependencies.
• Measure realized value after launch and report it back against the original business case.

What We're Looking For:

• Experience: 5+ years in technology consulting, strategy, product, analytics, implementation, or customer success roles, ideally with AI or LLM-first products.
• Strategic and commercial skills: A track record of building roadmaps, prioritizing by ROI, and writing business cases that senior stakeholders approve.
• Analytical approach: Strong data skills. You are comfortable analyzing conversation or operational data, designing experiments such as A/B tests, and monitoring performance to refine solutions.
• Technical understanding: Working knowledge of how LLM-based AI agents function, including prompts, tools or function calling, and retrieval-augmented generation. Hands-on experience with an agent project, even a personal one, is a plus. You do not need to write production code, but you can read and reason about system behavior and discuss tradeoffs with engineers.
• Stakeholder leadership: Experience leading cross-functional work and influencing senior customer stakeholders across CX, Operations, Product, Sales, and IT.
• Communication: Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills. You can explain a complex finding to an executive in plain language.
• Execution: Strong project management skills and a bias for action. You turn ambiguity into a plan and follow it through to results.
• Mindset: Curious, self-driven, and comfortable learning quickly in a fast-moving startup environment. You are passionate about AI, automation, and the future of customer experience.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Bonus Points:

• Familiarity with customer support and contact center operations, including metrics such as AHT, FCR, containment, and QA
• Experience with conversation intelligence, speech analytics, or voice-of-customer programs
• Background in management consulting, product management, or forward deployed roles
• Experience in a startup or high-growth SaaS environment
• Comfort with SQL or a BI tool for self-serve analysis

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with plans to fit you and your family
• Flexible PTO to take the time you need, when you need it
• Paid parental leave for all new parents welcoming a new child
• Retirement savings plan to help you plan for the future
• Remote work setup budget to help you create a productive home office
• Monthly wellness and communication stipend to keep you connected and balanced
• In-office meal program and commuter benefits provided for onsite employees

Compensation at Cresta:

Cresta's approach to compensation is simple: recognize impact, reward excellence, and invest in our people. We offer competitive, location-based pay that reflects the market and what each individual brings to the table.

The posted compensation range represents what we expect to pay for this role in a given location. Final offers are shaped by factors like experience, skills, education, and geography. In addition to base pay, total compensation includes equity and a comprehensive benefits package for you and your family.

OTE Range: $150,000 to $200,000 + Offers Equity