AI Strategist

Overview

As an AI Strategist, you are the embedded AI leader for Cresta's customers. You connect customer conversations, business needs, and Cresta's AI capabilities into a prioritized plan and measurable results. You will not build AI Agents from scratch; Forward Deployed Engineers and Forward Deployed Product Managers create and deploy them.

What you'll do

• 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, keeping it current as priorities and Cresta capabilities change.
• Align stakeholders across CX, Operations, Product, Sales, and IT on priorities, sequencing, and success criteria.
• 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.
• Stay current on new Cresta features and bring 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 you'll need

• 5+ years in technology consulting, strategy, product, analytics, implementation, or customer success roles, ideally with AI or LLM-first products.
• A track record of building roadmaps, prioritizing by ROI, and writing business cases that senior stakeholders approve.
• Strong data skills: comfortable analyzing conversation or operational data, designing experiments such as A/B tests, and monitoring performance to refine solutions.
• Working knowledge of how LLM-based AI agents function, including prompts, tools or function calling, and retrieval-augmented generation.
• Experience leading cross-functional work and influencing senior customer stakeholders across CX, Operations, Product, Sales, and IT.
• Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills; able to explain a complex finding to an executive in plain language.
• Strong project management skills and a bias for action.
• Curious, self-driven, and comfortable learning quickly in a fast-moving startup environment.
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Nice to have

• 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.
• Hands-on experience with an agent project, even a personal one.

Details

• Location: United States (Remote).
• Compensation: OTE range $150,000 to $200,000, plus equity, based on location and individual qualifications.