AI Strategist

Cresta unlocks the true potential of the customer experience, turning every conversation into a competitive advantage. Cresta’s unified AI platform combines conversational AI agents, real-time human agent augmentation, and comprehensive conversation intelligence to drive revenue and efficiency gains across every channel. The world’s leading companies, including United Airlines, Cox Communications, and Marriott, use Cresta to power world-class customer experiences every day.

Born from the Stanford AI Lab, Cresta has raised more than $270 million from the world’s leading investors, including a16z, Greylock, and Sequoia. Cresta’s leadership includes some of the leading minds in AI today. Our CEO, Ping Wu, founded and led Google’s Contact Center AI and Vertex AI platforms before joining Cresta to build the future of AI-driven customer experiences.

Over the next few years, AI is going to redefine how people all over the world interact with businesses every day. Come build that future at Cresta.

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.
• 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.