Leadership Structures & AI at $1B Scale with Steven Birdsall

In this CRO Spotlight episode, host Warren Zenna sits down with Steven Birdsall, CRO at Alteryx, to unpack a sweeping leadership transition and how a newly formed C‑suite aligned on product and go‑to‑market. Steven shares how a product‑centric CEO and a servant‑leader CRO combine to create clarity of mandate, performance culture, and human‑first execution across sales, CS, partners, and solutions engineering.

The conversation dives deep into Alteryx’s evolution from workflows feeding BI to becoming the governed “canvas” for AI and agent use cases. Steven explains how business users can blend structured and unstructured data, enforce governance and access controls, and then safely bring LLMs into the same environment—pushing compute down to cloud data platforms like BigQuery, Databricks, and Snowflake.

For CROs, Steven details practical AI operationalization: SDR personalization at scale, three‑dimensional agents trained on company knowledge, and revenue insights built directly on internal data. He outlines how to raise sales efficiency without scaling opex linearly, and why fast experimentation with new AI tools is now core to modern GTM orchestration.

Steven closes with hiring and leadership principles for today’s CRO: prioritize grit, perseverance, and customer centricity over pedigree; remove roadblocks for the field; and mentor generously. He shares how to balance data‑driven rigor with empathy, build alignment with marketing regardless of reporting lines, and stay entrepreneurial—even inside a large, complex organization.