Persado Adds Executive Leadership as Company Strengthens Position as AI-Powered Content Leader

NEW YORK – January 14, 2021 – Persado, the leading AI-platform that unlocks the value of the right words at every customer interaction, today announced two additions to its executive team. Gautam Kher, a veteran enterprise technology sales and growth leader, has joined the company as Chief Revenue Officer. Amy Heidersbach, a marketing and communications leader with a proven track record in technology, financial services, and e-commerce, has joined as Chief Marketing Officer.

“I’m thrilled to welcome two seasoned leaders to our diverse executive team and our growing Persado family,” says Alex Vratskides, founder and CEO of Persado. “Adding such high-caliber talent underscores our focus on go-to-market excellence in order to help more enterprises unlock the immense value Persado customers are already realizing by optimizing their marketing and customer experiences with our AI-powered language platform.”

As CRO, Kher will oversee all global customer-facing functions at Persado. Kher spent the last decade scaling go-to-market teams at several hyper-growth SaaS companies backed by premier venture capital firms including a16z, Battery Ventures, ICONIQ, and Index. Most recently, he held a variety of sales and customer success leadership roles at Collibra, scaling the company beyond double unicorn status as Vice President of Global Sales and Field Operations.

“Global organizations are just beginning to realize how AI platforms can create outsized incremental business and brand value by improving the language they use to connect with different customer segments,” said Kher. “There’s no question that Persado is leading the AI-generated language space, with some of the world’s leading brands as customers. Our next frontier of growth will be fueled by obsessively focusing on product innovation, industry-leading customer experiences, and unparalleled value creation.”

As CMO, Heidersbach will lead all global marketing and communications functions. Heidersbach brings nearly 30 years of experience in marketing innovation, brand building, and category creation at companies like Visa, PayPal, Magento, Capital One, and CareerBuilder. Most recently, she held the Chief Marketing & Community Officer position at Alteryx, where she scaled the global marketing organization to drive double-digit revenue growth, launched the Analytic Process Automation category, and doubled the company’s global Community.

“Right away, it was easy to see the value that Persado delivers to CMOs across all industries,” said Heidersbach. “It’s also exciting to join Persado at a time when forward-thinking marketing and customer experience teams are actively investing in AI platforms to automate and improve the ways they communicate with customers across channels and across their journeys. Persado makes the promise of personalization at scale a reality for enterprise businesses, and in doing so, opens up new sources of value and incremental results we’re all looking for.”

Gartner estimates that one-third of marketing leaders rank AI-generated content as one of the emerging technologies that will have the greatest impact on their company marketing efforts in the next five years. As highlighted in the recent Harvard Business Review article, How AI is Helping Companies Make Deeper Human Connections, “The companies that will capture a disproportionate share of digital growth and create sustainable competitive advantage are mobilizing and prioritizing investments they may have put on the back burner over the past few years.”

“2020 proved, without a doubt, that the language and tone that businesses choose to communicate matters,” says Jason Heller, President at Persado. “For modern brands, AI-generated content is a proven growth lever that is still largely untapped. But we’re already seeing the adoption and scaling of AI-powered content solutions accelerating as 2021 starts.”

About Persado

Persado is an AI platform that unlocks a lever of value creation using the right choice of words for all customer interactions across the enterprise. By unlocking the power of words, companies win every customer moment, experiencing dramatic new levels of brand engagement and revenue performance. Leading global brands, including Chase, Humana, Williams Sonoma, American Express, Vodafone, Dell, Microsoft, and Verizon rely on Persado to generate content in a dramatically new way to unlock the value of messaging and emotionally engage consumers, one by one, moment by moment, at scale.

The Persado platform uses sophisticated AI, data science, computational linguistics, and machine learning to generate the perfect message by leveraging the world’s most advanced language knowledgebase of more than one million tagged and scored words and phrases. Companies can gain full visibility with quantifiable results and data-driven insights to identify the trends and language that wins every moment in the customer journey while ensuring the message always reinforces brand voice.