Founder & RevOps Advisor (ex-ZoomInfo VP RevOps) · ZoomInfo
LinkedIn ↗Tessa Whittaker is the founder of a senior-operator RevOps agency partnering with enterprises on AI-first go-to-market transformation, already on contract with a Fortune 500 to lead an AI transformation across a 500-person operations org. A UCLA grad who pivoted from legal recruiting into tech, she spent nearly a decade at Salesforce — rising from executive assistant in San Francisco to Senior Director of Strategy & Operations for Tableau's Global Enterprise business — before becoming VP of Revenue Operations at ZoomInfo, where she ran the ops org driving the company's move up-market. She is a Pavilion Miami Co-Chapter Head, a GTMfund LP, and was named a Pavilion RevOps Leader to Watch. Her thesis: GTM engineers and AI can execute a strategist's judgment, but they can't replace it.
“The layer that's missing from that is that RevOps person who can take that high-level strategy and translate it down to the tactical.”
“I was having that conversation with a go-to-market engineer, and at one point he asked me what ARR was.”
“You can't layer AI and expect anything to change on your existing processes, your existing data structures. You need to think about it from a re-architecture perspective, end-to-end.”
“The single hardest thing for any operator that's running inside an organization is prioritization.”
“How do I run the business while transforming the business while all the priorities are gonna stay the same? That is what people are up against right now.”
“What the board or the LT is asking them to do by themselves, with everything they already have to deliver, is quite literally impossible.”
“In order for there to be a reduction in headcount, there has to be rigorous operations, a lot of standardization, and incredible data architecture. It can't just replace people.”
“AI is not coming for your jobs today. I'm not gonna replace you with a bunch of agents. But if you don't take the responsibility to learn AI and become AI fluent, we're gonna start having to look for people who will think that way.”