Most AI pilots fail not because the technology is wrong, but because nobody agreed on what success meant before it started. Anurag Goel has built his entire function around fixing that gap. As the leader of a 125-person specialist team at Red Hat touching $4B in ARR, he's moved pilot-to-deployment conversion rates to three times their previous pace by doing one thing differently: defining success in executive business terms before anyone writes a line of code.
Anurag built this function from scratch at Red Hat after doing similar work at Adobe and Salesforce, and this conversation gets into the specifics of how he hires for it, structures it, justifies it internally, and tests candidates in ways most hiring managers haven't considered.
Topics discussed:
- Why AI pilots stall at the executive layer and how scoping business KPIs upfront changes conversion rates
- The three-profile hiring model for value consulting roles: management consultant, financial storyteller, B2B software fluency
- How sequencing early hires across external experts, internal sales reps, and former customers built the foundation
- The case study round structure that tests how candidates prepare and present, not whether their answers are right
- Using one interview question to separate surface-level AI users from people who build with it
- Why "builder mindset" in this function means co-creating a shared vision with the customer, not internal execution
- How to justify an overlay function's existence with a single two-part metric
- Testing for "fire in the belly" through specificity of past examples, not behavioral question frameworks
ABOUT YOUR HOST:
Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating.
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