Director, AI-Enabled Demand Generation
- Palo Alto, United States
Posted 5 days ago
About the role
Rivian is transforming how it generates and converts demand. AI Agents will own the always-on, high-volume work of engaging prospective customers, answering questions at any hour, and qualifying purchase intent at scale. In parallel, our Sales Advisors and Field Organization will focus on the moments where human presence is required. The Director, AI-Enabled Demand Generation will build the team and the operating system that make this partnership work.
The bar for this role is unambiguous: AI agents that support customers as well as—or better than—our people do. This is not about adequate deflection or containment rates; it is about delivering genuinely exceptional customer experiences, measured against the same standard to which we hold our top Advisors. Reaching that bar demands a hands-on builder with strategic vision; someone who can define the channel’s direction over the next three - five years while staying deeply engaged in the day-to-day workflows, prompts, and transcripts.
This role owns the commercial and customer experience performance of the AI-enabled channel, including demand capture, purchase-intent qualification, handoff quality, conversion, speed, factual accuracy, and compliance. The successful candidate will build the team, performance metrics, and governance model, while partnering with Sales and Delivery leadership to continuously improve the mechanisms required to scale the channel responsibly.
This role expands Rivian’s sales capacity while strengthening—not replacing—our Field Organization, which remains central to how we sell. Success means field teams receive better-qualified, better-informed customers and can spend more time on high-value conversations. That outcome is a core measure of success for this role. The Director of AI-Enabled Demand Generation and field leaders will operate as partners with shared conversion goals.
This role will consolidate agentic commerce leadership, inheriting the KPI dashboard, use-case roadmap, and governance model being stood up now by the cross-functional Agentic Commerce Working Group. The team and long-term operating model are still being built from the ground up, and the successful candidate will define the right processes, metrics, and team structure while navigating a rapidly evolving landscape, building on this existing foundation rather than starting from scratch.
- Architect and iterate the AI-enabled sales operating model: what AI handles autonomously, where it assists, and when Sales Advisors remain the decision-maker.
- Define the next-best-action and fallback-outcome framework for every stage of the funnel, ensuring agents default to capturing the highest available value rather than abandoning a lead when the top outcome cannot be reached.
- Own commercial performance for AI-enabled sales and build the performance measurement framework for the team from day one: productivity, AI-assisted vs. unassisted outcomes, cost-to-serve, quality, and compliance metrics.
- Diagnose performance and identify the highest-impact opportunities to improve funnel velocity and customer experience. Build business cases for new agent capabilities, workflow changes, tooling, and staffing investments.
- Monitor agent performance across quality, compliance, customer sentiment, handoff quality, and commercial impact; turn frontline and customer feedback into prioritized improvements to agents, workflows, tools, and staffing.
- Inform the tooling stack for AI-enabled sales; run a competitive intelligence loop on AI-native disruptors to keep the operating model ahead of market benchmarks rather than reactive to them.
- Present roadmap, headcount, and performance updates to Sales & Delivery leadership on a recurring cadence, translating team performance into commercial impact for executive stakeholders.
- Own the end-to-end incident-response system for AI-enabled sales, covering early-warning detection of poor experiences, funnel friction, inaccurate responses, missed handoffs, and emerging customer risks, through real-time correction and case-level remediation, ensuring factual, pricing, or commitment errors are resolved before they become escalations or legal exposure.
- 10+ years in inside sales, sales operations, or revenue operations leadership, including direct people management. Experience in a lean, AI-native commercial organization is a plus.
- Working fluency with AI-assisted sales tooling (conversational AI, lead scoring/routing, sales engagement platforms) — able to evaluate and select tools, not just use them.
- Experience partnering with a conversational AI/agent platform team on scope boundaries and handoffs.
- Experience in regulated, high-consideration consumer sales (auto, fintech, insurance, or similar), with fluency in the compliance, disclosure, and legal-exposure considerations that come with AI-generated pricing, financing, or product claims.
- Direct experience partnering with Commercial Tech/platform engineering teams (Rivian’s Commercial Tech org has been central to building this channel) to co-own build vs. buy decisions, integration architecture, and release cadence.
- Familiarity with sales engagement/CRM tooling (Salesforce, HubSpot, Gong, Outreach, Chili Piper).
- Experience owning a revenue channel, sales funnel, operating budget, quota, or measurable conversion outcome.
- Demonstrated experience leading teams through a significant workflow or technology change. Track record of translating skepticism into adoption through transparent communication, incentive redesign, or phased rollout.
- Strong executive presence; experience presenting team strategy, performance, and headcount asks to senior leadership.
- Comfortable operating without an existing playbook, building process, metrics, and team structure concurrently.