🎙️ Episode Overview

In this episode of the AI to ROI podcast, host Ray sits down with Drew Laxton, CFO at Outreach, to explore how AI is reshaping sales technology—and the financial metrics that define success. Drew shares why he returned to Outreach, convinced the company is positioned to lead the next era of agentic AI and automated revenue workflows. The discussion cuts through the hype and focuses on how finance leaders must evolve as software shifts from seat-based subscriptions to consumption-driven models, with compute costs and non-linear growth changing the playbook.

🎧 Featured Guest

Drew Laxton — CFO at Outreach

📊 Key Topics Covered

The conversation dives into:

• The “Personal Productivity” vs. “Financial ROI” debate—and why efficiency gains must translate into higher quotas and lower OpEx

• Maintaining margins in an AI-native world, including the Product, Engineering, and Finance “triumvirate” managing gross margin as compute costs rise

• Why traditional SaaS “snowballs” don’t work for AI, and how Outreach uses “spend-as-truth” to normalize data for NRR and CAC

• Agentic AI in action: Outreach “revenue agents” that replace manual prospecting with autonomous, data-tuned interactions

• Practical perspectives on consumption pricing, utilization as a retention signal, and “boring” automation wins that still deliver impact

🔮 Looking Ahead

The episode highlights a future where utilization and consumption dynamics increasingly shape how finance teams evaluate growth and business health.

🚀 Why Listen?

If you’re navigating AI-era pricing, margin pressure, and metric redesign, this conversation offers grounded, operator-level insight into what changes—and what matters most.