Hear from a 20 year tech entrepreneur veteran on how the Growth Officer role has shifted from managing pipelines to orchestrating outcomes.

Keith Laska is a technology entrepreneur, executive, and educator with over 20 years of experience in the SaaS, AI, and energy sectors. He currently serves as the Chief Growth Officer at GridUnity, where he leads the company's market expansion and go-to-market strategies for grid planning and interconnection platforms. As a multiple time technology CEO, Keith has extensive experience in executive leadership, venture investment and entrepreneurship. He is an Adjunct Professor at Fordham University, holds a double bachelor’s degree in French and Political Science from the College of the Holy Cross, and has attended both the University of Burgundy in France and Harvard Business School.

1. What is the remit and role of the chief revenue/growth officer in your organization?

The role of the Chief Revenue or Growth Officer has fundamentally shifted from managing pipelines to orchestrating outcomes. At GridUnity, the remit spans the full lifecycle of growth, from market definition and positioning through to revenue realization and expansion. It is less about owning a function and more about aligning a system.

That system includes sales, marketing, customer success, partnerships, and increasingly product and data. The CRO is accountable for turning market complexity into clarity, ensuring that what we sell, how we sell, and how we deliver are tightly integrated. In an AI-first world, this also means leveraging data and automation to move from reactive revenue management to predictive, insight-driven growth.

2. What data-driven insights and analytics are essential to formulating successful and sustainable growth strategies and agendas?

The most valuable data is not volume, it is signal. We focus on three layers: market signal, customer signal, and operational signal.

Market signal includes interconnection demand trends, regulatory shifts, and capacity constraints. Customer signal is about understanding where value is actually realized in the workflow, not just what is purchased. Operational signal is where AI is becoming transformative, identifying friction points in sales cycles, forecasting risk, and highlighting expansion opportunities before they are visible to humans.

The companies that win are not those with the most dashboards, but those that can translate data into decisive action. AI is accelerating that shift by turning raw data into real-time guidance for go-to-market teams.

3. Which functional leaders and teams need to align and combine in formulating, executing and being accountable for growth plans and deliverables?

Growth today is a team sport, but not in the traditional sense. Alignment is no longer about coordination, it is about shared accountability.

At a minimum, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Product must operate as a unified system. What is often missing is a tight feedback loop between the field and product. That is where real differentiation happens. Throughout my career, I have emphasized a triad model where commercial leaders, product leaders, and customer-facing teams continuously inform each other.

AI is increasingly the connective tissue here, enabling real-time insights to flow across teams. The organizations that break down silos and operationalize this loop will outpace those that still operate in functional isolation.

4. What technologies and process innovations have the most potential for impacting growth in your organization?

AI is the single most important force reshaping growth today. Not as a feature, but as a foundational layer across the entire go-to-market motion.

We are seeing impact in three areas. First, pipeline intelligence, where AI helps prioritize the right opportunities and reduce wasted effort. Second, customer intelligence, where we can better understand usage patterns and predict expansion or risk. Third, operational efficiency, where automation removes friction from both internal workflows and customer interactions.

At GridUnity, we are also applying AI to the core problem we solve, bringing intelligence into interconnection and grid planning processes. This creates a multiplier effect, where AI not only improves how we sell, but also enhances the value of what we deliver.

5. What do you see as the common obstacles to growth in today’s diversified, risk-averse and complex global enterprise?

The biggest obstacle is not market conditions, it is organizational inertia. Many enterprises are structured for control and predictability, less speed and adaptability.

Risk aversion often shows up as slow decision-making, fragmented ownership, and an over-reliance on historical models. In a rapidly changing environment, especially with AI accelerating disruption, those approaches can quickly become liabilities.

The companies that are breaking through simplify decision paths, empower teams with data, and most importantly, adopt an experimentation mindset. Growth today requires both discipline and agility, and the ability to continuously recalibrate based on new information.