ElevenLabs appoints Alex Holt Field CTO, the first addition to its leadership team

ElevenLabs appoints early employee Alex Holt as its first Field CTO to lead forward deployed engineering and scale real-world AI voice agent deployments.

ElevenLabs has appointed Alex Holt, one of its earliest employees, as Field CTO. Holt joined in 2023 when the company had fewer than ten employees (over 500 today). His mission is to bridge the gap between the company and the real-world deployment of AI for its clients, by working within their systems and alongside their teams. The underlying idea, put forth by ElevenLabs, is that the primary gap in AI is less about the promise of the models and more about their productionization—their transformation into reliable, secure, and scalable products.

Holt structured the company's forward deployed engineering (FDE) function after a stint at Palantir, where he led deployments for the UK's NHS during Covid (PPE distribution, vaccination campaigns). At ElevenLabs, his FDE team has supported major accounts and governments, from the live phone translation agent deployed with Deutsche Telekom to the voice agents keeping Ukrainian public lines operational during air raid alerts.

This is the first executive team appointment that the company is just beginning to build.