Airtm SVP of Enterprise Sales Strategy Ian Gilbert on the Evolution of Revenue Leadership and the Company's Focus on Digital Entrepreneurship in the Global South

Airtm is a highly connected digital dollar account, offering over 500 methods to buy and sell digital dollars. Incorporated in the United States and registered with FinCEN as a Money Service Business (MSB), Airtm operates in over 190 countries.

Senior Vice President (SVP), Enterprise Sales Strategy at AirtmIan Gilbert has a 30+ year career as a commercial leader in the technology industry. He has worked with companies across the maturity spectrum to help them expand their potential and achieve their growth objectives.

Airtm is a highly connected digital dollar account, offering over 500 methods to buy and sell digital dollars. Incorporated in the United States and registered with FinCEN as a Money Service Business (MSB), Airtm operates in over 190 countries.

With over 30 years of experience spanning from founding startups to leading public companies, how have you seen the role of revenue leadership evolve, and what key lessons have you carried from those early-stage challenges into your current role at Airtm?

Technology has changed and impacted revenue leadership in largely positive ways. However, the fundamentals are the fundamentals, and technology only helps if the revenue generation approach/process is sound.

Revenue leadership has always been mixed up with sales leadership and the assumption that revenue is ‘created’ during the sales cycle and then ‘protected’ by an account management approach. There’s now a growing appreciation of the value of orchestrating all parts of a company’s revenue-generating system and the fact that optimum performance comes from creating value throughout the lifetime of customer engagement.

As such, modern revenue leadership is increasingly focused on the consideration of multiple channels and methods across the spectrum of markets served by a company relative to the stage of the business and the maturity of the product/solution offering. It’s focused on maximizing the entire revenue-generating lifetime of all customer relationships – and it’s likely in some businesses that existing customers have far more revenue-generation potential than new prospects. It’s also focused on efficiency of growth, and on using tools/technologies at the right times and in the right ways to optimize the model.

From an early-stage perspective, it’s tough to get everything right at once! A lot of experimentation is necessary. Finding the learning in each experience and codifying it to make modest gains is the key to creating long-term, sustainable growth for companies at this stage.

That’s hard because we’re instinctively ‘hustling,’ and every deal feels good – but I’m a believer that learning to help improve the model can often be significantly more valuable than the revenue from a single deal, however big.

At Airtm, we’ve focused on digital entrepreneurship. We’re trying to optimize our role in bringing value to workers and entrepreneurs throughout the Global South and the companies that they work with. We have multiple ways to create value, and we’re constantly trying to learn about the best blend of approaches and capabilities to increase value and sustain it for longer.

How does Airtm ensure the security and stability of digital dollar accounts, particularly for users in developing economies?

Airtm is focused on ensuring that all of our users across the Global South can access their money easily and freely, send and receive money quickly and inexpensively, and do so with the knowledge that their money is safe and transactions are secure. For that reason, Airtm uses USDC as the digital currency for all transactions. USDC is a stablecoin backed by highly liquid cash, and cash-equivalent assets pegged 1:1 to the US dollar. In other words, it is secure and stable and allows our users in developing economies to manage their money with total confidence.

In what ways can companies leverage Airtm's platform to navigate the challenges of the growing AI Data Labeling market?

Airtm has spent nearly a decade helping users across the Global South access and use their money as they choose. Many of these users undertake work, and an increasing amount of that work supports the AI industry.

Our mantra is that we help companies unleash the world’s digital entrepreneurs for their businesses. We principally help companies attract, pay, and engage workers around the world so that they can build and maintain their workforces in developing economies efficiently, consciously, and profitably.

Practically speaking, not only do we offer the best method to pay AI workers throughout the global south, but we also have solutions to enable companies to engage with our community to find new workers, undertake research, and to undertake education. Organizations like Scale AI – one of the biggest players in the sector – have been working with us for years to fulfill their needs around the world, and an increasing number of AI and BPO companies are choosing us as their preferred solution.

With over 500 payment methods available, how does Airtm manage transaction efficiency and ensure low-cost cross-border payments?

The heart of this is our peer-to-peer network, which facilitates secure transactions with low costs and minimal limitations across a wide range of geographies. Our network is particularly focused on the global south, an increasingly important group of countries in terms of the future of work—but with some challenges in terms of financial and banking systems. Our capabilities in these countries are unparalleled, which is why we