Tom Witte is Chief Revenue Officer at Upflex, where he leads revenue for a workplace platform that uses AI to orchestrate how, when, and with whom people come together in a hybrid world. He has spent 15+ years in employee experience — across benefits, well-being, employee-experience platforms, and now workplace and workspace optimization — unified by a single mission he calls 'making work better.' He is a self-described AI-first revenue leader who runs a lean, scrappy team by pushing every painful process through a 'can AI do this better, faster, cheaper?' test. Witte is also a crisis-tested operator: he launched a wealth-management practice straight out of college and into the 2008 financial crash, lost roughly half the business in a couple of months, and rebuilt it to some of his best-ever years — the origin of his conviction that adaptability and resilience are the two most important traits for any businessperson.
“I'm somewhat disappointed in how much of a binary conversation it's become — that your organization is either in office or remote.”
“We don't necessarily have to be co-located in the same space all the time to get the benefit and sort of wring the juice out of connection, collaboration, and culture.”
“It's not the building that you're doing it in. It's who you're doing it with.”
“How we orchestrate folks day to day within space is actually the much more powerful magnet than how nice the space is itself.”
“That Rubik's cube problem of orchestrating people on a day-to-day basis quickly exceeded the capabilities of humans. And that's where we've really latched onto AI.”
“We sometimes refer to it as the Swiss cheese effect — two or three people over here and two or three people over there, with a lot of gaps in between. You may have a bunch of people in your building, but the energy feels really low.”
“The ability to give them time back, which I would argue is the most valuable asset in the world.”
“If the company really demonstrated care for the employee, and that was felt and tangible, the employees will reciprocate that care back into the business, probably with dividends.”