Otter.ai Appoints Mike Barnes to Lead Global Partnerships and Alliances

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Otter.ai, the Conversational Knowledge Engine built for the modern enterprise, today announced the appointment of Mike Barnes as Head of Partnerships & Alliances to lead its global partnerships and alliances strategy. This marks a major step in the company’s enterprise go-to-market expansion.

Barnes will be responsible for building and scaling a structured partner ecosystem initially spanning the US, UK and Europe, with an emphasis on recruiting and enabling partners that help enterprise customers capture, structure and activate the knowledge shared in meetings, calls and workplace conversations.

He joins Otter with more than two decades of experience leading partnerships and channel organizations across enterprise SaaS and marketing technology. Most recently, Barnes led partnerships at Gainsight, where he helped drive strategic alliances and ecosystem growth. At Otter, he will build the company’s global channel program from the ground up, establishing the foundation for long-term partner success.

The program will support a broad ecosystem of technology and workflow partners, resellers, MSPs, systems integrators, distributors and affiliates. Its first phase will focus on partner recruitment, foundational go-to-market activity and early lighthouse partnerships. The second phase will expand partner enablement, training, support, co-selling, co-marketing and regional growth across priority markets.

Otter’s partner strategy is designed to help partners meet growing enterprise demand for AI-driven productivity and knowledge solutions. As organizations look for better ways to support distributed and hybrid teams, Otter enables enterprises to turn conversations into structured, searchable and actionable knowledge that can be shared across teams and connected into existing workflows.

Otter is used by over 35 million professionals across industries to automatically capture conversations, generate insights, and streamline collaboration. As organizations increasingly adopt AI to power productivity and decision-making, Otter is expanding its platform beyond meeting transcription to become a foundation for capturing institutional knowledge from conversations across the enterprise.

“As more enterprises adopt AI across their business, those tools are only as valuable as the context they can access. Partnerships will be critical to bringing Otter’s conversational knowledge into the systems, workflows, and teams where work happens. I’m excited to help build the ecosystem that makes that possible,” said Mike Barnes, Head of Partnerships & Alliances at Otter.ai. “One of the things that attracted me to Otter was the opportunity to build a world-class partner and channel program from the ground up around a product that’s already transcribed over 1 billion meetings and increasingly adopted by enterprises.”

“Mike’s appointment is an important step in Otter’s enterprise growth strategy,” said Sam Liang, CEO and co-founder of Otter.ai. “Mike has spent his career building successful partner ecosystems and understands what it takes to create value for both partners and customers. His experience will be instrumental as we expand our enterprise reach through the channel.”

Otter will work with partners that can help enterprises deploy conversational AI across departments, verticals and workflows, including sales, customer success, operations, media, education, financial services and construction. The channel program will also support Otter’s broader international expansion, with the US, UK and Europe identified as priority markets.

Prospective partners can learn more about Otter’s channel program at otter.ai/partner-program.

About Otter.ai

Otter.ai is the Conversational Knowledge Engine built for the modern enterprise. With over 35 million users and 1 billion+ meetings transcribed, Otter captures, connects, and activates the knowledge from every conversation, turning spoken words into searchable intelligence, automated action items, and agentic workflows that sync directly to the tools teams already use and gets smarter with every conversation. From individual professionals to Fortune 500 enterprises, Otter delivers immediate value with no prompts required because with Otter, your voice is the prompt. Backed by Spectrum Equity, Horizon Ventures, and Draper Associates. Otter.ai is headquartered in Mountain View, California.