Slack’s former regional vice president Damian Naughton has joined ElevenLabs, the AI research and product company, as general manager ANZ.
The appointment comes as the London-headquartered company arrives in Australia, opening a Sydney office.
In his new role, Naughton will be in charge of leading the company’s local operations, drive enterprise growth, triple the local team and deepen partnerships across the region.
ElevenLabs already has more than 750,000 users across the region. Local enterprises, including Australia Post, Employment Hero, Heidi Health, Xero and Andromeda Robotics, are deploying the platform for uses spanning call centre automation, content creation, accessibility and AI agent deployment.
“Australia and New Zealand are exciting markets for us,” said Mati Staniszewski, cofounder of ElevenLabs. “We’re seeing real demand for voice agents right across product, support, sales, and operations. We’re expanding our local teams, particularly engineering, so we can build alongside those companies and get them into production faster.”
Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs helps businesses use AI to communicate with their customers, employees and other audiences.
The company launched the first human-like AI voice model in 2023, and has since expanded into voice and chat agents and creative tools to generate and edit content for media and marketing across 70 languages. At the heart of its enterprise offering is ElevenAgents, which allows companies to connect business systems such as CRMs and deploy agents that handle customer enquiries, book appointments, qualify leads and resolve complex tasks in real time.
“We’re at an inflection point for AI adoption across both Australia and New Zealand,” said Naughton. “Organisations here are among the most keen early adopters of new technologies, and we’re seeing that translate into early demand, with organisations already embedding voice AI into their customer experiences.
“It’s an incredibly timely moment for us to plant a stake in the ground locally with an office and dedicated team here. Organisations are looking to move from experimenting with AI to genuinely running with it, and voice AI is one of the most immediate yet high-impact places to start. I’m excited to expand our presence here and to make Australia and New Zealand a leader in the future of voice AI.”
With its world-leading research, creative tools and enterprise voice agents at scale, ElevenLabs is changing how people communicate and interact with technology, organisations and with each other. In ANZ, users have generated over 300 million audio clips and held 2.4 million AI conversations on the ElevenLabs platform, with nearly 37,000 developers building with the API.
ElevenLabs’ approach is to augment, not replace, human creativity and communication. Its agents help businesses enhance customer experience and extend the reach of their work across languages and formats, freeing people to focus on empathy, creativity and complex problem-solving.
The expansion follows recent launches in Korea and Spain as the company continues to grow its global presence.
