Conga Hires Salesforce and ZoomInfo Veteran Darrell Grissen as Chief Product Officer

Conga has appointed Darrell Grissen as chief product officer, handing a former Salesforce and ZoomInfo executive control of its product roadmap as the company pushes AI across its commerce platform. The Houston-based vendor announced the hire on October 28, 2026, and Grissen will oversee strategy, roadmap and execution for the full Conga Advantage Platform.

A product hire timed to an AI push

The appointment lands in the middle of a busy month for Conga. Two weeks earlier, the company expanded its AI footprint with a new MCP Server and a larger set of AiMe capabilities. A day after the CPO announcement, it unveiled a partnership with GC AI to embed legal-specific AI inside its contract lifecycle management product.

That sequence suggests the hire is not a reset. It is reinforcement for a strategy already in motion, with a senior product owner now placed over it.

Grissen inherits a growing AI toolkit

Grissen brings more than 20 years of product and technology experience, including generative AI launches aimed at commercial teams. CEO Dave Osborne said the company has spent the year putting AI to work across the commerce chain and framed Grissen as the executive to accelerate that effort.

He takes over a platform with real assets to build on. AiMe, Conga's native AI intelligence layer, now carries nearly 100 tools. The MCP Server pipes live Conga data into assistants such as Claude and Microsoft Copilot, so customers can query contract and pricing information without leaving the tools they already use. Conga says it serves more than 10,000 customers, including over half of the Fortune 100.

Contract management vendors are racing on AI

Contract management is one of the most contested categories in legal technology. Incumbents face pressure from AI-native entrants and from general-purpose assistants that can read and draft agreements. Vendors now compete on whether their data and workflows can be reached by AI agents, not only on feature lists.

Conga's approach is two-pronged. It builds its own AI layer while opening its data to third-party assistants through MCP, an increasingly common integration standard. The GC AI partnership adds a third route: buying in specialist legal capability rather than building it. Hiring a product chief with enterprise AI scaling experience fits a company trying to manage all three at once.