Charting the Full Potential of Gainsight CS & Staircase AI

Awesome. So as Justin shared, we are absolutely pumped to be up here with you today. Thank you for choosing the session. We recognize we're rolling into the end of day two.

You have a lot of other places to be, but you chose to be here. So thank you for hanging in there with us. If you're in the room, you're already thinking about AI, change management, the impact that it's having on you, your teams, the discussions that you're having. So what we're going to talk about today is, what CS motions exist that are not built for the things that AI is surfacing.

We're going to touch on how demanding this is for your organization at every level, your CSMs, your leaders, and even the conversations that you're having in the boardroom. And then we'll share with you a couple of plays that we know that folks are running and seeing success with and how they're thinking about discussing this and having these change management conversations internally. And then last but certainly not least, we're going to kind of share with you a few tactical items to leave with today to start thinking about and unpacking this when you get home and back to your desk. We're going to give you specific, real examples.

We'll walk you through a few things. You're not going to leave here with a running checklist, but hopefully what this does is it gets your juices flowing and kind of resets the pace at which you're thinking about AI and implementing it within your organization and for your team. So let's start with the honest truth about where teams are right now. AI does not fix a broken CS motion, but it will expose it quickly.

And for my nine-year-old son who is a subscriber to car and driver, he would be so proud of me using the analogy of trying to put a Ferrari motor on a Honda chassis. It's not going to last for the speed that you're looking to have this thing take off for. You're going to start to hear-- you're going to start to see cracks. It's not going to handle.

So that's what we're doing today is we are going to slow down in order to go fast. We're going to be very deliberate with how we're thinking about things. And we're going to identify the cracks and the elements of opportunity before AI does that for us. So the question that we are going to address is what are teams seeing that others aren't quite there yet or others may not be addressing yet.

Let us show you. This is a great slide to take a picture of, both for the context of the conversation and for those of you building a CS journey. What this does is it shows you all of the milestones throughout a customer journey, all of the signals, the stakeholders, the touch points. The reason that this is valuable to you is you can call out the places that you have established already and the places you might not and give you some ideas on where you can start to evolve there.

But why this is relevant for the discussion today is this still lives in CSM's heads for some people. And we are living in a world where the CSM could manage the relationships. They could manage the volume of accounts. Any context, they had it, no problem.

And they'll get to documenting that into your CRM or your system of choice whenever they get to it. But now we are in a world that is completely unhinged when it comes to data. And so not only from an internal perspective as a CSM or a CS leader, but also from the external pressures that you all are seeing, your competition is more fierce. Procurement is asking more questions.

You have a buying team, not a buyer. The cushy incumbent, I'm already there, we're good. The switching costs have never been lower. So things are really-- people are starting to feel the pressure.

It's not just you. It's the entire experience of CS right now. And so essentially, we're in a world where the speed of data and inputs have outpaced what a human can handle. And so what we're going to talk a little bit more about is it's not actually a people problem.

It's a process and experience problem for the CSMs. And as Kelsey was just mentioning, the CS motion that you all have inherited and been running is a world where the CSM was the system. They had the relationships. They had all the contacts, all the risk signals living in their heads.

And as Kelsey mentioned, outpaced everything now to what a normal human can ever handle. So with that as well, the external pressures are ever present, where before, customers would stay, even if things weren't great. And the relationships were just generally stickier. And now it feels like, as Kelsey was mentioning, procurement is more aggressive.

The options are everywhere. And that gap between a lost renewal and a risk signal has never been lower. And really, health scores are extremely valuable, but they're inherently reactive. So when we see a score drop, that sometimes means that things have already been compounding.

And you might be a little bit too late to that conversation. Not only that, but context lives across so many different places. We've got mixed signals across different handoffs. And we've got outreach running on a schedule, rather than reaching out and the customer is expecting you to reach out when they need it.

So pairing health scores with AI signals is really where you can start to change the game with that and to close the gap between the motion that you're running and what your customers and the reality that they're living in. And the teams who have actually figured this out and are doing it really well are doing it in a fundamentally different way. And so the question starts to become, do you embrace the change? Or do you let it overpower you?

Or do you get dragged through it, I should say? And honestly, most teams are tackling this in a totally different way. And I'll also say that teams aren't behind because they don't care about AI. In fact, they care a lot about AI.

They just feel a little stuck. And maybe they don't know how to implement it in a way that makes sense to their existing workflows. So it's not really a process problem. It's more of a direction problem.

And the teams that are getting it right are doing it not just on one level, but three. Kelsey and I work with CS teams every day. And they're all navigating this new reality that we have. And they're all doing it in their own different version.

And the pattern we keep seeing in the teams that are successful in this is tackling it as not just one change management problem, but three distinct problems. And so we're going to break those down into those levels today. But if you think about it, at the practitioner level, this is where the day-to-day motion changes. Whereas at the leadership level, this is where the measurement and accountability levers change.

And then at the board level, this is when you can start measuring it and comparing it to actual or tying it to business outcomes. So each one is distinct, which requires a distinct function and workflow associated with it. And so we're going to dig into each section here today. So we'll start at the practitioner level, where the change here isn't really about which AI tool they're using.

It's more about whether that AI tool is connected to the right customer context. So we've talked a lot about build and buy, grounding in this infrastructure. And there is a version of AI adoption where your teams are taking all of the transcripts and meeting notes and just copy and pasting them into a generic LLM of choice, where they feel productive. But really, that's not a CS strategy.

It's more of a workaround. And in fact, it's a risky one, too, because think about it. All of that customer communications, that contact is leaving your secure systems and being plugged into this LLM tool with no audit trail, no accessibility control, and opens you up to a lot of compliance risk. And then in the world that starts with the CS platform, as the backbone is where you see a lot more success.

And having that AI layered on top of the structure, the infrastructure that you have in place, makes them faster and more intentional, but without the risk. So then it becomes the interface being flexible, but the infrastructure not. You go one more. I'm sure you can all relate to this GIF, where it feels like there's always more tools, more AI being thrown at you, but the list or to-do list just keeps growing.

I know I do. But honestly, that's what you would expect with a market and a world changing as fast as it is right now. And you're not alone. Everyone is feeling this way.

In fact, Harvard Business Review published a study earlier this year that basically found that if you're throwing AI indiscriminately at your teams, they become much more overwhelmed, because they don't know where to spend their time. So then they become more burned out at the end of the day. But when AI is deployed strategically, it helps them to-- and of course, connected to the right context, as we've been talking about. The opposite happens.

It actually helps them to spend the time in the places that actually matter and become much more effective in their role. So this is AI as a fire hose versus AI as a filter. And what it's pointed to truly makes the most genuine impact on the effectiveness. So with that foundation, the interface then becomes a choice for your team rather than a constraint.

So then we can actually meet them where they prefer to work. And so it's just surfaced in that place where they're living day to day. For example, of course, we've got Gainsight MCP, which services that customer intelligence directly in their place of work, your generic LLM of choice, chatty BT, Gemini, Claude, or your existing internal pre-built AI tool. We also have Ask Staircase for teams that would rather chat in, ask questions in the place that they're communicating day to day, even if they would prefer not to be chatting there all day every day.

And then we have Gainsight Agent Studio or Copilot, where teams living and breathing within Gainsight are used to doing that can access the same customer context directly within Gainsight. So the prompt might look slightly different. But at the end of the day, it's grounded in the same customer information. And so the responses and the results are going to be the same.

And this, again, kind of brings up that build versus buy conversation, because, yes, data lives in your CRM, data lives in recording tools, and all of that is extremely valid to think about. But none of that is providing you customer success insights. It's providing data. And that's the real difference between a generic AI that's pieced together with different integrations and ones that are purpose-built for your workflows.

So I'll say it again here, because I think it's important that the interface is flexible, but the infrastructure is not. As a CSM myself, I can relate to a lot of this, a lot of the pressures. I think there's never been a more interesting time to be a CSM or a customer facing, like, account manager, whatever you'd like to call yourself. Because the volume in which we're able to take on more customer engagements has increased because of the support of AI.

And I'll give you a couple of examples of how I have found a way to optimize my day and my time through a number of different things utilizing AI. Like she said, though, for those of you that are like, we don't use AI or we don't have it, we do have it within the product. And so if that's enabled for you, please be sure to leverage it that way. I don't want to speak like we're just talking to a pocket of customers.

We want to be very inclusive of the forward-thinking AI future that we're all walking into. So two of the many different ways that I have figured out how to harness and optimize my day. As a mom of three kids who has a limited amount of space to get it done, is meeting prep and account transitions. So the first, I average about six to seven customer calls a day, not including internal.

So that leaves very, very, very little time for prep time. I've done this two different ways where I could start my day with a prompt. Prep me for my day, looks at my calendar. If you're using an LLM that's plugged into your calendar, you can do it that way.

I personally have staircase, Gainsight MCP, my calendar, my Google Drive, and my Slack connected to mine. Prep me for my day. And it will figure out who are my accounts, who are the customers that I'm talking to. And it will give me a breakdown of what it is that we're talking about.

The prompt that I give my LLM though says, what were the key objectives that we are moving towards? What are some primary publicly available insights that you can provide me since I last spoke to them? So in the last two weeks, one week. And then what are any key risks or opportunities that I have with these customers this week?

So that's built into this prompt that delivers me then a quick one pager and a refresher of what I should be talking to my customers about, outside of the things that I would like to contribute to the conversation. So I would say about 15 minutes of call prep for each one of those every single day. So if you do not have a baseline of where that time is being spent with your CSMs, your AMs, your customer facing teams, that would be an awesome takeaway today, because at some point we're going to need to start measuring that. It's coming like a freight train.

We've got to understand the cost or the time savings that AIA is providing back to your team. A lot of people, a lot of organizations are like full force on AIA, but we don't know why. And so if we can say that we've saved some time with that, that's a quick and easy win or value story for all of you. The other one is account transitions.

I had a leader once say to me, your customers should never feel your org chart. And specifically for software, account transitions are just something that happens. You have to balance out your workload. And so it's just kind of a natural event, whether it be annually, sporadically, you name it, it still has to happen.

But my biggest pet peeve and or fear, probably equal, is that my customer would have to repeat themselves and have to go back and tell me things that they just got done explaining to their previous CSM and or another CSM has to spend all of that time regurgitating all of that information. Those days really are gone, especially if you're using Gainsight and have any sort of AI implemented. Because if you're using even just a basic prompt-- again, you don't have to tell it what you want as if you're speaking to an intern. You say, hey, I am a new CSM.

I have no historical context on this account. Create a SWOT analysis, keys and objectives, primary corporate and organizational goals, and have it give you the readout. And again, that's not only saving the experience for your customer, it's saving the CSM or the account manager handing off that customer. And it's setting me up for success as the incoming CSM to pick up where they left off.

In theory, we want that. We want our customers to not feel that, oh, I've got it. I'll pick up where you left off. I don't think we have this perfected.

I don't think that I have this perfected. But it certainly has set a much stronger foundation than a one hour, 30 minute handoff call with a lot of minutia in it when I just need to see the big key points. [END PLAYBACK] And I love hearing from you talking about your day today. Because I use AI in a very similar way, but it's different.

Like I'm more on the sales side. I work with existing customers all day too. But I also wanted to relate to those fellow admins in the room, which I'm not an admin. But I feel like I'm kind of a pseudo admin.

Because specifically recently, I have been tasked with building our brand new demo for our sales team. And that has required going through all of our customer conversations, all of our sales conversations, pulling in from the MCP to understand how you all are successful with the workflows that you've built and how you're seeing value from the tool so that we can restructure all of our conversations with our customers and our prospects to make it better and more valuable for them and for them to be able to take those learnings and go build that themselves. So not only that, like pulling that customer context, but also being able to use those AI signals to power some of those workflows too. So for example, using AI signals to power CTAs, to power success plans and fill in all of the rich customer details about the risk signals and expansion and all of that good stuff coming in from Staircase.

And even automated programs like JO. For example, accounts going dark or risk signals from Staircase that we've provided, let's have an automated outreach go out to them. So how can we kind of offset some of these things and have them grounded in more customer examples so that it feels less painful for you admins to go in and research it yourselves or interview the team members. You can actually pull those conversations in and build the workflows off of them.

And beyond what Kelsey said about CSMs, also starting to think about those notification layers for your teams and how you can use AI signals to prompt some quick action off of what's happening in real time. As we talked about health scoring, even though it's fantastic, it still feels a little bit delayed. So being able to use those conversational pieces happening so quickly to then prompt them to go in and take action on it, I think can be really, really powerful for your teams. We'll get into how to structure these notifications.

That's a little bit more on the tactical side in a bit, but I will say we wanna encourage you to be a little bit careful on the notifications because notifications without action is just noise. All of you have talked endlessly at these Pulse conferences about CTA fatigue. We don't want to continue that. We wanna make sure that we're offsetting maybe some more digital automation, focusing on CTAs as the structured playbook and the flows that they need to have maybe multiple steps on.

And then the notifications being that quick action for that. But basically the point is we want your teams to show up, have that insight delivered to them, know exactly what they need to do rather than digging in and trying to figure out before they can get their day started. Okay, so for the CS leaders in the room, your experience or the way that you're thinking about this is going to be much different from a workflow. And you're going to be challenged to make a very deliberate decision.

And just because your business is saying, we're AI first, we're AI forward, we're an agentic forward company, like we've heard it all. And of course, like that's where things are going because they have to. But we, I think the billboard statement here is just because you can doesn't mean that you should. And so it is within the CS leadership role, you are the linchpin in this experience to say, slow down, I need to understand what my teams are doing today, what's broken or maybe needs to be adjusted.

And then how can we implement AI to help us evolve that experience or change that experience? And it's going to take like, however you want to say it, peel back that onion and really understand that one use case that you want to automate. So the ways that you want to think about this is, what can go to software? What can go with AI and what needs to stay with a human?

Which is so weird that we're just calling ourselves humans now. What can I measure now that I couldn't measure before? Hint, it's not logins or adoption. It's way bigger than that.

You're gonna get some really good juicy data out of an AI prompt. And then last but certainly not least, not what visibility can it give me? What visibility do we need? What do we need to see?

If I had a magic wand, what would that look like? So the challenge to all of UCS leaders is get very clear on how you're going to use AI. What use case are you going to use it within your team? And what will it surface for you that you didn't have access to prior?

So let's get like in the weeds for a second. And I'm just really dying to use this laser pointer, but I'm not gonna do it. Okay, so for the things that can be automated, you've got your meeting summaries and call followups. Team, if you're in here and you have people who are still going into Gainsight to log a call or document an email, that can be simplified, likely within the access you already have.

So talk to your CSM, talk to your account partner, and explore that because that is something that we absolutely should be getting, please, getting off of the place of your CSMs. They don't need to come into Gainsight to document things. We can do that for them. Now, in the other bullet points, you're gonna see things like the words detection, monitoring, and signals.

Those sound like excellent things that AI could be used for. Gainsight did not hire me to be a data sleuth. They hired me to go knock on my customer's door and say, "Hey, we are seeing a change in this metric "or this percentage, can we talk?" And then that is where the human element comes in. I have the context on a sensitive account.

I have the context on an entire migration or acquisition or maybe some friction within a team and some organizational changes that AI is not going to pick up on or may not pick up on, right? And so it's that human element, it's that trust, it's that understanding, it's that human context that is wildly valuable and still so, so, so important. And this is where we can start to get into the details a little bit. I know I kinda got ahead of myself earlier where I was talking about notifications, but this is where you leaders can start to maybe think about some ways and some examples of how to structure something like this within your own orgs.

Signals are happening across your entire book of business, but as mentioned earlier, signals without direction is just noise and we wanna really avoid that. So I would encourage you to think about setting up notifications, setting up different workflows in the form of tiers where some of those high value things, those revenue risks, those churn risk notifications, those are straight to leaders because those are high value and low volume, whereas kinda the outlier risks, more the portfolio base things that are happening, those can go directly to managers because they need a view of their entire team's business. And then for things like expansion signals, those go straight to CSMs or sales. And that can be in the form of a notification, sure.

It can also be in the form of an exception report. Or if we're thinking about other types of signals, churn risk absolutely I think requires a playbook, but other things like smaller things like, I don't even have a great example off the top of my head. Smaller things. Those are those smaller things.

Or maybe like an overdue EBR, there we go. Doesn't necessarily need to be a playbook, it can be an exception report. So same thing for things like expansion and other areas there where they can open up their homepage and see some of these exception reports in addition to their CTAs so they can have the appropriate workflow associated. Most importantly, they know what to act on and they're delivered all of that in the morning in addition to the things that they're setting up, like they're meeting preps and what have you.

So all of this can really help to define some more structure around the actionability and the implementation of the correct AI infrastructure. Oh, it's still me, yeah. Another tactical one, but I think also important, Kelsey alluded to it earlier, where we wanna make sure that we can measure it and I think AI has just been so elusive for so long that we're like, how do we even start to measure it? So maybe this will give you a little bit of a head start there too.

Because as Kelsey mentioned, if you don't have a baseline, you can't report on that six months from now and how do you start doing that? So I definitely think it's valuable to go interview your team, see where they're spending time, how long is that taking? I save so many hours on meeting prep and other things day to day, that demo org restructure that I talked about, that would have taken me so long to just do that without the help and assistance of AI. So yeah, just talk to your teams about it and start to understand what they're doing.

And then once implemented, just let it run and let it sit there for a bit, maybe measure it 30, 60 days, see how it is, and then start to put some numbers and pen to paper on that front. And that's where GainSight can really help as well, provide you both the measurement framework, but also the tooling, the reporting in a more automated way to help put numbers associated to it. I was just thinking too that like prepping for an EBR is another one where I get, I have so many conversations with my customers and this might be a controversial statement. I'm not to the point where I trust AI to build my deck, even if it's within the marketing standards, I spend more time adjusting that than I do just building it myself.

But to have a one pager of like, what were some of the core objectives, GainSight, PX data, so I'm not PX, literal PX data. Like how are they using the product? How does that tie back to their objectives? And all of that into one spot versus having to go dig and remember and find my notes.

It's just like, that was so phenomenal. I had to do three in one week and it was a godsend. I mentally may have been a little bit unstable if that wasn't the case. And then you're telling me you took that data and you put it into a deck that you use, but- Totally built the deck off of it.

But like saved you so much time doing that too. Yeah. Oh, I mean, again, so there's the value in this is like, I think we would be shocked if we took the baseline of how long it actually takes me to build one QBR versus three in one week of presenting. So I digress, find your baselines.

Okay, so the board level, this one is in a league of its own and I would be lying to you if I said, I didn't have some imposter syndrome getting up on this stage and telling you how to go talk to your boards. But the reality is this, is when it comes to CS, I have found and I have heard in these sessions that like CS is trying hard to make their mark in the business and like, we can help you with your growth number. We can help you with retention. We're making our CSMs more efficient.

If you can leave today and show up in those executive level conversations with a story better than 95% of my team is using AI. This will like get people thinking about how intentional you all are being with AI and you might be like a poster child for your peers in the space. So that's my hope for this today. We worked with our advisory team to find some templates and some tactical things for all of you to take out with you today.

So the thing is, is it's not that you don't have the data. You all have the data. For those of you using AI, again, we may not have the baselines, we may not know what to measure, but the data is there. People have access to something.

Are they using it? Are they not? How frequently? What's the number?

It's the matter of packaging it and telling that story in an executive level way. So again, we gotta make sure that you have the right proof points behind it. It's not that another organization is doing this better than you, it's just that they're telling a clear story. Okay, so the three different outcomes that you wanna nail when you're having the conversation with your leadership team on how are you implementing AI within your teams?

This first one, GRR, like that's, drool out of the mouth, that's the number they wanna hear, is we implemented an AI flag to trigger a risk notification to our CSMs. As a result, our CSMs engaged with the customer, X stays faster, resulting in X saved renewals amounting to X amount of revenue. Like that is a dollar sign and that is a tangible number for them to associate back to the implementation of AI. However you might tell that story.

The second is, dare I say, low hanging fruit. This one isn't an easy one, it's a simple one to measure if you go back today and figure out how much time your users or your CSMs are taking on the specific task that you are looking to automate. And if you take that task, multiply it by the person, the amount of times they're doing it, across your whole team, for the year, I feel like there's gonna be some commas in that number in terms of time saved. So that's gonna be a huge one.

We just gave you a couple of examples, I think those would be a great start and where we could automate some things. Last but certainly not least is like an AI mandate or an AI adoption. This one is an easy one to report on, right? Like are they using it?

But it's a really hard one to land, right? So you have to prove that a behavior exists now because they're adopting something. So an example would be, because I was mandated to use AI, I built a EBR one pager, resulting in the ability to deliver three EBRs in one week. Ultimately, early, I'm making this up, early renewal and flat renewal on XYZ companies.

Okay, so like you can tell that story backwards because we're requiring this as an outcome, here are the ways that they're using it and tell some use case stories there. Okay, so this is where we got a little help. I am confident and for those of you who are not, this is awesome one to take a picture of as well. This is like your starting point.

This is a blueprint for how you can tell that story and I would encourage you to structure it this way. The four boxes, you likely have this data somewhere if you're using any sort of AI or tooling, it's just gonna take a minute to go find it and then you can kind of streamline how you gather that week over week, month over month. But essentially, are people using AI? Are they using it consistently?

Have we saved any time? Has there been any expansion or growth opportunities and any risk customers that have been saved or risk mitigated? The part that is usually missing from this story is the right side. What new capabilities have we unlocked?

So the things that your team can do now that they weren't able to do before. We have a couple of examples like account transitions completed in minutes, required very low connect rates between reps internally. Proactive risk flagged before CSM effort was required. So a more proactive risk mitigation process, okay.

But the thing, I was thinking about this this morning and we have emotion, not emotion, but an experience at Gainsite where we run V2 Moms. Is anybody familiar with that from Salesforce? Okay, KPIs, OKRs, however you wanna say it, it's us putting our best foot forward to say, here's what we're looking to accomplish in the next six months, next year. Now the value of that is that Chuck, our CEO puts his out first, Brent then reflects his to get to support Chuck's, my manager to support Brent, and then mine to support my manager, which means we are all rowing in the same direction.

And if we can tie this effort back up to what we know is important to Chuck, and we're doing it at my level, we're doing it at my boss's level, that is a very holistic story to tell a board that we are moving in the right direction and we're doing it together. And we're doing it organization-wide too, because we have the same structure, even though we have different reports. Yep, so like your efforts are improving or moving towards his goals as well. Okay.

Okay, so this is like in conclusion, like you are building the foundation for tomorrow. The steps that you're going to take, or hopefully going to take as a result of sitting in with us for this session, is that you're gonna look at this as you are building for the future. You're not just setting yourself up for success in 2026, because things are gonna change. I am so eager to see what we talk about at Pulse next year, because it's going to be completely different.

And I hope that this session lasts. I hope this session lasts the test of time, but the way that things are moving, it's-- Save every, everyone's saving. Everyone's saving on it. We have to review it every week.

(laughing) Yeah, so we've got the CS workflows. How your CSMs can start to use and engage with AI, doing it intentionally, saving themselves some time. It could be a little bit intimidating, so maybe sit with some folks, tell them to treat it like an intern, and just go from there. There's a ton of time to be saved.

Again, I'm gonna repeat for those of you who are manually documenting into Gainsight, a call or an email, those things we can help you with. You might all have your own unique situations, but please explore that if you haven't already. You've got your CS leaders being a little bit more deliberate and intentional when you're being asked to use AI. Ask the question, how are we going to use it?

What data do we have access to now, and what can that surface for us? And if I had a magic wand, what would I want to see? Because the likelihood is that it could happen for you now. And then last but certainly not least, how do you elevate a room of your peers in a leadership discussion on how you are implementing AI and benefiting and serving your business, both revenue and time saved, for the longer term of however long this AI transition and evolution is going to take place?

Here's the thing. The organizations that are using AI, whatever form it is, are not doing anything unique, but they are allowing their CS team, their account managers to show up differently for your customers. And so that is the changing, that is the turning point for this, is we are going to allow these CSMs, these AMs, to show up and do what they do best, and we are going to do it deliberately, intentionally, and with data. Thank you.

(audience applauds) All right, I'm gonna let you take this first question. I knew you were going to do that. (laughs) Can everyone see it on the screen? The first question is-- On your app, if you're not on the Pulse app, we're reading from the questions there.

Thank you. You can tell how many sessions I've been able to attend this week. (laughs) Do the same integrations with teams exist with Slack? Specifically, is it possible to set up alerts in teams rather than Slack?

Yes, it is. Yay, for both Gainsight and Staircase, great. Did it. Yes.

I thought it was gonna do the other one first. Okay. What does a realistic before baseline look for teams that want to measure AI's impact on efficiency, but they haven't captured any data yet? I've got my cop-out answer.

Use your cop-out answer. All right, my cop-out answer is Staircase, because we've got efficiency reporting. Okay. All right, I'll take my sales hat off now.

(laughs) There's a tool for that. Data from places like Gong have sometimes required the CSMs to log a timeline. Do you have an actual better answer than that? No, I thought it was great because I think the baseline may be zero.

Yeah, right. It may only be up from here. Yeah. And so I think, going back to the baseline question, I'm hesitant to give you an answer on that because I think for some people, we're starting with nothing.

And or just taking the time to measure the time it takes to do something right now. Right, yeah, like interviewing your team, just like seeing what their day-to-day looks like. And I know that takes extra time out of people's day, but I think that can be really powerful to just know what is taking. And even if you have an idea of where you think AI could be incorporated within that, then being able to just tie it to those different specific areas that your team is spending time on, without the automation side, I think.

And I think the time-saving things might be a very rewarding, might be a very rewarding number that you find, or shocking, if you're like, "Wow, that takes my team X amount of hours each week "to do this very administrative task." So I think it would be very interesting. We've talked a lot about efficiency, but I think at the end of the day, GIRR is what matters. So are your teams able to spend more time strategically with their customers in those conversations, rather than spending time on logging notes or logging things here and there and copy-pasting everything, right? So I think that's, obviously you all are probably already thinking about that, but it's not to be overlooked.

I think those numbers can also be thought of in addition to the time-savings and efficiency gains. And I have a couple of customers who measure activity or customer-facing time, and I'm thinking through this now, and that that's a way for the organization to put some skin in the game and be like, "We are asking a lot of you, but we are also going to remove your very redundant and mundane tasks." Okay, the next question is, "Gong, the data from places like Gong have sometimes required CSMs to log timeline events right after they just had the conversations in order for it to pull into Gainsight, which may result in missing data in the tool. Does staircase have additional connectivity access for data, customer data for full context?" I think I understand this question. It might be a little bit more on the integration side.

We do connect with Gong automatically, so we can pull in, and it actually reads the call transcripts, and that is for Gong, Google Meet, Zoom, Chorus, Clary. We've got a bunch. Teams, so all of those can be automatically captured, and I'm sorry if I'm not understanding the full picture of that question. I will say that I do find that Teams are still logging timeline activities just to capture the notes that they were taking for themselves, and that's a personal choice for me too.

I've got my transcription tool on, I've got my notes that I take in addition to that, and then I actually use the Gainsight MCP to pull that transcription and log a timeline activity for me after my calls, so that could be a route for more automation in addition to the integration capabilities that we have to automatically capture those call recordings. Hopefully that answered the question. If not, come find me after and we can chat through it. Is there a way in Gainsight CS or Staircase to store an AI prompt template for your CSMs to use?

Yes. I will say, and I don't know if this is widely known, Staircase, there's like some conflicting complementary capabilities in terms of like the Ask Staircase and the Copilot, so we are heavily focused on deepening that integration between those two tools, and part of that is by connecting the Ask Staircase kind of experience or what have you into Copilot, and so you can access the same kind of conversational intelligence through the Gainsight Copilot AI experience as well as those MCPs. Within Gainsight, the prompts are available both on a user level, admins can also log different prompts to make globally available for your teams, so those are just some options. I hope that clarifies too.

What kind of risks trigger your CTAs? I can share with you a couple of like real world examples from both myself and from customers, but I think that you might have some Staircase insights to this as well. Some of my customers are looking at telemetry data, so are you using the product, X amount, there's certain thresholds. Several are looking, I actually did a webinar on this, it's like you've got to look at several different layers, it can't just be, they don't use the tool as much as they use to sound the alarm.

So tool frequency, number of adopted users, the adopted user is a certain threshold, right? And then there are elements of Staircase that I rely more heavily on because it seems to be my source of truth based off of like sentiment. An example would be if an email came in and somebody was like, "This is ridiculous," which they never do, but if they did, I would be like, "Okay, I need to see that urgently," and it goes into my Slack and it is alerting everybody who's in that specific Slack channel. But that is a notification, right?

Not a CTA. Oh, right, not a CTA. Just to be clear. Yep.

In the form of CTAs, I think like a really big one is a stakeholder change because that's not, I mean, sometimes it's obviously going to be triggered from communications, but just triggering off that workflow to make sure that we're mitigating any risk associated with losing a champion or what have you, I think can be really beneficial. Account dark, that's a great use case for a journey orchestrator program as well as a CTA, depending on the segment. Maybe if it's a strategic customer, enterprise customer, you haven't heard from them in a while, that's a big risk. I've got loads, and I think like on the community education side, there's so many in there as well, like less activities, less engagement in the community, those types of things.

So I'm trying to be agnostic with our Gainsight products, but when we're thinking about AI, and this is what that session is on, using some of those AI triggers, I think can be helpful to incorporate. Well, we are at time. Thank you so much for joining us. Enjoy the rest of your sessions today.

Thank you.