How Gainsight’s Own CSMs Use Gainsight to Retain and Grow Customers

Thank you, Katie. That was really sweet. So we are here. This track is all about CSMs.

So I want to kind of get a show of hands. How many CSMs in the house? Yes. This is the maximum number of CSMs I've seen here.

So thank you for being here. The rest of you are either CS leaders, CS ops. So how many CS leaders? Whoa, that's fantastic.

And any CS ops? Okay, so we have a decent mix. We have a really decent mix. And what I wanted to start with today is, my name is Kalpana Krishna Kumar, as you heard.

I am a senior CSM here at Gainsite. Been here about four and a half years and absolutely love my job. Absolutely do. I've also been in professional services.

So I've seen both sides of the coin, the implementation side, as well as the CSM side. And I have deep empathy, I will tell you, for both sides. So before I move ahead, I did want to introduce, have these folks introduce themselves. But before that, I also wanted to tell you about the childlike piece that we have as part of this session.

Everybody must have heard about Gainsite leaning in really heavy into the childlike, a joy. So the icebreaker for today is, what's your pet peeve with AI? Okay, I'll let them go and then I'll go at the end with what my pet peeve is. So Nicole, go.

Yeah, I'm Nicole Bellinger. I'm a senior CSM in our dedicated segment. I manage about 18 accounts, about 6 million in ARR across all five products now, which is a recent shift. I've been in customer success going on about 14 years now.

My AI journey kind of started with chat GPT, perplexity and gamma, but have since moved over to exclusively Claude, as far as my pet peeve with AI. When it confidently gets something wrong and it hallucinates, it times out. Or it just stops working and asks me for permissions that I've already given. Yeah, that happens all the time.

Anybody else have that pet peeve? Yeah, 100%. Thank you. Hi everyone, my name's Archina Narang, also a CSM here at Gainsite.

Been here around five years or so on our dedicated segment as well. In terms of accounts, I have about 10 accounts, roughly 7 million in ARR. And in terms of my pet peeve with AI is I send thoughts. And so I send an incomplete thought, context, I think it's enough.

And then I'm like, oh yeah, I remember this one other thing. And then it's already cycling, and then I have to hit stop and start again. And that's really, really annoying to me. Wish I could send multiple thoughts at the same time.

All right, Justin Brown, I've been with Gainsite for four years now. Started off as a solution architect on the CS product. Last three years I've been at PXCSM until very recently, where if some of you are our customers, we've moved to this relationship model. So instead of having one CSM for each product, we now have a relationship CSM that kind of handles the entire book of business.

So what we've moved into is a adoption consultant. So it's more like a solution expert in professional services that will come in at the appropriate time in your journey, and really examine your instance, examine your practices, and kind of make some suggestions, and make sure you're on the right track. So it's more like a limited engagement. As far as my pet peeve with AI, aside from MDashes, which everyone hates, and it won't stop doing it, no matter how many times I tell it to.

Similar to Nicole's, like I've asked it questions where it confidently gives me an answer, and I'm like, oh, that's great, where did you get that from? And it'll say, I don't know, I just guess based upon everything else you told me. So that's my pet peeve. Yeah, Justin's being very humble at this point in time, because he has a very unique perspective right now.

He was a CSM, and then now he is in a role that kinda he is not dedicated to any one customer, but he gets that perspective really well. So definitely a unique perspective. So my pet peeve is, and I don't think I ever thought I'm gonna be saying this, but I think AI or Claude or whatever it is, listens to me too much. It just pays too much attention to me, and I'm like, there's a time, and I'm like, no, no, no, you've got to think for yourself, be opinionated.

And so I ended up putting that in my instructions, and I say, okay, I'm gonna challenge you, you've got to challenge me back. And that's probably not a pet peeve, but it is a pet peeve because sometimes it doesn't, and it annoys me. But anyway, so as you see, we at Gainsight here have the unique distinction of being CSMs to CSMs, no pressure here, right? So we have a lot of fun, we use our own product, Gainsight.

And very recently we got Claude, but our journey in AI started long ago. So it's almost, I wanna say, two year cycle that we would say we have had AI at Gainsight, and we are all actively using it. We have been pushed to use it, we have been challenged to use it, and we have all found a lot of benefits out of using it. A lot of it has been need.

My specific case, I do it only because it's sheer need, right, there was a time when my book of business was a little bloated and I didn't know what to do with it, and so I turned to AI, and I keep turning to AI for everything. But even with AI, I think the core of our job remains the same, which is retention, expansion, right? That continues to be the same, and so the way we have evolved, and those stories that you'll hear today, which are, by the way, real stories, this is everything that we do on a day-to-day basis, you will hear real stories, and what I would love for all of you to do is to open up your Slido app and start asking us questions. We may not be touching a certain subject, but please do put your questions in Slido.

I don't need to tell you where that particular thing is, but in case you wanna know, on the home screen, we are Room 105, so if you click on that, you will get to the Slido app. So with that said, one of the very first question that I wanted to talk about, you've heard a lot about how AI has been transformative, a lot of what you saw this morning in the product keynote, a lot of what you heard on the keynote yesterday, many of those ideas actually originated from the CS team itself. We have been utilizing it, and when they saw that there was a particular workflow that we found very useful, kinda putting it through AI, it was taken up and productized. So there's hope.

This is what you can do, be that change, go use the AI, get your organization to start using it as well. So with that said, it has changed our lives, and that's the piece that I wanted to address today. So Nicole, I know you and I have been on the same team for a long time, and I know that you have really changed and transformed the way you work. So would love to hear you talk a little bit more about it.

Give us a use case, tell us your story. Yeah, absolutely. AI has pretty much transformed my day-to-day workflow in what would have been more repetitive manual tasks, is now almost fully automated. I started leveraging our meeting prep skill, which is available on our Gainsight website.

It really just drafts up a full digest prior to any call, health score, risks, open, tasks to follow up on, any type of risk situations, expansion opportunities, and it fully gives me a full summary prior to the call, so that I can go into that call fully confident and prepared and sharper. The best thing about it, it also gives a full context and conversation guidance of questions to ask. So again, you can come to the call more prepared, more confident into that call. That's just one part.

The other parts that I've utilized is I've started to utilize a pre-built skill that I've built for myself on helping to draft an agenda prior to my meeting. By doing that custom skill I created, it drafts automatically in Gmail for me. And then on the flip side of that, one of the meetings completed, I had a pre-built skill that I built that will draft up a follow-up email that drafts into Gmail directly for me. So it's all automated.

It saves me probably 10 to 15 minutes, maybe more of my time. The other skill I also built was to help me build business review decks using our Gainsight branding. It essentially spins up a full deck for me in a matter of a couple minutes based on that skill I've built. It's really exciting for me.

I also built a custom success plan skill as well, so that I can, as we're going through account transitions, we are now multi-product CSMs. I'm having new accounts transition to me. So I'm leveraging the Claude MCP to help me build a success plan based on the call transcript. It pulls out the objectives, pulls out the goals, and then automatically I can leverage the write back to Gainsight CS to create a success plan for me.

So it's really transformed my day-to-day workflow and significantly reduced my time. I've spent some manual tasks. I love that. I love that.

So the key question here is, so are you in Gainsight at all? It's a good question. So as you all saw this morning on the demo, what we've all been testing is in order to help, not eliminate removing Claude because Claude is gonna be extremely beneficial to other workflows, but some of the skills I've just mentioned is all gonna be in Gainsight. And that's the goal, is to help meet you where you're working, but not eliminate the fact that Claude is gonna serve other use cases.

But we've tried to solve for some of the most common and why we've built, are bringing that inside of the product. That's awesome. Ashina, what's your story? My story with AI, and in Gainsight, as much as I'd like to, even with 10 accounts, having a QBR with my customers on a regular cadence has been really difficult.

And so I, as I learned Nicole, I built a one-pager skill, a QBR skill in AI and Claude, leveraging all the data in Gainsight. So it's pulling all of my timeline entries. It's pulling all the information that for my success plan and what other people are conversing with my customer on, with from Gainsight, in conjunction with other resources I have from Gainsight, whether it be our enablement materials or product release information. And what I did is I had it build a one-pager for me that highlights the goals of the customer, what we did that last quarter, where we're going, what are some product releases that I think would be really interesting to them.

And it's letting me up skill and up level the conversation I'm having with my customers on a more regular cadence. This is something I just built recently, so it's starting Q1, and I can already see the wheels turning in terms of how customers can also see how then they can do this with their customers because I don't know, everyone can see the long tail. That's hard, but even also having these kind of constant conversations with their customers is difficult sometimes in the enterprise segment. And so that's been a huge win for me from a time saving because it's letting me have the more strategic conversations with my customers on a more regular cadence because before, it was happening one to two times a year, and this is allowing it to happen more frequently.

So I love that. And then I wanna make sure I say this because I learned another skill with AI this week that I thought was really interesting, and I don't know if there'll be a question about it, so I wanna pull it in now. Similar to upskilling, they were talking about how you can use AI to coach yourself. And so what I'm doing is I'm like, here are the conversations I've had with the customer in the past three months.

What are some things I should have done differently? What are things I should do now based on the information here so that then I can continue to grow and again, be more strategic with my customers? And I thought that was a great learning I had this week and I can't wait to keep doing it. That's awesome.

So as you can see, the million dollar question is, so if you take all this busy work out of your life, what on earth am I going to be doing? And Aachhna just gave you two really good examples of how she's upleveling her conversation with her customers. She is able to do all that, what is really high value for a CSM through the work that she's doing through AI. So she's got all these minions who will do all the little running around and creating her QBR decks while she as the CSM is able to deliver that content from the QBR deck and that is exactly what the customers are looking for.

So that's a really great example. How about you Justin? So mine's just a little bit different because as I said, I moved out of the traditional CSM role and into this product expert role. So what that means is I'm not, I don't have a long relationship with a customer and I get pulled into a lot of different conversations because I don't have that established book of business.

I'm pulled in, I think all of you have pulled me in at some point for questions, to jump into a meeting and sometimes it's in a half an hour or another hour and I don't know anything about this customer. And he's absolutely right, I can tell you that. I've done that to him. Yeah, I've done that to him.

Justin, help. So what I've done is I created a skill where it's connected to the CSMCP, to the Staircase, to the PXMCP. So it's connected to Slack, to my Gmail, to Drive, basically to anything I can connect it to, I did connect it to. And what I did was I created a skill that gives me what we call an account inspection.

So it will give me six to seven pages on the account and it's not necessarily long paragraphs of stories, it's who are the main context there and what do they do, what are their roles, how often are we talking to them. Like giving me real background on the people in the meeting but also all the details, what's their ARR, what are their MAUs, what have they been using, what are they not using, what success plan do we have established for them and where are we in regards to that success plan. So in that way, it's really enabled me to do something I wouldn't have been able to do two years ago. Like this would have been hours, if not half a day or a full day of combing through all of our objects just to gather that information.

And trust me, we are anal about putting things in timeline. So if you haven't heard it before, we have a saying here at Gainsight, if it's not in timeline, it didn't happen. And we follow it very, very religiously. With all the automation that has come in, that is a non-issue.

Our timelines are already getting populated. And so all of that data is coming in. Anybody in the audience, do you kind of, does this use case resonate with you? Anybody?

Thank you. Two people, three people. Okay, fantastic. So account inspection is also something that's not unique to the role that Justin is in.

But I feel like account inspection is part of a CSM's role as well. So at some point in time, I'm gonna ask him for his skill and say, can I just try it out on my customer? I might have to tweak it. I might have to iterate on it because Nicole was saying, I have also built my own skills.

And now you're asking, you guys are all building your own skills? No, actually, we do share our skills with each other. So I would take Nicole's skill and then I'll take something, Archanar's skill. And we do share it amongst ourselves because that is how we are growing each other.

So we are growing as a team. And then I will run it and I'm like, okay, so this seems like a very Nicole skill. I can literally read Nicole in her. So I'll iterate on it, I'll tweak it and then make it my own, right?

So that is something that I will highly encourage everybody else to do as well. I did want to kind of pause here for a second, not that, I just wanted to kind of pull the room to just understand we've thrown a few terms at you. And I know this has been a fire hose since yesterday for you guys. So everybody understands MCP, yes?

Perfect, MCP model, yeah, okay. Everybody understands that there are different types of MCPs we have. We have the staircase MCP, gainside MCP. And just this morning you heard that we have an MCP for each of our digital customer hub products, right?

So multiple different types of MCPs. What it is doing for me, it is giving me context where I'm at, right? So you heard the Arvind Jain, the glean CEO talk about it. The whole idea with the AI and the way it is transforming our lives is I should not have to go to AI.

I should be able to use it on whichever surface I'm at, right? And so that is probably the most important thing that I took away from this morning's keynote. So going ahead, I think what I would love to do, there's a ton of questions here. Should we get started on this?

Okay, let's do it. Okay, so I'm gonna read the question out and any one of you could take it. Multiple of you wanna take it, go for it. So please do put your questions in the slide.

Okay, this one's my favorite because it uses magic. It says, if you could have a wave of magic wand and add any feature or functionality into gainside, what would it be and why? Who wants to take this? The first thing that came to my mind was contact management.

There was a magic tool that could tell me who's at the customer and what their role is. That would be, and I mean, Staircase has this great offering where it has a stakeholder map and it can show you your relationship with the customer and who's new, but I'd love for that to be taking note. This person's gone, let's turn them off. That would be my magic wand.

100%, I'm gonna talk. I need my contacts to be cleaned up. I need clean data. Okay, anyone else wanna go?

Your magic wand? I would say, I mean, as a PX guy, I would like to see PX on all of our products. So knowing how your customers are using Skilljar community if you have those things and a unified login. So I don't like to log in to one place.

There you go, there you go. I thought he was gonna say, I want AI to make me, let Kalpana never call me again with an SOS. I would never let AI do it. All right, anything on your end, Nicole?

Yeah, I mean, I echo what both Archana and Justin said. I mean, I think a lot of what we're already building or in the process of building is essentially that magic wand for me is already almost gonna be implemented. I mean, the biggest piece for me is the QBR business review deck build, which if that could be already done for me, even though I have the skill, I think that would be the biggest time saver. I love that.

And I just wanted to talk a little bit more about that question was you talked about a feature in Gainsight, right? Our customers have constantly come back to us and said, can your product do this? Could it do something else? And the reason why we came up with the MCP is because we want you to have the flexibility to build, build it the way you want it.

So it's like you build it in Gemini or Claude or chat GPT or wherever, Glean AI. I don't know where you wanna build it, but you build it yourself because you will have all the necessary context going in there. So we're not trying to kind of fit a square peg in a round hole and try to fit your processes into Gainsight. We want you to take the Gainsight data and fit it into your process.

I think that's the big thing here. All right, so with that, the next question that's got the most votes is, do you see success plans being more of an internal operational tool for a CSM? Or do you see customers finding value directly from a success plan? I can take that.

A great question. I am probably one of the biggest users of success plans and have been, I've been pinged multiple times by our enablement team on my usage of success plans. I personally think it's a value add if you're tracking it properly for the customer because at the end of the day, are you delivering an outcome for the customer? Are you tracking that?

And if you're not tracking that, you're at risk. So yes, it is an operational tool because the business needs to understand what's happening with the customer. What do they care about? But as a CSM, it's my job to protect the revenue and retain that customer and renew that customer.

And if I'm not delivering on the milestones on every meeting I have with that customer, if I share the success plan with them, I talk about it on the call. I started leveraging spaces, also sharing it that way. So for me, personally, I love this question because if you're not tracking it on the success plan, you're completely missing the mark. Could one of you also talk about what a verified outcome is as part of the success plan?

Because I know Nicole talked about ROI. So you wanna take this? I mean, a verified outcome is just ensuring you're having that conversation with your customer of what the value they've seen with your tool or with your product. And so what we do within Gainsight, within our success plan, is we have that conversation with the customer.

We go to the timeline activity of that specific objective and we write down what value do they see? Do they see that verified outcome? And then at that point, we can close out that objective. But I wanna add on to what Nicole said.

I, on the other side, I'll be a little bit vulnerable. I fill in my success plan and then because I meet with my customers biweekly, it felt too often to bring a success plan. Things don't change that frequently. And so then I sometimes go away from it and then we come back to it when we have the EBR.

But I was thinking this week, again, with AI, how I can be better. I was like, how can I tie each individual, the topics that we wanna discuss back to the success plan every week and how can I show that even from an agenda standpoint? So maybe I'm not having the success plan pulled up and going through it every conversation, but at least then they can see how is tying back to their objectives with the topics that we're discussing on a biweekly cadence. So continuing learning and I think AI is gonna help us push to make sure that we're having the right conversation with our customer and they know exactly why we're having that conversation.

So I think success plan to your point is gonna be even more important in the time of AI and how fast things are moving. Yeah, absolutely. So the value of the success plan is not going away. And it's important only because, it's exactly what Nicole said is because at the end of the day, if I don't show value and ROI to my customers, they're not gonna renew.

I could be like their best friend and hang out with them for any amount of time. They still will not renew. Maybe they will, but maybe most probably they won't. So that is a super important thing.

I like the way Archana has kind of framed this because once you get all of this basic work off your plate, the agenda prep that you talked about, the recap email, everything that takes so much time. Once you take all of this, AI can actually become that thinking partner. And I like the way you said, you can iterate with it. You're like, it's giving you, and AI has now the, at least the way that we have trained our model is to not only give you the answers, but ask you provocative questions, challenge you, like I said, and I will also definitely encourage all of you when you go back, whatever model you're using, you can provide it with instructions and have it ask you the next step, like give you the next step and ask you a question, right?

So that's how the cycle continues to go. Anything you wanted to add, Justin? Yeah, I do. I agree with what both Nicole and Archana said.

I do think if you're using it, of course we use it as an internal tool as well, right? Like it helps us to keep you on track. It helps us to retain you because we want to retain you as customers just like you want to retain your customers. But I think if you're purely using it as an internal tool, you're not using it efficiently.

You should be sharing it with the customer. You should be working on it. Like as a live, I consider it like a living document. Like it's not, okay, we have one success plan, when it's done, we're done.

It's, you know, maybe you have five or six objectives and as you cross one off, you add another one. So it should be something that you're like, you're collaborating very closely with your customer. I share them with my customers. You get to share it right from the success plan.

So they have access to it as well. Yeah, so I think it's just, like I said, it's more to collaborate and make sure you're on the same track. I agree. It has to be a mutual success plan because it should reflect what the customer really wants to do, not just what I think they should be doing.

All right, so let's move to the next question. And this is a fun one. Has the use of AI ever backfired for you in a customer engagement? Be it like incorrect data, any other form of wild or hallucination, assumption or otherwise?

Any lessons learned? I could start off if you want. I will tell you, the more I use AI, the more I become an AI skeptic, okay? I've been an AI skeptic forever.

I trust human beings, no problem. I'll trust you. But when it comes to AI, I have, I heard this long time ago, trust but verify, okay? So anything that goes out from me has to have, well, maybe I'm just a control freak, who knows?

But definitely it has to go through me before it comes up in front of the customer, right? That's the most important piece. So have I had any, have I had AI hallucinate on me? Yes.

Have I thrown that hallucinated AI slop in front of the customer? No. That is not something, not on my watch. So I'll just say that, but I'm gonna ask if you guys had any-- No, I totally agree with you.

As I was saying before, like those account inspections we do, like I have no knowledge and I have this long document that I, I'm taking it at its word, but I also need to know your product well enough to read it and say, that doesn't make sense. Where is that coming from? You can't just use it as a, okay, I'm just gonna run it, print it out and send it to someone. I have never luckily had it backfire on me yet because like Kalpana, I check my emails first, I read through them before, especially before I send to a customer.

So yeah, I would say just make sure that you read it, that you verify it and if it sounds at all like something that doesn't sound right, just make sure you dive into that and check that. And that's part of the reason where, like we say, I honestly am mostly in cloud. I don't go into CS as much as I used to, but as Nicole said, you still need to because I wanna go in and actually look at that email or I wanna actually go in and look at their R360 to say, I'm sorry, did the AI really get that from there or is that just guessing it extrapolating based upon other questions of other customers I've had? Is it taking a company that sounds very similar to another one and pulling that information in?

So you do really have to verify what you're reading. Yeah, and I would echo both what Justin and Kalpana said. I've never sent out a meeting agenda email or a recap email without verifying that everything that was in that agenda that before I sent it is correct of what we discussed, what their goals were, what the priorities are, what our open items are. And then similarly on the recap email, making sure it was actually what we discussed and the AI didn't make up a point in time that didn't exist.

So I mean, luckily for me, I've never, that hasn't happened. But again, you just wanna be careful at first to make sure you review everything before you send it out. Anything you wanna add, Archana? I mean, one tip I guess, or a lesson learned, I can say it's not necessarily lesson learned, but someone on my team, they used AI to build a QBR deck and then they had AI review it once it was done.

Now it's complete, let's do a clean check, do spell check, do make sure the flow looks good. And so yes, you can do the human check as well, but if you wanna have AI double check itself, that might be another interesting way to use it. Okay, I'll give you a story that could have really gone wrong. So for Pulse, for every customer meeting that we had, we have our leaders come and join us.

And so we need to create a prep doc. So this prep doc skill was automatically created and suddenly in one folder, we had like this bunch of AI generated prep docs. And I'm like, okay, cool, prep docs created, all good. Then I open up one and I'm like, this is nonsense.

Then I open up the second one, it's the repeat of the nonsense that happened in the first one. Somewhere something went wrong. And I was able to get back to the team and say, you know, all the prep docs have this kind of thing. They fixed it, they sent it back.

And so I think the key pattern, as you can see, all of us are echoing here, is our job is not going away. AI is up leveling us. It's making us do higher value tasks. But at the same time, we need, our judgment is very, very important.

Our skills are important. And actually, Justin mentioned something that's also important is I need to know my customer. I need to know my product. Both of those are super important.

Do I need to know like how a certain rule need to be configured and you know, what data designer needs to be created? No, I don't need to. But I still need to understand what can my product do and what it cannot do. Those are table stakes, cannot move away from them.

So just, you wanna add something? I do wanna add something. So it's, I found with AI, it's not necessarily just knowing your product. As part of the account inspection I have, like I said, we have gone for video recording.

We have, we've used Notion and Granola for meeting recordings, things like that. So what I've done is take all of those and say like, what is Kapanah like? How does she like to be talked to? How does, how does she like her information delivered to or like what level of frustration or satisfaction does she have?

So you can take a look at those like abstract qualities that give you maybe an indication that you wouldn't get just from looking at numbers. Like I facilitated a circle of success yesterday and it was green customers that churn. And we found a lot of that is, it looks great on paper. They're using your product.

They're using it well, but when you look at the timeline entries, it's a lot of frustration, a lot of support tickets. You know, just not easy to use. So they're spitting things out, but they're frustrated at the same time. So it can make your health score look good, but the relationship is actually bad.

Yeah, that's a great point too. How are we doing on time, Katie? We good? You have a few minutes here?

Okay, awesome. Just saying that if you do have questions, please continue to put them in Slido. We'll pull all of them out and we'll do a blog post on our community. So we'll all kind of put the answers in and we'll definitely answer all your questions.

Okay, this is an interesting one. Do you feel the traditional QBR format is dying? Will AI change how QBRs are delivered to customers? I'll take this for a bit, is because two pulses ago, I presented on the stage how EBRs are getting transformed.

EBR, QBR, same thing. EBR is just the executive business review, but basically we're talking about business review. And I talked about how business review was going to get transformed. Two years down the line is the same question.

We are still sticking with the QBR concept. And what I feel here is it is a business review. A business review is talking to your customer and getting their understanding of are they still seeing value? This is where the state of the product is, the relationship is, and are they still seeing value?

So I feel like the concept is very valid. How it is going to be done and how it is going to be delivered will definitely change. You guys wanted to say something on this? I don't necessarily think it's dying, so to speak.

It's just making it easier to put together and to send it out, well, easier to put together in the sense that you have now all of these AI tools to help you to build the information that you would have spent hours upon hours putting it together. And for that reason, yes, that is changing because it's making your job easier to put this together. And it's historically been a very time-consuming task. And I do think, I mean, will AI change the way it's delivered?

Potentially, if you want to automate it, but that might depend on the customer segment you serve. It would obviously be great to send out a QBR digitally for your digital segment. If you're in like a mid-market segment, yes, you might want to send it out digitally, but chances are you're a one-to-one CSM, but in our dedicated and strategic segment, we would never probably send out a QBR deck just automatically. Would it be great to do?

No, but each customer is going to be slightly different and you do need to have oversight before you just send it out automatically. The only thing I'd add there is I think it's going to get simpler. I think taking in too much information, I think everyone's moving so fast. And so I can see the deck shrinking in terms of the amount of information, like the amount of information you're including, but I think to Kalpana's point, the conversation is key there.

And so I think in some way, you need to have that conversation. So QBR is a great way to facilitate it. So I think that's direction it might go. Sounds like a plan.

If you don't want to say anything, you'll take a couple more questions. All right, okay. So this one is what recommendations would you have for a brand new Gainsight customer who's in the midst of their implementation and wasn't using a CSP prior? Wow, what a great question.

Would you raise your hand if you don't mind? Okay, come talk to us afterwards, but we'll try and kind of give you a very quick answer here. So I think one of the things I would like to say is if you already have a CS motion in place in the organization, and you're simply getting a CSP right now, start with the basic foundation, but don't just stop there because AI has already transformed many of the ways that we are doing things, right? I'm not putting a manual timeline note anymore.

The CTAs that are being created to me, I'm not going and looking it up in my cockpit. I'm actually pulling all of that up in Claude, having Claude tell me what to do about it, and then simply posting it, right? So the way we are handling these basic things is changing, but I think it is, it's like, when you learn to ride a bike, you do have the training wheels, right? And you take the training wheels after a while when you get that motion.

It's a very simple thing like that. And after that, so I would say that you are in a really good place that you have AI already available to you. So start with the basics, get your muscle memory in place, but don't take too long to move to your AI transformation for your CSMs. Yeah, and I would say, I mean, the foundation to a good implementation is good data.

So making sure you have the right data, because that's essentially going to facilitate the information that is leveraged by the AI tool of your choice. So making sure you have the telemetry data, and I know that's a challenge for a lot of customers, but that is the foundation clean contact data, hygiene. Also, I know a challenge for customers, but if you can start off with those at the baseline, you'll be set up for success long-term. Lovely, that's a really good point.

The only thing I'd add there is that it can get complicated really fast if you try to do everything at once. And so starting small and understanding what your end state or what your goal is in 60 days, 90 days, and a year from now, because that really can help you work backwards in terms of where you want to prioritize. Because if you throw too much out there at your CSMs, they'll get overwhelmed and then change management. It's going to be really, really difficult.

So that's going to be key. And then also making sure that you're enabling your CSMs properly with the right workflows and what's in it for them is going to be really key when you go live. That's a really good point. Anything you want to add, Justin?

Justin Arquita totally stole my answer. But I would say treat it like you would treat a customer. So crawl, walk, run. Don't do too much too soon.

Release it to your users in a way where they won't get frustrated because nobody likes change. So your users aren't any different. So as soon as you lose faith, you lose trust, things become too difficult. That's where the usage starts going down.

So I would say just start a few really simple procedures and processes that are quick wins to build up that trust and then iterate on that. Yeah, I think that's a really good point as well. Your processes need to be defined. If you don't have a process in place and you're trying, you could use AI until Kingdom come, but it's not gonna work.

So definitely have your data in place, as Nicole was saying, and then also make sure your processes in place. And then the tooling comes after. So that's basically, and I'd like to kind of just wrap up right now. So just a few things that probably that came up during our conversation and just wanted to talk about that.

One is, I'll start from the back, is that AI actually amplifies the good fundamentals you already put in place. It doesn't replace them. The second is clean data. The clean data is about as important before or after.

The other thing is you don't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be like everything is in place day one, and it is going to be like that. It's not a one and done. It is going to iterate.

So don't just worry, don't get caught up with that. The other piece was that the CS role is not disappearing. 100%. We are still here, and we hope to be here for a while.

How is it gonna be in three years? I can't say, but today and for the near future, we definitely have a very important role to play. And then, of course, we're all figuring it out together. So trust me, we don't have all the answers.

I don't believe anybody, and everybody you heard about here, how much ever they may have AI with them, probably doesn't have the answer. Google transformers guys also don't have the answer. So we're all figuring it out, and the interesting one that I've recently heard is that we're just not building a plane while we are flying it. We're actually manufacturing the parts to build the plane, to fly the plane.

So that's where we are at. With that, I really wanna thank everybody in the room. Thank you for coming. I know we are either between you and your flight, or you and kicking off your shoes and having your next drink.

Or happy hour. But yeah, happy hour, that's right. So thank you so much for coming, and we're gonna be here, catch us on LinkedIn, catch us on, I don't think the Pulse app is gonna be up here, but we'll be outside for a little bit, and we'd love to kinda continue the conversation. (audience applauding)