Opening Keynote: Charting the Future of Retention

I built something they love and I can't take care of them. 80% of my customers, 20% of my revenue. They keep telling me AI will fix this. Can gainsight help us here, Chuck?

It's the oldest problem in SaaS. Nobody's ever solved it. A small fortune walking out the door every year. Every business.

And there's a solution. They call it the long tail treasure. There's a legend that goes back generations, and nobody's ever come back with it. This is nuts.

So we're headed south to This isn't air, this is soup. The treasure isn't lost. It's just waiting to be found. Nobody's come back with a long tail treasure, Chuck.

If we don't bring it back, nobody will. It's impossible. We're doing this. Where are we, Ori?

A big jungle. We're not the first. We are hopelessly lost. You're telling me in 2026 nobody brought a G?

Can you help us find. Doesn't want to be found. It wants to be free. Who's it for?

The long tail. Keep away for the long T. I'd rather be on a zoom with Legal right now. For every enterprise customer, there are a hundred in the long tail and nobody's ever reached them.

So we send something that can. Hey. Hey. What took you guys so long?

We've got work to do. Frame. What are you wearing, dude? Meow.

Hold on. Hold on. You have WI fi up here. Please welcome to the stage Gainsite Chief Executive officer, Chuck Ganapathi.

Every great civilization reaches a moment where the path forward disappears. The Mayans called it a cycle. And every great expedition begins the same way. You're standing at the edge of something vast.

The path ahead is not clear, even dark. And all you can hear is what everyone behind you is telling you. And every great explorer in history had the same choice to make. Listen to the noise or go deeper.

Let's talk about the noise right now, because it's loud. Every analyst report, every conference keynote, every LinkedIn post is telling the people who built and sustained this industry that their best days are behind them. Some of this is real. Change is needed and it's happening.

But here's what we can learn from studying every major technology revolution in human history. Each of these new advancements, from fire to the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution, always had its critics. They were convinced that this new technology would destroy humanity. And they were always wrong.

We've been here before. Every generation has faced its own version of the. This changes everything. And not in A good way.

Every major technological revolution begins the same way. Confusion, skepticism, fear. But also excitement, possibility. So each of us has a choice to make on which of these feelings we lean into when the world starts changing faster than people can fully understand.

There are two groups that emerge, the critics. And then there are the explorers. Let's look at the industrial revolution. Many believed that mechanization would destroy work.

It would destabilize society and threaten human existence itself. The luddites. They were 19th century English textile workers. You know, they resisted the rise of automated machines, entirely convinced that this new technology would do more harm than good.

At the same time, another group of people began asking a different question. Not how do we stop this? But what could this become? James Watt and his contemporaries were explorers.

They were experimenting with entirely new ways to extend human capability. And their explorations led to new inventions that reshaped human civilization. The steam engine factories, industrial automation, modern manufacturing. Now, let's fast forward to the Internet revolution.

History repeated itself. The same divide emerged. The critics believed that the Internet was overhyped, you know, unsafe, and they just dismissed it as a fad. Perhaps the most infamous example of this was a 1995 Newsweek article arguing that the Internet would never meaningfully transform commerce or communication.

Seventeen years later, that same magazine seized print publication and moved exclusively online. And yet, while many dismissed the Internet, others explored entrepreneurs, engineers, creators. They began building toward a future they couldn't fully see yet. And in the early days of the Internet revolution, explorers like Steve Jobs saw something that most people didn't understand back then.

He believed that computers would evolve beyond computation and become platforms for communication, connection, and participation. From those explorations came entirely new economies, entirely new ways for people to create value. YouTube, Shopify, TikTok. They make it possible for anyone to turn creativity, expertise, and entrepreneurship into real businesses, A reality humans could have never imagined before.

The Internet. So here we are again, standing at the beginning of humanity's next defining moment. The intelligence revolution, fueled by the big breakthroughs in AI in recent years. And just as history has taught us, the future isn't something we can see yet, fully imagine yet.

The map is still blank, and we can't predict what this year or next year might look like. We can't even predict next week. And that new level of uncertainty is exactly what makes this moment feel both uncomfortable and important. And at this moment, we all have an urgent choice to make.

Are you going to be a critic, or are you going to be an explorer? We see the critics all around us now. College graduates booing their Commencement speakers when they promote AI people protesting data center buildouts in their city. And you know what?

I have a lot of empathy for the critics. They aren't just modern day Luddites. They're college graduates, knowledge workers, community members who are genuinely worried about their livelihood and their way of life. Our leaders aren't helping either.

We have AI doomers on one end who think the future of humanity is doomed and is in danger. And then on the other hand, we have AI zoomers who think AGI will create utopia. And even in this room, I know some of you have similar concerns. The pace of advancement in AI only adds to the pressure you're already feeling.

Improve, Grr. Reduce cost scale, impact without adding headcount. We all feel it. That growing pressure for transformation is forcing all of us to rethink what customer success really means.

Who should own renewals? Should we merge CSMs and AMs and put them on a quota? Or should I go out and hire a bunch of forward deployed engineers, or FTEs as they're called, which is the hottest job in Silicon Valley right now? Like Indiana Jones running from the Boulder, it can feel insurmountable, impossible even.

And as we navigate this age of AI experimentation, there will be more questions than answers. We need to prioritize agility and curiosity over certainty, hypotheses over long held beliefs. And at Gainsight, we see our role no differently from how we saw it when we started a decade and a half ago. Make that exploration easier, faster, and more human friendly for the entire community.

Because the fact remains that somewhere inside of every B2B company on the planet, someone is responsible for making sure that customers get value and they grow with you. Retention will always be the job, regardless of specific titles or operating models. And the work of retention doesn't disappear. What is changing is the how.

How those outcomes are delivered. AI is accelerating that shift faster than any technology revolution before it. Which leads us to the one fundamental question that everyone in this room is thinking about. The same question your CEO, your cfo, your board of directors are asking you.

How do I use agentic AI to drive higher retention? This is the question we'll answer very clearly over the next two days. As explorers in the intelligence revolution, we see the market trying to answer that question with a choice. Build versus buy.

You are forced to choose between the freedom and the pain of vibe coding something from scratch, or the shackles of inflexible software and just learn to live within its At Gainsight, we think that framing is fundamentally flawed because the future is not build or buy. That's a false choice. It's build and buy. Have your cake and eat it too.

Buy the foundation you need for security, governance, pre built data models, enterprise scale, reliability, all available out of the box. And then build the agentic workflows that are unique to your business on top of that foundation. Today we'll show you how you can move faster with Gainsight by converging both agentic paths, giving you the best of both worlds. Let's welcome two of our expedition leaders at Gainsight.

Just show us the way. Please welcome to the stage Ori Entus and Erica Kuhl. You just heard Chuck challenge us all to be explorers and that is exactly what Orey and I are going to do. We're going to explore and guide you through where Gainsight can be the best of delivering best of both worlds software that you can buy and software that you can build yourself.

Now you could fib code your own community, your own academy, your own csp. You could do it in a weekend. You can experiment faster than ever before. And for those of you explorers in the room, you know just how exciting this is until that experiment touches a customer.

Because once software touches a real customer, a real workflow, a real renewal, things get a little dicey. Infrastructure, permissions, governance, maintenance, integrations and AI doesn't make the hard enterprise stuff go away, but it does make the building new workflows and customizations a lot more easy. And that doesn't factor in the cost of maintaining the software that you build, assuming you can deploy it at all. Traditional software nails a few use cases really, really well.

But your business is one of a kind. It doesn't ever work with one size fits all. So when something doesn't come out of the box, professional services and forward deployed engineers should not be your only choice. So we built differently.

Gainsight is a foundation, something that you can still build on, you can extend and make it entirely your own. So that's how we're bringing Build and Buy together and guiding you to that retention treasure. So we've identified the entire Gainsight platform. Now you have the flexibility to build and experiment with AI tools to bring that strategy to life.

That was just not possible before. But before I dive into the how, I want to bring on stage someone who's been thinking deeply about how to build on Gainsight with agentic tools at enterprise scale. Please welcome Kim Humphrey, VP of Customer Success at IBM. Kim, welcome to Pulse.

Well, thank you and great to be here. And as you probably noticed, there's a little bit of an adventure theme going on here. I usually walk around with my map carrier. But before we start talking about agents, AI and enterprise scale, if you were to go on an adventure expedition, what would be that one device or tool you'd want to take with you?

I did watch the video ahead of time and I will say that I'm not bringing a gps, but I am bringing a compass. But it's not just any compass. My compass is going to, yes, lead the direction and tell me which way to go, but it's going to warn me before the floor falls out, before the boulder is coming, before the poison darts start flying. It's also going to make the path so simple, it's going to remove hills and it might actually help me hit my step goal too.

There you go. Steps in the jungle. Okay. There's a lot of conversation right now around custom AI built apps and vibe coding.

IBM has, you know, world class AI engineering capabilities, including Watsonics. As you redesign cs, your CS operations, how did you decide, you know, which capabilities to build and which to, you know, build internally and which to invest or accelerate through ecosystems and platforms? Yeah, so we absolutely could have built it ourselves. We've got the engineering capability, we've got the technology, and we've got platforms like WatsonX.

But really the question wasn't should we build it, but what really uniquely differentiates us at IBM to be able to accelerate where it makes sense and how we accelerate value. Everyone in this room knows customer success is a discipline with its own operating model, data semantics, and over a decade of hard won learnings. Gainsight brings very specific industry expertise. That is how all of us scale customer success organizations.

Things like health scoring, adoption signals, renewal motions, predictive workflows, and the things really only our CSOP folks really love around scale and governance. Rather than spending cycles relearning those patterns, we chose to build on top of them. Our approach was intentional. Leverage Gainsight's customer success innovation as a foundation and then integrate, extend and differentiate using IBM's capabilities.

This has let us move faster, focus our efforts where it creates the most value, and ultimately deliver stronger outcomes for both our clients and our teams. Absolutely. So once you decided to lean into Gainsight at the foundation, how did you actually extend the intelligence across the broader organization? Yeah, this was a fun one because our CSMs love gainsight.

They live their day to day. I don't know if any of you have experienced this, where your sellers, account teams or others around your company kind of almost talk about it like they're living in salesforce and it's like that mythical thing that sits over there that they don't actually see and don't actually know what's in there. So for a long time our operating models were siloed. We selected a subset of data that was then replicated between Gainsight and Salesforce.

Now that led to every day hearing one of two comments. The first came from our csms. The dashboard isn't right. Reality is, it's not that the dashboard in Salesforce was wrong.

It's that they realized five minutes before the meeting they'd forgotten to make an update. They made the update and it hadn't had time to work through the entire data pipeline in order to show up on the dashboard. The second was from everyone else that wasn't in customer success that didn't have access to Gainsight. They would almost talk with this disdain about this mythical thing called Gainsight and the insights that were locked away on it that only CSMs had access to.

The reality there is that they just wanted to be participating and collaborating with the client across the full lifecycle. So the question became how do we unlock the value of the post sales insights across our entire broader organization? After all, an account plan that doesn't take into account support trends, adoption insights, renewal risks, usage signals probably needs some work. So the focus became seamlessly embedding those insights where people work.

The goal was one interface and one experience that was used by our entire organization across the full sales life cycle. Gainsight's ability to live directly natively within Salesforce unlocked that and accelerated our ability to achieve those outcomes and let customer success not be a siloed organization, but part of the broader ecosystem. And when we think about AI and kind of the future operating model, we mentioned WatsonX earlier. IBM has actually built something with WatsonX on top of Gainsight.

Can you share a little bit with the audience? Yeah, absolutely. This is where for us it really comes together with this build and buy story. There are three themes that I'll hit on around WatsonX.

The first, as Ori mentioned, is in our high touch motion, we built an agent called deployit that has indexed information from Gainsight and a number of other sources we have available to us internally. Not only can this agent answer questions which all of us have gotten very used to in day to day life, it will also help build a success plan. That success plan will also have customized personalized playbooks with expected dates. It can build a get well plan.

It can use the information available in order to integrate and provide a better together story and Help position your technology with the broader ecosystem. A client has put that together and after a few prompts be able to submit it directly into Gainsight. No copying and pasting, no moving that data. What used to take a significant manual effort is now done in moments and it's stored in the system of record being gainsight.

The second is in our scale motion where we're using WatsonX to help scale the workflow that is anchored with Journey Orchestrator. Things like being able to get the right action and the right follow up to the right CSM since they're not directly assigned or using IBM Bob to uncover patterns we wouldn't even otherwise have identified. And finally is one of the things I'm most excited about is we've been able to use DeployIt and integrate it in with the broader agent ecosystem at IBM called Ask Sales. Not only was this agent that was designed for our customer success organization available to our CSMs, it is now available to the entire sales organization.

So when they engage with it, it will sometimes point them to pricing and all sorts of sales questions, but it will also expand the ability to get the CS motion across the life cycle. Now go back to an example around the account plan and think about the power that is if your client has 200 products and you're trying to summarize how that should feed into all the activity, all the deployment motions, how that automatically feeds into an account plan without the team having to go read for hours. So we're just starting to scratch the surface on the use cases this unlocks, but this is what Connected Intelligence actually looks like. Gainsight is the trusted source.

WatsonX is where we build the custom experience on top of the and neither one can do it alone. That's really amazing examples that we can all learn from. For everyone here trying, there are a lot of, you know, obviously CS folks and managers in the audience like that are trying to navigate this shift. You know, what kind of advice can you give them how to kick this off and start it?

Yeah, I think one of the most exciting things is the barrier to innovation has never been lower. You don't need perfect data, you don't need to know how to build all sorts of custom models. You don't actually need to know how to code all that well with things like IBM Bob and Claude code and all that kind of all those technologies. What you need is momentum and so give your teams the permission to test, learn and apply AI in real workflows.

I'm going to tell you from experience, 80% of them go nowhere it's the 20% that go a long ways. And this isn't a siloed exercise. So one of the things that we learned early on is that all of the use cases that we focused on that were just CS use cases, they were helpful, but they missed the entire boat. They've missed unlocking the end to end life cycle.

So think about where those handoffs are. Think about where those moments are, where you have to cross organizational boundaries or where you cross roles. How do you build that experience and leverage AI to get rid of the word handoff? But this is something that continuously evolves as you learn more about your customers, about your data, and frankly about your own operating model.

So the folks who will win aren't waiting for the certainty of what's the right approach. They're creating learning loops, they're empowering their teams, they're celebrating the Mrs. And they're improving in every iteration. So the biggest risk isn't getting it wrong.

It's not starting and finding those allies in other roles that are helping you accelerate and get to those outcomes. I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much for coming today and sharing with everyone here. Thanks a lot.

Absolutely. So IBM just shared how important Salesforce is to their customer ecosystem. What Kim described is exactly where the power lies, leveraging Gainsight with the tools that you're already using. But we're going even further today.

I'm excited to preview for the first time here at Pulse that Gainsight is one of the first companies to build an MCP connector to Salesforce agentforce. And this will be live from day one on the agent exchange. This is a deliberate bet we are making together on the future of revenue teams. And speaking of mcp, we recently launched MCP support for Gainsight and Staircase.

And the response has been incredible. To date, customers have run more than 175,000 queries, triggering over 96,000 prompts across the game site data. Things like run me a portfolio health report broken down by Risk or build me a QBR deck with my customers milestones. Now, if you're new to mcp, we built an incredible site of use cases so you can scan the QR code and get started, get inspirations, prompts and skills and wait.

The MC momentum does not stop there. We're also so excited to announce MCP servers for Skilljar, for Community and px, making it easier to build automated digital customer experiences for your customers. You're going to hear. Oh yes, but you're going to hear all about that in detail tomorrow at the product keynote, so don't miss it.

We're also excited. More announcements to announce Command line interface for customer success CLI gives agents and developers structured, efficient ways to access Gainsight right directly inside Gainsight without any UI needed. Mcp, cli, Salesforce the message is the same. Gainsight context and Insights should work wherever you are.

And that customer context is what makes all this so important. When you choose Gainsight, you're not just getting a dashboard with a generic AI bolted on. You're getting models that understand what a stakeholder change means to churn risk, what a drop in usage looks like if it's a training problem or, you know, a value challenge, and what a good handoff looks like in enterprise versus SMB. This is what our MCP integrations are running on, what these CLI automations draw from, and what your sales reps see when Gainsight surfaces recommendation and Insights directly in their workflow.

Now, MCP and CLI are very powerful when you're connecting Gainsight to other tools that you already use. But what about when that workflow you want to build is a Gainsight workflow running in the platform that needs to understand your CTAs and success plans. It needs to work operate under your governance. How many times have you heard your admin say, if Gainsight can only do this, if I could only build this agent, if I could only customize this workflow, if I could only have my community look like this.

Now, the reason all these Agentic tools exploded is simple. People can now build exactly what they want without having to wait on their vendor's roadmap. Tools like Claude and Cursor are excellent for building anything. But post sales teams don't just need to build anything.

You need something that understands your customers and your systems. You need something that's built on customer success context. So our team started thinking, what if we could bring that same prompt to code capability inside Gainsight? What if you could innovate using AI that's preloaded with your success plans and your Playbooks?

What if you could lean on the same security access control that is bolted already into Gainsight without you having to recreate them? And what if you could scale from a single user on their laptop to multiple users running multiple workflows across your team? So today we're announcing the Gainsight Agent Studio powered by Claude. That flexibility and creativity you've experienced with tools like Claude, now running directly natively inside Gainsight Agent Studio isn't just some generic assistant.

It's where you build your workflows your CS specific to your accounts, to your data and to your day. Now, because it lives inside Gainsight, it already knows everything it needs to. So you can automate your workflows really quickly. For example a pre meeting prep or a post call follow up.

You can build your own dashboards that highlight your priorities and surface signals that are important to you. You can even create your own layouts, your own page layouts, for example, for success plans that need to be unique to your business. And this is not parked in a roadmap or available in a few weeks. It's actually live now.

But your CS teams are not the only teams that are building. Your digital teams are the ones building those experiences your customers, your users see and use every single day. And those experiences should feel polished, they should carry your brand and they should definitely not be generic. That's why we're excited to announce the developer studio for Gainsight Customer Communities.

You can now vibe code community experiences with Claude and GitHub that look and feel exactly the way you want. Do you want a countdown for your next user conference? Do you need a template showing how customers use your product? Or do you want members to leave you G2 Reviews all is available right now in Community and coming soon to Skilljar.

And now, exciting as all of this is, and this flexibility is, building the workflow isn't the hard part. It's maintaining it and running reliably at scale. That's the tough part. And many of you in the audience, you want to build sophisticated customizations on top of Gainsight and CLI and now Agent Studio and MCP make all of that possible and much, much easier.

But other teams don't want to start from scratch. They want agents they could use out of the box in Gainsight, the product they use every single day. You shouldn't have to choose between customizations that you can't manage and the out of the box software that doesn't really meet your business needs. So with Gainsight, you don't have to.

You can do both. We've built a whole set of agents that are pre built with AI capabilities, specifically with the workflows of the people in this room. These aren't general agents, they're agents preloaded with over 15 years of gainsight experience. First Expansion Analyst IT services upsell and cross sell opportunities hiding in your customer communications.

It tells you what is most likely to close, who has budget, and what is your next best recommended action on what has worked before. Risk Analyst. It turns risk signals into actionable recommendations that your team can act and align on quicker. Now customers have been able to align and identify risk three months earlier and take action before they've lost that renewal moderation agent.

It automatically flags, approves and identifies harmful content end users based on your community's code of conduct. So your team can spend a lot less time policing the community and a lot more time actually engaging in the community. The adoption agent. It helps you tackle one of the trickiest problems in customer success, which is spotting when product usage starts to drop and being able to create personalized outreach to be able to guide them back to the usage of your product and get value.

Aitutor it lives directly in your academy. It's your learner study buddy and it's telling you answering questions, it's telling you your next lesson and it's your real time coach making certain that a learner never loses any momentum. And finally, the handoff agent. It gives teams an instant snapshot of a brand new account, key stakeholders, goals, success metrics and potential red flags, allowing you to have a real authentic and great conversation on day one.

Now all of these agents, they're available for you today and when you pair them with the power of building with mcp CLI Agent Studio, it's finally possible to capture that treasure in retention. Now our next guest is living proof of all of this. Zendesk uses Gainsight as a foundation of its authentic strategy. So I would please help us welcome chief customer officer of Zendesk, Colin Murphy to the stage.

Hello. How are you? Good, how are you, Stan? Yeah, right there.

It's great. We're over here. Perfect. Hi everybody.

All right, Colin, before we get started, you know, it's not a normal wear, you know, we're all being explorers here today. It kind of looks more like non Indiana Jones for you, you know, but with the expedition vibe, I have to ask, tell me, what's your most adventurous trip you've taken? Well, I would say that I am definitely a child of the 80s and so anyone who knows me knows that I really love movies. So I do appreciate the Indiana Jones reference.

I'm not necessarily an exotic traveler. I've probably been close to 40 countries. I've been to 49 US states. I think I will call out.

I don't know if it's adventurous, but my 50th state will be this summer and I'm looking forward to going to Hawaii. So I've saved the best, maybe for last. Amazing. Ever been to Hawaii?

Yeah, no, I'm very excited, very excited to go to Hawaii and be number 50 great. Well, Zendesk has a huge customer base, have a huge long tail. And what does it make most sense? You've been hearing about the build and the buy.

Tell us, what do you talk to your customers about when they're deciding this concept? Yeah, I mean this is definitely something that's top of mind for a lot of our customers. I mean there are teams that have strong technical capabilities and they're asking them, asking them themselves, why don't we just build it ourselves? Right.

And in the context of AI tooling and AI initiatives, that's understandable. People are experimenting, they're building, they're trying things very quickly. We are generally not trying to stop that because we know we can't stop it, but where we have the edge. Zendesk and the message to our customers is that we're 100% focused on service.

And in fact we just launched last week at our conference relate what we call the autonomous service workforce. And, and we just are reinforcing that. We are not trying to be the general purpose resolution platform. We are 100% focused on service related problems, not sales problems, not marketing problems and not R and D problems.

So while customers are doing a lot of experimenting, we reinforce that we're the best platform for solving their customer and employee problems. And there's a big difference between building something quickly and putting something in front of your customers at scale. And I think everyone knows, I think I heard you earlier. There's definitely an iceberg underneath all that.

It's compliance, it's security, it's administration, it's controls, it's governance. What happens if the person who builds your Claude leaves? I could go on and on. And so all that matters when you're building something that you're going to put in front of thousands of customers to handle tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of issues per per year.

So our message is definitely don't, not build and don't experiment. It's that you should use AI, you should experiment with AI. You should plug your company AI initiatives into our platform where it makes sense to do so, but trust our platform to do what it is built to do. And that's balancing AI and the human and the human element to most effectively resolve a customer's or employees problem.

Let us help you accelerate your journey on your automation, on your automation journey to 50, 60, 70, 80% plus automation. And so all of that said, with respect to gainsight, we're really excited about the best of both worlds where we can actually start building agentic workflows on Top of the foundation. We've already built on Gainsight CS with new innovations like mcp. We've also chosen Gainsight products to power our community and our academy for a reason.

These experiences are fundamental to how we scale and to how we reach our extensive customer base. And that experimenting comes at a great cost. Right. So we need our teams focused on delivering the Zendesk Resolution platform.

And we have a great partnership with Gainsight, trusting you all to manage the iceberg for us. Love it. Well, clearly we love that. And you mentioned that you're using Community and Skill Jar.

Tell us a little bit about how you're bringing and what the expectations are of bringing that to your customer base. Yeah, we're just, I think, across the board, we know that we need to up our game with, with how we approach our customers. So we need to continue to, of course, have the most innovative AI Forward Resolution platform possible. But we also need to make sure that we're investing heavily in how we actually show up to customers.

Right. And that manifests, manifests in the way our experts engage through, you know, customer success or through professional services or through support or through the renewals experience. But the customer's digital experience is so critical to complement that human engagement. So we use both skilljar and Gainsight Community to power education and community, and those are two core components of that digital experience.

We've been a Skilljar customer for close to 10 years. But let me focus on the latest decision that we've made, which is to go with Gainsight Community because it's very fresh. We made that decision last summer, early fall, and we replaced our old Community product, which had been out there for many years, with Gainsight. And we evaluated a number of vendors.

We did the whole thing. This was right as I was joining Zendesk, actually. And we ultimately chose Gainsight because of the power of the platform and the enterprise capability of the platform, but also because it was really, really easy to use. And I know that sounds cliche and kind of silly, but it's really important, especially when you don't have a lot of resources managing Community.

And so that combination was really important. So we went live with Community in April, just this past April, and thus far, the results are really, really encouraging. I'll spare you all of the nitty gritty stats, but I'll just say that 100% of our posts are now on the Community are all AI moderated. And that's really important because it allows our very precious community resources to be spending time, yes, moderating, but also focused on trying to continue to transform the community experience, which is really important.

And I promise that I didn't coordinate our keynote based on what he's saying here. No, I wrote that. It's genius. It's perfect.

I wrote that. It's really, really, really. So, you know, speaking of Relate, there was a conference that we jointly debuted something a community integration with Forethought. And this is a really strategic acquisition with Zendesk and made you earlier this year.

And I know that the fourth age is now living on your community, and it's actually living on our community. So can you talk about how this helps surface and bring relevant community content and education content to your users? Talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah.

So if a customer gets stuck inside a product, those moments matter and they add up and they may seem really, really small, but again, they accumulate and they add that sludge into the adoption process, and that ultimately affects customer confidence and. And ultimately it affects growth. Right. So with Forethought by Zendesk integrated into a community or integrated into an academy or an app, the customer can ask the question right there, get the guidance they're looking for, and then get back to work.

Because what really sets an agent like Forethought apart is the ability to converse with the customer until they receive an answer that they're confident in. Right? Because it's not just about deflection. I think that's really important.

It's not just about deflection. It's about and. Or just about automating things. It's about legitimately solving somebody's problem.

Right? So that's the kind of experience that customers really expect and what we really, really value at Zendesk, because retention is not only about the renewal experience, it's about all the moments that add up to that time where either customer keeps making progress or they get stuck. So if we can connect that entire customer experience, as we're doing with our agentic technology and the Agenta capabilities and Gainsights platform, we can help customers get value faster and reduce the friction that again creates that sludge that slows growth. Because we don't want to do that.

Right? We want customers to be successful, and we want customers. We want to be able to grow as customers grow as well. The teams at Gainsight and the teams at Zendesk did such an incredible collaboration, bringing that to life very fast for Relate.

And you're going to hear more about that tomorrow in the keynote. So excited to hear that, but such an exciting time. All right, last question. You are facing this As a chief customer officer yourself, you're trying to decide internally how do I.

What do I build, what do I buy? And so how are you facing that internally? How are you making those own decisions as you're as actually a chief community? Yeah.

Yeah, this is a good question. It's something that I'm grappling with on a daily basis. I was talking to Kim back there. It sounds like she's got everything all figured out, so I got to spend more time with her.

Seriously. But I'm constantly asking myself, how do we make sure that we're moving at the right speed? Because I know there are efficiency and effectiveness gains that we should be taking advantage of. There are days when I feel really, really good that I feel like we're on the right side of the curve.

Then there are other days where I feel like we're not on the right side of the curve and I feel like I'm behind. I mean, on the support side, we actually use our Zendesk AI agent called Zeah. And I feel like that's a really good example of us being on the right side of the curve. But in general, I think the point I want to get across is there are days when I feel really good and I feel like I'm really good at my job.

And there are also days where I feel like I'm not so good at my job, admittedly. So what we are asking ourselves is what actually helps us show up better for customers? Where should we build and leverage our own tech because it is unique to us? And then where should we use a platform like Gainsight because it helps accelerate what we're trying to do as a broader CX organization?

Because our customers really don't care where they're getting an answer from. They care that they get what they need when they need it, with the least amount of friction as possible. And so that concept is at the center of how we're advancing our own use of AI within. Within Zendesk and within the CX organization in Zendesk.

Whether it be to drive the right customer success outcomes, whether it's to drive the best professional services engagements, the most frictionless renewals process, or the best support experience. It's awesome. You know, I love that framing, obviously, and it's. It's really gets to the heart of what we were talking about here.

The future is not companies ripping out everything that they built, then they're totally rebuilding from scratch. It's about building with the platforms, the intelligence and the ecosystem systems, and extending them all in smarter ways. So thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking and thank you for sharing with us.

Thanks for inviting me. All right, so so far today, we've explored build and buy paths that can help you chart your map to this intelligence revolution. Now, with Gainsight, you can deploy your agentix strategy quickly. With pre built agents, explore, customize in ways that were just not possible before.

And all this is focused on the single thing helping you accelerate your retention outcomes. Now, just a little while ago in that video at the beginning, we alluded to the mystery of the long tail, the treasure in the long tail. Now, if it's true, then there is more to explore. And for that, we're going to bring Chuck back on stage to tell you more about it.

Sam, How great was Kim Humphrey and Colin Murphy. Let's give them a huge round of applause. Everything Orey and Erica just shared, that is the imagined future. A future where you can quickly build and deploy your agentix strategy.

With Gainsight, that future is already here. But there's one more path worth exploring. A shortcut that leads to the unimagined future. It's a fundamentally different answer to the question, how do I use agentic AI to drive retention?

You know, SAS gave this industry a platform to track the work, to organize the process, to help humans execute. But now technology is expected to do more, to do more than simply support the outcome. It's actually expected to deliver the outcome itself. And that is what we mean by retention as a service.

Now, with the power of AI, Gainsight is ready to deliver an entirely different way to address the retention challenges. You all are facing a solution that goes beyond software alone, especially in the long tail of your customers. Your long tail is the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of accounts that no human is managing because the math doesn't work. The numbers are just too big, the contracts are too small, and those customers are quietly churning.

There's treasure in that long tail, but for most of us, it's out of reach. You know, some of you have tried solving this problem through traditional outsourcing with BPOs, but that's just all about finding the cheapest labor. It's labor arbitrage, not value creation. It's not how you treat every customer like your best customer.

And, you know, we had our own idea on how to solve this. Last year, on this very stage, we launched Atlas with the goal of automating your long tail renewals with our agents. And while the will was high, the way was harder. Companies immediately saw the opportunity because for the first time agents were, you know, they offered the promise of engaging your long tail at massive scale.

But we also learned something very important. Agents alone are not enough. Our learnings forced us to start asking a different set of questions. What happens if the data is not clean?

What if the company doesn't have the institutional knowledge or the at scale retention playbooks to teach our agents when there's no playbook for how agents and humans collaborate? Because neither humans nor agents can solve this alone, Scaling human coverage across a long tail will always be too expensive. Agents bring extraordinary scale. But without human guidance and the learning loops and the operational expertise, they will hit their limits too.

A future that allows you to treat every customer like your best is not about humans or agents. It's human expertise and agentic scale working together. Agents handling the personalization, the outreach. Humans providing the judgment, the oversight and the strategic intervention when the situation calls for it.

We are ready to go get that lost long tail treasure for you. Not with technology that you have to manage yourself. We are going to deliver the outcome for you. And for the first time in this category, you can hire Gainsight to do the work.

So today I am thrilled to announce that Atlas is transforming from Agentix software to an AI native service. You can now hire Gainsight to manage your long tail renewals. We'll partner with you to run those renewals end to end with our platform, our agents, our playbooks, and with our people. You get full transparency and control and we will deliver the outcome on your behalf.

Look, we've been your trusted partner in delivering the thought leadership, the software, the automation and the insights for many years. And now we're ready to go the extra mile to do the work for you, to deliver the outcome as a fully managed service. Focus your internal resources on your high touch customers and leave the long tail to us. You know, the most sophisticated companies are already starting to explore this because they know that this expedition will help them improve GRR and nrr.

They've invested in the Gainsight platform. They've tried outsourcing to BPOs, they've experimented with AI agents and they understand how Atlas drives human agent collaboration. To deliver long tail renewals. I want you to meet one of those explorers.

Please give a huge pulse welcome to the chief customer officer of Okta, Ed Daly. Thanks for having me. Moon, great to see you. Great to see you, Ed.

Why should I call you Indiana? Indy's fine. Indy's fine. I'll take that.

I like it. You call me Henry because I look like your dad already. All Right. Don't let the black hair fool you.

I might be as old as you. All right, good. So, Ed, thank you so much for joining us. It's a world class event, so I'm thrilled to be here.

Well, and you're a world class professional and leader, so thank you for joining us. I just have one question for you to start us off. You have built one of the most sophisticated CS organizations in the industry. And we were talking backstage about the pressure of retention.

Can you talk to us about what that pressure means to you and your team? Well, we've built it together, so we've been in business for over eight years. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Gainsight team. I think everyone in this room feels pressure. And before I get into any more detail, let me just share that.

And if you don't feel the pressure, you should be worried. If you do feel the pressure, that means what you do is important and somebody cares. So that's one, two is I think the pressure on customer success that I get from our board or our CEO that I work with our CS teams on has really evolved over time and it's expanded. It used to be just renewal rates and then we said, well, let's look at term lengths because we want to build a backlog, rpo, remaining performance obligations.

And then that's evolved into, well, we want growth, let's get drive nrr. So we need to add growth on top of that. And now the next discussions are how do we help change the company? Because no one in the SaaS world has more impact and a better insight into the customer base than customer success.

So that pressure is growing and expanding and it's great. I'd rather be in the game than watching it from the sidelines, much like you guys. Amazing. Amazing.

Well, listen, you've been an amazing customer for us and we're so thankful and we've learned so much from you and your team. You use pretty much every product in the Grainsight portfolio. What drove that investment and that commitment to the gainsight platform? Yeah, a couple things.

Let me explain a little bit about Okta. If you don't know us, we do about a little over 3 billion in revenue every year. We've got tens of thousands of customers. Our long tail is in the 10,000 customer range plus and it represents around $100 million of our business.

So it's material to what we do every day. So we use at Gainsight, we've been with you guys a long time. Not only the customer success piece, we use Skilljar, we use Staircase and Atlas as well, too, that you've talked about. So we're heavy users of all of those products and the core components as well, too.

So Journey Orchestrator will send over a million messages to our customers every year. With Journey Orchestrator, it'll kick off over 3,000 calls to action that we take action on and we measure and monitor and help customers be successful and of course, health scores and things like that. So, yeah, we're end to end on Gainsight. And a couple of reasons we are.

One is the obvious. It's roi. If we couldn't deliver an ROI to our business and improve NRR and renewal rates, which have all moved up close to 10% on each of those key metrics over the past couple years, we wouldn't be here together. So I wouldn't have a job either then.

The second thing I think is really important that we don't talk a lot about is there's a constant pressure. You guys talked about earlier as well, is moving fast. And we need to move fast. At Okta, everyone needs to move fast.

We never feel like we're moving fast enough. And Gainsight gives us the ability to move fast because if we try to build it all ourselves, it would take a really long time. I want our engineers building access management and security software. I don't want us building.

You don't want them vibe coding as customer success platform? Yeah, yeah. And then exposing our customer data to customers. We wouldn't want that.

Yeah, that's bad PR. Then I'd be working weekends and nights 24 by 7 with you, of course. So the second it's not only ROI, but it's really our ability to make move fast. And you help us do that.

I mean, ATLAS is a great example of our ability to move fast. Could we build our own AI agents? Absolutely. We work with thousands of customers helping them secure their own AI agents.

So us understanding how to build them is there. But you give us the ecosystem integration. It's one platform. Your ATLAS agents.

We call it Oliver, by the way. I want to call it Chuck. Because if we call it Chuck, you'd really make sure it was the most smart, most genius AI agent out there, wouldn't you? We'll try.

We'll try. I'm going to work out with my team. Where's my team? Help me out with that.

There you go. So it's that integrated platform so that I can look at just taking that long tail of business and figuring out what our strategy is and what we need to do. You help us make That a reality with not only the software, but we currently work with a business process outsourcer. Think of it like an outsourced call center.

And today I'm a general contractor. I don't want to be a general contractor. We need to figure out that solution together. I'm looking forward to doing that.

So you mentioned you're working with an outsourcer. Tell us about that experience and what are the pain points you faced in the long tail? Yeah, so I gave you some of the stats on how big the long tail is for Octa. Let me give you a story if I could.

Can I share a story with you? Of course. Imagine being a customer and you're counting on Okta securing your employees access to applications, securing your customers access applications. And if it doesn't work, if Okta doesn't work, your customers can't transact business online, your employees can't wake up and answer emails online.

So it's mission critical. It's a mission critical piece of software and solution that we provide our customers today. So if you're a customer on the long end, his name is John P. He's an IT director for a regional bank in Washington.

He's in our auto renew program. And what that is is customers will take him through a whole digital process today where John gets an email 120 days in advance. Here's what you own, here's the value you're getting, here's what you're using and not using. Here are the opportunities.

In 90 days he gets another message. We got an upcoming renewal. Let's talk about or think about what you're using, what you're not using, what new licenses you might need. And that just goes right on down to T minus 0 or the renewal date.

So John, real story recently said, well, he responded to this digital campaign and he said, well, I would like to add more licenses, another $10,000 of licenses. Well, our algorithms and templates and the manual process and it's very good, by the way. So great job to my team on this. Wasn't able to respond.

So John's question kicks off a ticket to our outsourcing agents. They have no context, they don't know what's happening. We've cost arbitraged and moved that to really low cost places. So John has to get on a call or exchange emails with his agent and it just goes on and on and on.

Well, that's one interaction. Second interaction, John says, great, why don't you send me a quote, give me two options, three year, one Year. Let me add some more licenses here. Again, it kicks off another set of another sequence of messages with the outsourced agent without context because it goes to a different agent as well.

We need to integrate this so John can have one discussion. It happens very quickly. He wants to buy and the longer we wait, the less probable it is he's going to buy. Context.

That's the magic word here. Context is the magic word. And Atlas and the agent Oliver has connectivity into all the customer data for John P. And Atlas can answer all those things right away.

That is super excited about it. Such a great example. Thank you for going into that level of detail. Any last words of wisdom for our audience in the room?

Well, a couple things. One is cover the long tail. We have customers who do over $20 million a year with us, and we have customers who do $1,000 a year with us. And as I mentioned, the long tail is really important financially to optimize what we deliver back to the business.

So you can do all of it. And when you get to a certain point of GRR or nrr percent, you're going to need to look at optimizing all of your cohorts or segments in your customer base. So long tail is important. You need to act on that.

The second of all is AI, and you talked a little bit about it. Detractors versus explorers. Critics of the explorers. That's right, we're explorers.

Like an explorer. I'm dressed like a critic, but I need some help from someone who can help me dress better. But I know from experience that AI, it feels like a risk, but it's really not one. You gotta secure it.

So let's set that aside. Making sure that agent cannot take data and share it to the wrong customer or misinterpret information information and send the wrong quote to the wrong customer. Super important not to let that happen. So securing agents is important, but the risk that AI agents play, as we found, is it's actually created a lot of new jobs for folks in our team.

When we've moved, literally in the last six months, dozens of people from one organization where AI has helped us become much more efficient to brand new jobs. They've helped us scale and increase and accelerate our AI journey. And the last thing I'll just say is, look, take action. As I mentioned, we work with thousands of companies about how to secure their AI agents.

So we're very involved in their roadmaps. And the customers who are making progress fast are the ones who will get it 80% right or they'll pick a use case and start to execute. The customers who've been thinking about this for two years and haven't made progress in a material way are the ones who keep planning, keep piloting and keep analyzing. So take action.

And the last thing retention has to be led. Chuck can't just reactively manage it, so jump in front of it. Amazing. Thank you so much Ed.

Good to see you man. Good to see you. Great event. Ed Daly.

What Ed just described that the shift from managing software versus the outcome being delivered to you is not an okta story. It's not a Gainsight story, it's actually a market story. The most forward thinking companies in the world are already restructuring around the outcome rather than the org chart. And the most credible voices and the most consequential actors in the industry are all pointing at the same thing at the same time.

Earlier this year, Jake Saper at Emergence Capital, one of the most revered venture capital firms in the world, published a framework to name and explain this phenomenon and this categorical shift. He calls it AI Native services or aims. His framework for what makes a great AI native company comes down to three things. Domain expertise, technology platform, and you guessed it, a willingness to own the outcome.

At Gainsight, we've been working with our customers, all of you running adoption playbooks, managing retention motions, applying our expertise alongside each one of you, our customers, for years. The platform you saw today is not separate from the services model. It's part of the services model. It what makes the services model possible.

15 years of institutional knowledge. Every churn pattern, every playbook, every renewal motion across every vertical, companies of every size in every economic cycle that doesn't live in a foundation model. It doesn't live in a single agent. It lives in Gainsight.

We are starting with the long tail renewal. But that's just the beginning of this journey. Onboarding, adoption, expansion. So much more to come.

Retention as a service makes the outcome the product. The outcome is the product. It's no longer enough for technology to track the work, to run the business process, enable our humans to execute. Yeah, you have to do all of those things, but it's now expected to do the work and deliver the results.

And if you're not sure how to get started, we are here to guide you. The Gainsight Advisory Services is here to help to chart your agentic exploration. We know that no two companies will follow the exact same path. With Gainsight, you can choose your own adventure and you won't have to navigate it alone.

Build, buy or just hire Gainsight Retention delivered as a service. OpenAI this morning officially announcing its new OpenAI deployment company. We're really helping companies bridge that gap between this incredible amount of innovation that is happening happening how they bring that into their organizations to really deliver outcomes at scale anthropic. Blackstone, Hellman and Friedman, Goldman Sachs announcing the formation of a new AI native enterprise services firm that will work with companies to rapidly bring Claude into their core business operations.

What we're doing here is create what you call the AI deployment company. Leading firms are now backing the next generation of AI native services services companies. AI native services is going to be the next big emerging business model when on prem went to the cloud, the emerging business model that got created with SaaS. We're in a similar moment right now where AI is a crazy, you know, groundbreaking technology shift.

The thing to keep in mind is that an AI native service business is owning the outcome. Accounting firms will become AI native accounting firms. Law firms become AI native law firms. Insurance brokerages become AI native insurance brokerages.

The addressable market for these companies is much larger than software ever was. I like to say Genai will enable enterprise software to eat services. I want to leave you with something before we open the doors to the rest of Pulse. Ancient civilizations left inscriptions everywhere.

And for a long time these inscriptions have been treated as decoration, you know, historical artifacts, something that goes behind a wall of glass. But that's not what they are. They were instructions left by people who built something great. And they had faced their own inflection points.

They wrote it down not for themselves, but for the people who came after. Our industry has its own inscriptions, the playbooks you've written, the coverage models you've built, your instincts about customer risk before it shows up on the health score. The relationships you've built with customers so they know who to call when things go wrong. That knowledge is not in any model and it's not being automated away.

It's in fact the most valuable thing in this room. Keeping the humans in the loop is not a resistance to change. Its wisdom written on the wall by everyone who came before us. We're standing at the entrance to something we can't fully understand yet.

The path is not yet mapped. The treasure is not yet uncovered. But that's not a reason to turn back. It's the definition of an expedition worth taking.

So here's my ask for the next two days. Go into every session like you're opening a new chamber. Ask questions that no one else is asking. Have conversations that feel almost too honest for a conference.

Find the inscriptions that feel like it was written just for you. The one takeaway or idea that you take with you to do this work. The future of this category is not going to be written by the critics who are predicting its demise. It's going to be written by the people in this room.

You are the explorers now. Let's go on this expedition.