Scaling the Unscalable: How Cognite is Turning Community Into an AI-Powered Retention Engine

[Speaker 1]
Thank you everyone. Very excited to be here. Originally based in Norway, one hour outside Oslo.

I'll introduce myself a little bit more, a little bit later. But I think, oh sorry, you told me, I no longer have the mic on me, right? Very excited to be here.

So, with AI, the expectation running a community, running an academy, is for all of us to run incredibly lean, right? But that's not the story I will try to convey you about today, but rather give you some examples of what we've made possible when it comes to how much of a business can actually a community structure and an academy structure take on. And this story for me starts back in 1906.

Can you see this signature? It's an old, old letter. It's actually written here by Edison, Thomas Alva Edison.

I will give you a trial, is what it said. And he told that to my grandfather's brother, applying for work at Edison. And what Edison actually did, he was famous for thousands of patents.

I think he had more than 2,000 patents. And everyone thinks that Edison made up those patents alone, but he didn't do that. He actually built their time community.

He made sure that he sourced good people from around the globe that joined his lab in New Jersey and really made that work thrive through a community. And that's really what the community is, a trial given to someone you have never heard about before. So this room that we built, which Edison built back in the early 90s, is what I would like to speak to you about today.

I joined Cognite six years ago. Back then, we started from scratch. We had to build the platform, even.

I remember I did this RFP with the big players. And at that time, Little Incited, which was a company no one had heard about. And in my company, I got a little bit pushed back.

Why don't you go for Salesforce or ServiceNow? We're one of the really big players. But I only had one hard requirement, and that was find a platform where you can build stuff without requiring developer resources.

So that's why we chose Gamesight back in the days. And we are on a big mission in Cognite to reach 100 billion US dollars in customer value by 2025. We actually reached that last month.

And as some of you heard on the keynote, we were acquired by Schneider Electric a little while ago as well. So what we're building now, we have a community team of two. We actually see the potential to grow that into a much wider ecosystem with a much larger set of customers and partners also, doing exactly what we're doing now.

And being product-led and community-led is what we believe is going to take us there. Because Cognite is what we do, we have a data platform where we contextual industrial data. So you can think of it as Google Maps for industry.

That's basically what we are. And we have high-touch customers and high-touch partners. So customer success managers will always be needed.

But we also see an opportunity to really help drive the demand of headcounts down by enabling customers and partners through this one-to-many enablement platform we now have with Cognite Hub. So before I move on, I want to be very honest also. I want to tell you about all the pain points we had building this.

And for the first four years in Cognite, building this from scratch, I was only one person. Two years ago, I got to hire a community manager that now helps me technically. But before that, it was only me.

So believe you me, I've felt all the pain points that probably all of you have. But there is an ongoing poll now in Slido. I think it was track four, right?

Yes, so if you could please go there and tell me which of these points here is really, really standing behind your success and the business impact at your company. And I'm going to share on the next slide the major ones for us. Exactly.

Yeah. And I even think that for me, I could easily tick all of those boxes because they've all been pain points. And the last one, of course, more relevant later with the boom of AI.

But it started for us. We're at these four silos. That really hindered us, right?

Product wasn't open to feedback. For all of you having the Gainsight customer community platform, you're aware of the product ideation tab. When I asked our product leadership team if I could open up that space, they sat with their arms in cross.

No, it's just going to disturb the journey. And we know what we're building. We know where we're going.

We don't need it. At that time, Cognite was still so small. This is not in my script, really, but I'm telling it anyway.

I decided to, over the Christmas holidays, just... Oops, it's live, right? And that's the beauty of having a very small team.

And then the feedback started coming, and really valuable feedback. And we also have an internal tool called Slack. I saw in those internal Slack product channels between the product leaders, Hey, guys, look at this feedback.

We decided to park this, but I suggest we reconsider it, because this really makes sense, right? And that's how it all started. So, really, finding mechanisms.

And I'll share with you what we did after to make sure that we partner tightly with product. The second one was not at the table. We were just a division.

People thought we did great things, but they couldn't really measure it. We were still put in the cost center bucket, right? Simply because we were not an official part of the 360 health score.

And then we had a separate silo. Not connected even to Academy. Separate silos.

So, this is where it started for us. We were just one person, as I said. We grew to two.

I still think now, with the structure we have, going into the Schneider Aviva world even, we don't need to be more than two community people, because we have this fantastic platform now helping us scale. We are at, I think I said 20,000 at the main stage earlier, but 19 is probably more correct. And 40,000 monthly unique visitors.

And that monthly unique visitors number is so high, because we decided to make most of the content publicly available. Not to build that wall of logging in for users. So, this is basically where we are.

Great growth delivered by a two-person team. We only have 100 customers in Cognite. Think about that, right?

So, we're an incredibly small company. I remember, I think his name was Pascal, the person selling this to us back in the days in Gainsight. He said, Anita, are you sure you want to do this?

You have very few customers, right? But for us, we knew the potential of the users and the builders. And I think the result proves that.

So, quickly to walk you through the three bets, the main bets that we focused on. I touched upon it earlier. We made product an official member of the community.

That's been absolutely key for us. We built out structured, formalized processes with the product leadership team in Cognite, making sure that the quarterly product updates, they are shared in the community, nowhere else. We make sure that all product IDs, feature requests, that can be anything from customers saying, I prefer purple over pink, to the high strategic requirement, right?

They need to go through the community. And we also have customers that cannot share IDs, but okay, we set up a private ideation forum for them, so they have no excuse, right? They're still pushing all the IDs through here.

And what happens then? They slowly learn how to own the public community. Actually, it isn't dangerous.

It's even better, because we get more people's eye on the input. And the third thing we did, we made it obligatory also for the product team to run early adapter. We call it private and public preview groups on the community.

If you join Cognite Hub, you will probably not see them because they are mostly hidden groups. The product has also learned that they build faster, they fail faster, and they take better products to the market much faster when they can globally source a small group of 10, 15 people, gather that feedback instead of going to one client at a time. And we also made sure that the academy courses was a part of the official product release process.

Now, that's taking a little bit longer time, but we are getting there, because we have a lot of course material that needs to be updated every quarter. And I'm not sure about you, but in my role, the product team changed their product all the time. So it's incredibly difficult to make sure that the academy trainings are up to date, but at least making it a formal part of the process, the product managers, then they're accountable for making sure that they give us the information we need in a timely manner to keep also the academy courses updated.

And then, as I briefly, briefly mentioned, not everything in the community can be shared, and particularly not in our space. We work with some of the largest industrial clients in the world, oil and gas companies, manufacturing companies, power and utilities companies, and they have incredibly strict guidelines, and sharing is not something they do, basically. So that's why we use now the developer studio, and we set up these really, really nice-looking private communities for them, and we even invested 30, 45 minutes, not more, with each of them, and found one dedicated superuser or ambassador, if you will, on their side, where we made sure that we understood their customer journey, and then we drew that customer journey in their private community, and that's where they start. So public ideation is always what we recommend as the default way, but we have the option of private ideation for customers that are not, and partners that are not able to share publicly, and what that has resulted in is of all the feature requests, all the product IDs that are sourced by our customers and partners globally, they go through the community, and 40% of them actually end up on the roadmap.

That's a massive, massive number. So the mentality of the product team has totally shifted, and they are shifted, and they're aware of it. I'm really, really proud when I now hear the product release sessions internally, and also external-facing, where communities really, these processes are really formally a part of their storyline.

And the second bet, for us, it was a no-brainer to make sure that academy and community was on the same platform, because, as I said, when I spoke to Erika this morning, the customer journey is like a bowl of long spaghetti, right? The customers and partners move back and forth. And our customers and our partners had a really disjointed experience when they had to go to one platform for academy and one platform for community.

So really make sure that we provide for that seamless value-added journey, even across support. We have partners with support as well, so customers can also submit their bugs here through Zendesk. And then we have monthly meetings with support to make sure that the lessons learned are fed back to the community in articles.

So all connected, not merged. So this is really now the foundation that our AI ran on. And I think Gainsight has told me, I'm not going to say names, because I've heard it from many of them, we've probably been one of their most challenging customers, but I hope in a good way, and I think in a good way, because we've really, really pushed Gainsight also to help develop the platform with us.

Private ideation, as I mentioned, that was something they enabled because of us. It took us two years, but we made it happen, and we started embracing it from day one. And I hope some of you are also piggybacking on that and getting a lot of use out of that.

And also having one profile for users, customers, and partners across Academy and community is super valuable. Gamification structure also now with the customized gamification points where you can really build that holistic award structure across Academy community. And AI also searching now seamlessly across both places.

So we didn't, and of course we've been approached by a lot of companies, external companies, to partner with them to, oh, you need external search bots, you need external AI tooling, and we evaluated them really, really carefully, but we don't really see we have the need because from where we are today, our platform with Gainsight gives us what we need, really. And also looking at the cost picture, potentially partner with yet another external vendor, it wouldn't make sense, really. So quickly, where we, oops, I should have had that mic on me.

Quickly, what this produces for us, we have a self-service score of 71, which I think is very good considering we are a immature company with immature customers and partners in this space. We're building products the world hasn't seen yet before, right? So everything is new and there is no blueprint to follow.

40% IDs of the roadmap and 40K monthly unique visitors and 190K course completions in Academy. And this is even before we have brought, which I'm coming to next, the community to where most of our users are. And what this looks like, I have to go back from the user side, is this.

I ask my questions in the hub because they get answered quickly by someone with deep expertise. And AI can't give you this, right? And we are also now, as we speak actually, we also bought the Academy, now the Gainside 360 tooling, so that we can make all this value, the customer and partner value that we generate, visible also for accounts, because that's been challenging.

Okay, so Anita, you brag about all these great numbers, what good does it really do, right? So now we are bringing this into the 360 health score for our account owners, so they can really, really see the correlance between community Academy engagement and product usage, because those two really, really go hand in hand. But it's been difficult for us to prove it.

Well, we have been able to prove it, meaning my partner in crime on the community side had to spend one or actually two working days every month pulling those analytics, which now won't be needed anymore. So we feel now that with AI built into the Gainside platform, with Academy brought onto the same community platform, we really, really have a good fundament to grow. And the next thing here for us now is to bring our community platform to within our product using the Gainside MCP server.

That's going to be a big, big milestone for us, because most of the users of Cognite's product and applications, these are field workers, they're out in the fields, they're out in the plants, they're up in the oil rigs, right, with their helmets, gloves and heavy equipment on. And there is no way I will ever be able to make them open their laptop to log on to Cognite Hub to ask the community something. So we need to bring that experience to where they are.

And this is also something that our AI product team in Cognite is super excited about. And I even ask them, because this can be a big project for you, should we partner with someone externally to realize this? And they were like, no, no, no, this is too exciting.

We need to drive this. So on the Q1 roadmap, that will be a priority for our product team as well. And the main reason why they are so excited is that those insights that the community questions will give them will help them, you know, again, iterate and fix issues in the product that they would have no insights to fix earlier.

So really incredible times with all the opportunities AI gives us. So, yeah, if I... I think I'm speaking rather fast, but if I try to summarize three of my learnings or recommendations for you, make sure that you give your product team a seat at the table, because for us, that has been key.

Everyone cares about the product, the applications that our customers and partners buy. And if we can help our users experience more value out of those, that's, you know, when the magic started happening from our side. And also don't be afraid to build out private spaces, at least if you're in industries where that's a hard requirement for your customer.

Every time we've done that, and we've done that for some of the major logos in the world that you all see every day, they slowly start to embrace the thinking of... I can even mention Total Energy, some of the biggest oil companies, right? We're like, oh, yeah, no, but, you know, sharing actually makes sense.

And we actually, you know what? By sharing, the manufacturing industry, they're there to help us. Who would have thought, right?

So all of a sudden, they see that when they lean in, people lean in back, and they get so much more value out of their thoughts. And consolidate, merge before you try to optimize. Running on different silos doesn't really, really make sense.

And, yeah, so I think for us, you know, we are only two people now, but we can scale. And 20,000 users, it's maximum of what we have product-wise, because we're still a very, very small company, but we can scale this to unlimited number of people simply because we think that we have built this, you know, built this room right now for us. Yeah, I think that was it.

[Speaker 2]
Well, thank you, Anita. And first of all, also thank you to convincing Pascal to sell you or our products. Like, who would have thought, now having 20,000 users?

That's a lot. So you build it with a dream and efficient, and that's also shown in the showcase here. Thank you for that.

We will now go over your questions. So, okay, we will start with the first one. Question about the Academy tab.

How did you decide what pages should stay inside Skillshare and which should be moved to the Gateside customer community?

[Speaker 1]
Good question. So, basically, we are moving as many of the pages as possible to the customer community, actually, simply because we see that we have better control. We think the back end in the community is a little bit easier to work with yet.

Maybe that will change, but for now, we have focused on that. And all the custom pages and all the... Yeah, I think you call them custom pages, right?

Are built on the community side. I think when the acquisition with... I mean, the Skillshare acquisition of...

The Gateside acquisition of Skillshare has been completed, but there is still some back-end hiccups, right, to be fixed. So maybe with that, we don't have to move that much. But basically, we build as much as we can on the customer community side of things.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, we will...

[Speaker 1]
Does the public access mean you've allowed them to commit and interact with content without registration? Yes. Yes, they can.

No, they can read, but they cannot engage, right? So to be able to click like, reply, post something, you need to be registered with a user. But to be able to search a quick fix, how do I fix this in Canvas?

How do I improve this in charts? Then you, for most of those questions, you don't have to be logged in to find that answer. And that's simply also to lower the bar for engagement.

Yeah. Were those two first questions okay answered? Yeah.

How did you get product to take a seat? Yes. I didn't, so I...

It's complicated to get to work. I have a really cool founder. His name is Markus Lervik, and he tells me, you know, Anita, sometimes you just have to ask for forgiveness if things don't work.

Because I knew it would work. And I had his backing, so I did. So, and that you...

I think my shorter answer to that would be, as long as you can prove value, right, they will listen to you. But that's the tricky part, to be able to prove value, and sometimes you need to run a little beta or do a little test. And my little test happened to be over the Christmas holidays.

[Speaker 2]
And also, like, it's good, like, when they see it, when it all comes together, like, also what it is for me. Because there's also much to win from your product teams as well. And once they see that, like, all this valuable, like, product feedback requests trickling in, like, oh, we actually parked it for a while, but now we can actually reconsider or think about it.

[Speaker 1]
And the speed that roadmap moves now is incredible. Sometimes I see IDs come in in the roadmap in product IDs in the community, and seven days later, you can see it's planned for development, right? So some of those things move incredibly fast simply because so many people jump in.

So that's a trick also. If you really want an ID developed, make sure that you put it in front of all your key accounts, key customers, key partners. Make sure they tap in with their voice because then the product team simply can't ignore it.

In your six years at Cognite, are there experiments that you've run in the community that have not worked, that we can learn from, or challenges? Yes, so I struggled a lot with early adapter programs in the beginning because I thought that the product managers wouldn't understand that they needed to lean in to make sure that there were traction in those early adapter programs. But the product managers, they thought that, oh, as long as we just set it up, customers are so engaged, they will start asking questions, and no, no, it doesn't work that way.

So making sure that you enforce, you have to build the processes if you want to engage the product because they don't know. So making sure that you enforce processes. One of our biggest partners, they've even taken it one step further and we're looking now to do the same in our company.

To be able to get the promotion within technical roles in that partner organization, you have to deliver on five pillars. One of those pillars is external communication and they have enforced community contribution as one of those elements in the external communication pillar. That way you include it in the goal setting of the individuals and the employee development framework, right?

So I strongly, strongly believe that's a way of doing it because this community is a lot about change management and people are busy and if they're not measured on it, why should they care, right? And I work in a different department. I work in customer success or we call it value delivery at my organization, but why should product leadership listen to me because they are measured on different things.

And yes, now I saw my question. Have you seen a decrease of support after introducing the community platform? Yes, we have now.

The support team doesn't necessarily think that's a good idea, right? Because they just grew to 50 people and they are super happy about that. And that's yet another reason why it makes sense to include community and academy as company-wide goals and include it in the EDF levels of leadership because we need to work together on these things.

We can do massive wonders ticket deflection-wise. But what we do have in place with the product team is, as I briefly said once a month, we go through support tickets that come in and those that have repeatedly value for other customers, we convert them into community articles. So hopefully that question related to that bug in particular won't have to come in again.

Or not even bug because for us, only bugs still go to support, but sometimes it's really difficult to see if this is a bug or is it a missing functionality in the product, right? So, no, but support is super, super important and I think the other thing I wanted to mention quickly related to that question is going back to that quote I had. I get so much, because users say that when they ask questions in the community, they get input from all these clever people instead of not talking anything about people working in support, but only they will have that one person's knowledge back instead of the wealth of knowledge from those 20,000 people.

How did you get such strong buy-in from your product team? I think I covered that. I forced them to.

I showed them. It was basically that. I forced them, but I showed them.

What metrics do you use to prove the return of investment for your community? Oh, that's a good one. So a lot comes down to value-based outcomes and we see that more and more and more and more.

So a lot for us is about showcasing that our customers and partners, because of the community, they get better products because of all those product insights we together work with. The same with early adapter programs, right? Again, it comes back to the product team that they're able to build better products faster.

And now we are also... Next for me to attack is the support organization to really look at ticket deflection, because we know the potential is there. For us, we haven't formalized there yet, but I know that there's a big, big win as well.

One of my challenges in that, and I'm also in parallel working to look at that, how can we... Because I'm now in the customer success area of the organization. For some companies, I think that works well, but for us, it would help me get the mandate to do all these things that I want faster if I could be a different place in the organization where I had equally strong mandates in the product team, in the partner organization, in strategic projects, right?

[Speaker 2]
Can I ask you one question then? Also related to this one. Do you also have a specific metric, for example, the ROI for product improvements, enhancements?

Do you report on these as well?

[Speaker 1]
No, not yet, but it's also something we're working with the product team. And the product team is not easy. It's a big beast, right?

But they really, really see the value of this now. So what we're also looking at, it's fine looking at metrics to see how do we better together improve the roadmap, right? And the speed of the roadmap that we can take to customers and partners.

[Speaker 2]
How fast do you get to deliver it? Yeah, yeah. For asking and asking about, and now you can also access, for example, an ARR on so many customers.

This is the number of customers, but also tied to a specific ARR. This is the month for it as well.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. And when it comes to ROI, the academy trainings we built out is also incredibly important. And we also deliver instructor-led trainings as part of that.

And that actually, tied to that, we have certifications building. Our AI in Cognite is also called Atlas. So building applications on top of our platform.

So that's a concrete outcome also. Once the users went through all the community and academy enablement resources, were they actually able to build applications? And what's the use of those applications?

How did the new community experience affect the scope of roles for people managing community academy and your courses? How does this team work together to ensure? Would you like to elaborate that one, the one who shared that?

How did the new community experience affect the scope of roles for people managing there? Well, I think maybe we, to summarize, we have a lot less operational work to do, right? Because everything now is so easy at hand.

I can build pages. I am not a developer. I could never do that before.

Now anyone can build. The academy lead can build incredibly professionally looking academy pages. So yeah, I think we can just work much more efficiently and spend also more.

Even myself, I see myself serving more as a customer success director. I'm always, or I'm much more now available being a part of customer success meetings, which is very, very important also. Because that way I get that tailored, get to tailor that experience for them.

[Speaker 2]
So you said like the developer studio helps you have this, like seeing this. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

[Speaker 1]
And we are just about starting to use them, right? Exactly.

[Speaker 2]
So you don't have to like maintain both of them. So they're now having like consolidated and with the studio experience, you can make it one wholesome experience.

[Speaker 1]
And very concretely, the outcome of that is that one of our biggest oil and gas customers, now last week, she told me that she is the adoption lead at that company. She told me, Anita, we are now, we will stop using our internal internet. We're just going to use this.

Right. So yeah, connecting the dots. How do you keep up with product updates so the academy consistently stays up to date?

We made academy a part, as well as community product updates, a part of what we call internally the product lifecycle. So in that checklist, we have major product releases every quarter. The product managers, they are tasked with a lot of different, they have lots of different responsibilities.

And some of those responsibilities now include make sure the academy team knows well in advance what courses should be updated and what new training material needs to be updated. Eight weeks plus, right? So they know now that if they come to us two days before the release, no, you're not going to have it because it says eight weeks plus.

So really enforcing that timely process. Yeah. How many of your 20K users are for the closed part and non?

Yeah, so everyone is a part of the public community. But I would still, I would say, it's a good question. I would say around 20% of the interaction, maybe even a little bit less, 15 to 20% of the interaction happens in the private community.

So still a very, very low because they, once they, but it's about sort of removing that threshold because they have it as a requirement, they think, but it's mostly in their head that they need to speak in that private community. But then they start doing that and then they test a little bit in the public community and that is so much more valuable. Did your academy community launch together or did the academy come first as the building block for the community?

We had, when I joined Cognite, academy already existed, but on a separate platform. Actually, SkillJar. So, and then I did that RFP process and SkillJar at that time, you know, they were only academy, so they didn't have a community offer.

So we landed on Insighted, now Gainsight. And I was for one year very hard at work trying to get rid of SkillJar, very hard at work because I saw that we have to have academy and community together on the same platform. So, and at that time you were leading with another logo.

So, but I didn't care about the logo. It was more about, it was only about bringing them all to the same platform for that unified experience. And we actually signed also with that other product and then one of your, I think even Erica was on the call.

She was a little bit afraid to say that. We have some news. We acquired SkillJar.

So you don't have to move from SkillJar.

[Speaker 2]
Exactly. One more question.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Will AI auto answer agents reduce customer to customer interaction in communities? Similar to product teams, we struggle to get support.

No, that, oh, it moved, sorry. No, okay, now it stopped. Can you speak more about specific community and academy metrics you are looking at and integrating in 360 page views, course completion, others?

Yes, so engagement, of course, all engagement is super important. We look at quality over quantity much more because the type of questions customers and partners give us, the type of product ideas they give us is incredibly important. So I'm quite easy on volumes in that sense.

It's more about the substance. But now we've just, we've had all the community and academy data now into the Gainsight 360 tooling. And what we're doing now is beautifying that, making them more usable, digestible in dashboards.

So everything, of course, from page views, et cetera, but what customers and partners mostly care about is, okay, the product ideas I say, the requirements I say I need, when do I get them? And what's the status of those feature requests? That's the most important thing.

And I can mention that as well, Gainsight 360 is meant, at least in our organisation, to be an internal using tool, but we will open it up, parts of it up for customers and partners as well. But we've learned that we don't even have to give them access to the Gainsight 360 tooling. We can now give that access from within the community space using, you used to call it spaces, but now you maybe have renamed it.

But being able to provide that 360 analytics view to customers and partners, and I've pushed it so that accounts then use it in their monthly reviews with customers and partners, particularly, again, those product ideation pipelines. We have an initiative also in my company called Customer Advisory Board, where the most important people in each organisation are flown into a city and they sit in a room and they ideate on, you know, what does the product need to, what are the improvements you need to see in the product? But even that now happens in the community.

[Speaker 2]
All right. Thank you, Anita, for being such a good partner for us, and also you called yourself a tricky customer, but we love hearing from you because this is the way we can develop also our own products. So give one last round of applause for Anita, please.

Thank you.