Five Signals Shaping Customer Success Right Now

[Un]Churned Chapter 013

Last week, Gainsight held our annual Revenue Kick-Off (RKO). It was my first time at a sales kickoff, and an awesome reminder of what can happen when curious people get together with space to learn from one another.

The energy wasn’t just on stage. Some of the most interesting moments happened in the conversations between sessions.

While the main focus was Gainsight’s plans for 2026, the conversations around them felt familiar. The same themes I hear in my [Un]Churned conversations with Customer Success leaders kept resurfacing in sessions, hallway chats, and late-night debates.

In many ways, RKO felt like a microcosm of what the Customer Success industry is grappling with right now.

So in this special edition of [Un]Churned, I want to share a few themes that kept coming up throughout the week. To me, they signal some of the bigger shifts unfolding across Customer Success.

Here’s what’s been on my mind.

1. Customer Success has one of the most valuable datasets in the company.

Customer Success leaders already understand how much of the customer story flows through their teams. Adoption signals, renewal conversations, and shifts in sentiment typically surface first in the day-to-day dialogue between CSMs and their customers.

What makes this perspective valuable is how it brings different signals together.

Most teams see only one layer of the customer experience. Product sees usage patterns, Sales sees pipeline and contract value, and Marketing sees engagement.

Customer Success brings all three perspectives together.

CS leaders see how customers use the product, how stakeholders feel about their experience, and whether those signs point to growth or risk. This mix of product behavior, sentiment, and revenue context is rare in other parts of the company.

For years, it’s been hard to put that information to use. It was scattered across conversations, notes, and systems that didn’t connect well. Now that AI can analyze these signals together, the data Customer Success teams have is starting to look much more strategic than before.

2. The gap between people using AI as a toy and people using it as a competitive advantage is growing fast.

It was hard to have a conversation during the week that didn’t eventually touch on AI. Most Gainsters and our customers are already using it in small ways, like drafting emails or summarizing meeting notes. Helpful tasks, but still fairly tactical.

Customer Success sits closer to the strategic center of the customer relationship. QBRs, account handoffs, risk escalation, and aligning stakeholders all require a deeper understanding of what is happening across the account.

Several conversations this week focused on how AI could begin supporting that level of work. Brady Bluhm (Sr. Product Manager, Staircase AI at Gainsight), our resident “agentic power user” led a workshop showcasing how he thinks about customer context in LLMs, how to set up inbox reviews, custom Claude skills, and more.

MCP was an especially hot topic. Once your LLM can access the systems where the Customer Success work actually happens, like timeline entries, success plans, conversation transcripts, and product usage signals, the model begins reasoning with the same context the CSM sees.

That’s when AI becomes genuinely useful in Customer Success workflows.

3. The real question is becoming: what outcomes does this deliver?

Another major subject during the week was value realization. Onboarding and adoption conversations used to focus on features. Now, they’re more about the results those features deliver.

People now look at things like how deeply products are adopted, signs of expansion, feelings about ROI, and early signs that value is growing or fading.

This shift came up often in talks about services and advisory work. As Inna Ekhaus (Sr. Director, Service Products) put it, many companies are now in the “show me the ROI” era, where productivity and revenue outcomes are the main indicators of success.

Taylor Johnston (Sr. Director, Advisory Services at Gainsight) shared a similar view in her session on value frameworks. Customer teams are now expected to show real numbers for the outcomes customers achieve and help them find even more value.

As software becomes easier to build and launch, what sets companies apart is increasingly the results customers actually experience. Customer Success is the key to unlocking that value.

4. Nobody is immune to acceleration.

If there was one macro theme running throughout the week, it was the pace of change.

Chuck Ganapathi (CEO, Gainsight) started his keynote speech with a look back on the ripple effects of AI. I use the term “look back” lightly, because SO much has changed in not just the SaaS industry, but the whole world, since just January. We’re barely three months into 2026 and we’ve advanced to having Open Claw running autonomous workflow and vibe coding so powerful you can have an app in the app store in just a few hours. AI is not only changing the way we work, but it’s changing the course of our futures.

New tools show up almost every week. Product cycles move faster, and customer expectations change along with the technology they’re trying out. Erica Kuhl (EVP & GM, Digital Customer Hub at Gainsight) summed up the mood well, sharing that the fast pace of innovation around Claude and the challenge of building great products while everything is changing so quickly has increased the urgency in the way her team operates.

The rapid development in the AI world is changing how investors think about software, how companies choose vendors, and how teams plan their own roadmaps. You can see this acceleration everywhere. It’s in product development, market expectations, how customers evaluate software, and how teams learn and adapt.

Every function feels it.

5. The teams that stay curious will move the fastest.

While acceleration changes the environment organizations operate in, curiosity determines how teams respond.

The most interesting conversations at RKO came from people who were experimenting. They’re trying new workflows, testing AI tools with real customer data, and asking how their roles might change.

These conversations were rooted in curiosity, and the most curious teams tend to stay close to their customers. They follow conversations wherever they happen—calls, communities, events, and more often now, the social platforms where relationships grow over time.

One of the highlights for me was chatting with Darren McKee about using LinkedIn as open terrain for building multithreaded relationships with both new and existing customers.

In a fast-moving environment, these conversations become a powerful way to learn and improve.

The Bigger Shift Beneath It All

The themes from RKO were not surprising individually. AI. Value delivery. Customer context. Market acceleration. What stood out was how consistently they surfaced across different sessions and conversations.

Each voice brought a slightly different perspective, but together they pointed to the same shift.

Customer Success is becoming central to how companies understand their customers and deliver outcomes. The signals are already there. The question now is what teams do with them.

See you next Monday. 🧠

— Josh

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