Humans Over Hype

[Un]Churned Chapter 014

I posted about a $3.50 Sumo orange this week and learned from my LI network that citrus season ends in April. Peer learning in action, right in my own comment section. Turns out, that’s exactly what this week’s newsletter is about. And yes, I bought three 🍊

Here’s what’s been on my mind this week.

The Best Thing You Can Give Your Customers Doesn’t Come From You

Christina Meng leads the Champion programs at OpenAI. Part of this initiative includes running roundtables for OpenAI’s enterprise customers. She sets the topic, kicks things off, has a few questions ready, and then, for the most part, she gets out of the way.

When she lets champions from different companies talk to each other, something changes. They realize they’re all working through similar challenges, and the conversation goes further than any planned agenda could.

Christina grew OpenAI’s Champion Network from nothing to over 600 members in a year, after nearly ten years doing similar work at Slack. She’s learned that lasting AI adoption depends less on the technology and more on having the right people supporting it at every level.

In Customer Success, the usual instinct is to offer more. More content, more training, more QBR slides. But Christina’s work shows a different approach: maybe the most valuable thing you can give your customers is a space where they can connect with others facing the same challenges.

Here’s the Full Episode

Watch the full episode right here or on your fave podcast app, and listen out for these two things:

1. How Christina measures success now vs. when she started. The shift from attendance metrics to sustained activation is an important distinction for adoption programs.

2. The three champion tiers explained in her own words (executive champion, champion lead, internal champion) and how each one maps to a different kind of influence.

🎯 The [Un]Churned Take: We’re All Living in the Frenzy

The Agent Madness tournament just dropped. 64 AI agent builds, submitted by the community, going head to head for the title of “coolest thing anyone built with AI this year.” It’s chaotic and fascinating and a little overwhelming, and honestly, it’s a perfect snapshot of where we are right now.

Economist Carlota Perez has a name for this moment. In her framework for how transformative technologies spread, there’s a phase called the Frenzy. It’s a gilded age where capital floods in, everyone is building and competing and shouting, and the technology is being brute-forced into existing workflows without the institutional redesign needed to unlock its real value.

The real gains, she argues, come later, in the Deployment Period, when organizations actually restructure around the technology instead of just layering it on top of what already exists. It took 30 years to transition factories from steam to electric power. Not because the technology was slow. Because the humans were.

Here’s the CS connection: this is exactly what Christina Meng described in this week’s episode. The enterprises pulling ahead aren’t the ones with the most impressive agent stack. They’re the ones building internal champion networks, restructuring how their people learn, and investing in the sustained behavior change that makes adoption stick. Turns out, the hard part is rarely the technology.

The frenzy is real, but the Deployment Period belongs to the teams that started building human infrastructure yesterday.

☕ Off Topic: What Else I’m Reading

A few things I’m reading beyond the CS lens.

“Has AI Ended Thought Leadership?” By John Windsor

AI is making it easier to talk about a subject, but John emphasizes that the real value comes from “thought doers.” The scar tissue that comes from mistakes creates granular, personal learnings that AI can’t generate. Are you a thought leader or a thought doer?

“The State of AI Right Now” by Fabian Hediger

Enterprise ambition is running ahead of enterprise execution. Only 25% of organizations have moved more than 40% of their AI pilots into production. That gap is either your biggest threat or your biggest opportunity, depending on what you do next.

Wrapping Up

The frenzy is loud and nobody has a complete playbook yet. I shared an operating model on LinkedIn this week that feels right for this moment: LF-See. Not LFG. Let's. Effing. See. Go all in, stay curious, and see where the experiment takes you.

See you next Monday. 🧠

— Josh

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