What Do Humans Do Best as AI Gets Better? ft. Jean de Villiers (Unit4)

In the Enterprise Resource Software (ERP) industry, buyer’s remorse comes with the territory. On this week’s episode of of [Un]Churned, “Why Unit4 Cut Mid-Touch and Bet on AI”, Jean de Villiers, Chief Customer Officer at Unit4, shares how the post-sales team has overcome this obstacle to grow long-term customer relationships, with some lasting over 20 years.

The conversation covers a lot of ground: cutting mid-touch entirely, packaging every post-sales activity into a 318-item self-serve catalog, and the 45% consumption gap that Jean calls ERP’s “dirty secret.”

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Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Gainsight.com.

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🎯 The [Un]Churned Take: Keeping the Human Advantage as AI Advances

Jean de Villiers and his team at Unit4 are in the middle of an AI transformation. Right now, you could say the same about almost any CCO. As LLMs and agentic AI take on more work, post-sales teams are adapting and finding ways to use these tools to their advantage.

But AI can be a double-edged sword. As much as it helps the humans using it, what happens when AI steps confidently into those roles that once were uniquely human?

The Role AI Just Took From Your Team

AI has already absorbed the part of the job that “could have been an email.” Now, Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are expected to spend time on the harder, relationship-driving aspects, such as judgment calls and difficult conversations. However, as AI continues to advance, that capability gap is already starting to close.

At Unit4, Jean’s team is using an agentic CSM designed to read product telemetry, benchmark a customer’s usage against their vertical peers, identify a specific gap, and surface a success plan that challenges the customer. An example output can sound something like, “You’re not using this module, here’s what companies like yours are doing with it, here’s what it’s costing you not to.” While the agent’s job isn’t to maintain the relationship, it’s entering the realm of provoking action.

“The term ‘trusted advisor’ is kind of overused and redundant in the modern world. Claude and co-pilots are the trusted advisors these days.”

If technology can push customers to act and even inspire new thinking, the bar for what makes a human contribution truly valuable is suddenly higher.

What “High-Touch” Actually Means Now

When the agentic layer is designed to be challenging and specific, then a human CSM who shows up to a QBR with a relationship and a slide deck summarizing product updates isn’t offering anything unique. The agent already sent the personalized, telemetry-driven, peer-benchmarked recommendation, so by the time the CSM enters the meeting, they’re just bringing noise.

As AI catches up to the human skillset, CS leaders need to ask themselves, “What does your human layer actually do to move a customer forward?”

The answer lies in defining explicitly what high-touch means for your customers.

Jean’s strategy includes rolling out Challenger Sale training to his whole post-sales team—not just CSMs, but also architects, project managers, senior consultants, and the teams running cloud migrations and managed services. He isn’t focused on making them sell, but on helping them guide customers to new insights and directions they wouldn’t reach on their own. By teaching his team the Challenger Sale and changing how they engage with customers and deliver value, he’s equipping them to work better together alongside their agentic solutions.

Most CS orgs haven’t had to define their high-touch strategy to this level because CSMs have carried the load. The more impactful your agentic layer becomes, the more you’ll need to define how the human layer can sustain that impact.

Raising the Bar for Human Impact

If your agentic layer is doing its job well, and your human layer looks redundant by comparison, that’s not an AI problem. In order to get ahead, you need to be honest about what value your CSMs provide and work towards building out those strengths.

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🎧 Listen for These Moments

Jean gets deep into the specifics about his decisions behind Unit4’s post-sales rebuild. Listen out for these moments in the full episode:

• The 50-point NPS gap between high-touch and self-serve customers — Jean breaks down exactly why it exists and why it’s the clearest internal argument for investing in the human layer.

• Running post-sales as a profit center under PE ownership — how the 30% EBITDA contribution margin target shaped every structural decision Jean made, including cutting mid-touch entirely.

• Challenger Sale training for the whole post-sales org — why Jean is teaching architects, PMs, and consultants to pitch ideas confidently, and why he thinks most CSMs have never had to develop that skill.

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🔎 Where to Find Jean

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeandevilliers/

📎 Referenced in This Episode

• The Challenger Sale — sales methodology by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, built around teaching and reframing rather than relationship-building

• Gainsight — platform Unit4 uses to deliver digital success plans

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Wrapping Up

Most CS orgs will adopt agentic tools and call it a transformation. The ones that actually transform will use it as a reason to get honest about what their humans are doing and make them better at it.

See you next week 🧠