What Happens When AI Runs Your Renewals ft. Grant Clarke (Gainsight)

“You don’t own the bees. You’re just keeping them there with you.” After fifteen years of beekeeping, Grant Clarke took this lesson to heart. Now, he brings that same mindset to his new job leading Atlas, Gainsight’s AI-native renewals management service.

In this episode of [Un]Churned, Grant Clarke, EVP and General Manager of Gainsight’s Atlas business, talks with host Josh Schachter for “212. Can AI Really Manage Your Entire Renewal Book?“ They discuss what Atlas is, how AI-native services (AINS) are different from traditional BPO outsourcing, what a renewal rep’s day looks like in the “Atlas cockpit,” and where Atlas is headed after the renewal stage.

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

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🎯 The [Un]Churned Take: AINS Isn’t What Your Agent Can Do. It’s What It Learns.

Every AI agent will eventually face something it can’t handle. The case gets escalated, the ticket quietly closes, and the moment becomes a footnote. But Grant Clarke, EVP and General Manager of Atlas at Gainsight, thinks how an AI-native services (AINS) company handles those moments is critical.

Gainsight’s Atlas product was created to tackle renewals, a process that can involve anywhere from ten to twenty separate steps. More if the customer is unhappy, fewer if they’re already seeing value. Atlas is designed to handle as many of these as possible without human help. But when escalations come up, Grant doubles down.

“Every time we’re going to come up with a new workflow, understand a new way to come at the problem, we’re just training that back into what is going to help the next customer get started faster.”

That ongoing improvement loop is what sets true AINS companies apart. It’s not just about what the system can do today, but how quickly it learns from what it can’t do yet.

The Learning Loop Is the Moat

In the UnChurned episode, “212. Can AI Really Manage Your Entire Renewal Book?”, Grant explained how Atlas works. A team of four, comprised of engineers, product managers, and business analysts sit with renewal reps and watch for moments when the agent hands off a task because it can’t handle it. If the same kind of escalation happens more than once, it triggers a two-week product sprint, and the solution is added back into the agent.

“If they are finding another way that we didn’t already document as part of what Atlas could do, we’re now going to document that.”

This capacity to get smarter with every edge case they encounter unlocks the true potential of AINS. The innovation is in how these systems turn unexpected scenarios into new playbooks, evolving to handle more complexity over time. For customers, that means AINS adapts and grows to meet tomorrow’s challenges, making the partnership more valuable with every iteration.

“If we take those actions and go from only 20% of those actions being Atlas-led to 55% of those actions being Atlas-led, that’s margin accretion.”

A New Lens for Assessing AI Partners

When a vendor pitches an agentic renewal, support, or CS solution, the real question isn’t “what can your agent do?” Instead, ask “what did your agent get wrong last quarter, and what changed in your product because of it?” If the answer is that a person quietly fixed it and nothing else changed, you’re just buying labor with an AI marketing layer. But if they can point to a specific update that now helps the next hundred customers, that’s a sign of something lasting.

The real advantage isn’t just one impressive agent response. It’s whether the system keeps improving from the work people still do, every time.

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🎧 Listen for These Moments

Grant talks through his experience with Atlas so far, from defining the ideal customer to explaining how the renewal cockpit works for his reps each morning. Here are three highlights:

1. The 10-to-25 action inventory: Grant’s framework for how many separate steps are in a single renewal, and why that number is the real unit of work Atlas aims to automate.

2. The data hygiene answer: Grant’s straightforward view on why “the D word” isn’t a dealbreaker, and what Atlas really needs from a customer’s data before it can get started.

3. The “Mirage PMF” concept: Grant references Jake Saper’s AINS Playbook and the trap of taking on every eager early customer, even when it dilutes the autonomous leverage you’re trying to build..

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🔎 Where to Find the Speakers

• Grant Clarke — https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantclarke/

• Josh Schachter — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/

📎 Referenced in This Episode

• Jake Saper’s [Un]Churned episode — 277. Why Domain Credibility Matters More Than Ever

• The AINS Playbook — Emergence Capital's framework, including the "Mirage PMF" concept Grant references directly

• ServiceSource — Grant’s employer for 15 years prior to Dropbox and Gainsight

• Dropbox — Grant’s prior role in B2B/product-led growth

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Wrapping Up

The future belongs to those who keep building, learning, and improving.

See you next week 🧠