What to Do With the 80% of Customers You Can't Afford to Cover ft. Chuck Ganapathi (Gainsight)

The evening before his first Pulse keynote as Gainsight's CEO, Chuck Ganapathi sat down with Josh Schachter to talk through what's keeping revenue leaders up at night and what Gainsight’s doing about it.

In this special [Un]Churned episode, Chuck Ganapathi makes the case that most Customer Success (CS) and revenue leaders didn't choose to ignore their long tail. They just never had enough headcount to do anything different—until now.

---

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

Subscribe now and get the [Un]Churned take straight to your inbox.

---

🎯 The [Un]Churned Take: The Accounts You Stopped Chasing Are Your Next Growth Engine

You have an unspoken agreement with your long tail. The accounts are too small to staff, too numerous to ignore, and too unpredictable to forecast. So they go on auto-renewal, churn at 30-40%, and nobody brings it up in the board meeting.

The truth was, teams didn’t have enough headcount to do things differently. Now, agentic AI is changing that. CS organizations that adapt early will gain a real GRR advantage over those still treating long-tail churn as a fixed cost.

The Economics Finally Work

The long tail has always been hard to serve, not because it’s complex, but because of margin. Staffing people to handle hundreds of small accounts never made financial sense. Traditional outsourcing doesn’t fix it either; it just moves the headcount somewhere cheaper without changing the basic math.

Agentic AI changes the cost structure. Agents take care of the scale work like outreach, renewal tracking, and risk flagging, while humans focus on judgment, intervention, and the moments where context matters more than speed. This mix makes it possible to run a real process for accounts that have been ignored for years.

Gainsight is putting this into action with Atlas, the first AI-native renewals services for customer retention. This launch was the anchor of the Pulse 2026 keynote and Chuck gave a rundown during his conversation with Josh. With Atlas, instead of just giving you AI agents and leaving you to handle the outcome, Gainsight runs the long-tail renewal process for you, with agents and humans working together. The kicker: Gainsight only wins if you do. “That wasn’t possible even a year ago,” Chuck said. “Agentic technology wasn’t there. And now it is.”

This flips the long-tail equation on its head. A 10% improvement in long-tail renewals means a two-point increase in overall GRR. For most CS teams, that’s something to bring to the board.

Your Long Tail is Future Pipeline

While the risk of churn is reason enough to act, the potential growth that hides in your smaller accounts is worth considering.

With AI accelerating both the ability to build in-house and the potential for startups to get up and running quickly, gaining and keeping customers is harder than it’s been in years. Your long-tail customers are already in your corner, and keeping them there can provide an untapped source for growth.

Chuck pointed to AI-native companies as a prime example. While they may be small by contract value today, they’re growing faster than almost anyone else in the market. The broader point extends well beyond any one category, though. Small accounts don’t stay small, and the CS org that’s been running a real motion against its long tail will be in a fundamentally different position than the one that’s been hoping for auto-renewal.

Humans and Agents Work Better Together

The Atlas model doesn’t remove humans from the long-tail motion. It changes what they’re doing there. “Agents are probabilistic software and they’re not going to get everything right perfectly,” Chuck shares. This means humans need to be in the mix to handle the judgment calls, like when to intervene, when the agent’s output needs a second look, when a customer situation has context the system can’t read.

Chuck was direct about why humans stay in the picture, emphasizing that “The tolerance for mistakes is very low. We’re talking about real revenue here.” Agents will get things wrong. Having humans in the loop is what makes the system accurate enough to trust with real renewal numbers, and over time, humans and agents make each other better. Humans refine the judgment that agents act on, and agents surface the patterns at a scale no human team could cover alone.

Most CS orgs have spent years treating long-tail churn as the cost of not having enough people. With Atlas, that excuse just got a lot harder to make.

---

🎧 Listen for These Moments

Chuck and Josh chat the evening before Pulse 2026 for a thirty-minute, candid conversation about retention, agentic AI, and what Gainsight is betting on. Be sure to listen for these moments in the full episode:

1. The Atlas model in plain terms, including what outcome ownership actually means in practice and why Chuck thinks the long tail has been one of the most costly blind spots in CS for years.

2. The build-or-buy false choice, and Chuck’s case for why the best agentic AI strategies aren’t choosing between the two, they’re layering them.

3. Chuck’s take on AI optimism, and how we can use our human judgment to make sure the agents are doing the right thing.

---

🔎 Where to Find Chuck

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chuckganapathi

📎 Referenced in This Episode

• Pulse 2026 Keynote

• “Services, the New Software” by Sequoia

• “How to Save Your SaaS Company” by Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital

---

Wrapping Up

The long tail has always been worth fighting for. Now there's finally a way to do it. In fact, a lot of things that felt impossible in CS a year ago are starting to look very different. Join the waitlist for everything Gainsight launched at Pulse 2026 here.

See you next week 🧠