AI Search Is Changing Customer Discovery

[Un]Churned Chapter 017

Customer behavior is moving. Are you staying ahead or playing catch-up?

Here’s what’s on our minds this week.

🎙️ The Part of the Customer Journey You No Longer Control

Most companies recognize shifts in customer behavior, but only act on them after their current model starts to break down.

In 2022, as LLMs started collecting data from the web, G2 chose to open their review data for AI training, while their competitors kept theirs locked down. With AI actively changing how people discovered products, G2 found themselves at risk of losing direct traffic, control, and monetization. Two years later, G2 is a top-ten cited source in major models, with traffic up 31% year over year.

The companies that kept their data private are now trying to regain the reach they thought was secure. Eric Gilpin, President of Go-To-Market at G2, calls this idea “future always beats business,” but in reality, it’s a tradeoff. You have to weaken your current model before it breaks, so you can be part of where customer behavior is heading.

This is where most revenue organizations get stuck. Systems like pipeline coverage, expansion goals, and Customer Success (CS) capacity are built on the idea that engagement happens inside the product. But customer behavior is already shifting. People are evaluating AI tools, validating in communities, and showing early interest in places your metrics can’t track.

G2 bet that the most important signals would be outside their control, and that being present there was more important than protecting what they already had. Most Customer Success teams are still focused on tracking what happens inside the product, measuring a part of the journey that’s already over.

Here’s the Full Episode:

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

1. Why early discovery is moving outside traditional channels and what that means for when your team can actually influence the outcome

2. How G2 is adapting to answer engines and what it reveals about where customer decisions are really happening

🎯 The [Un]Churned Take: Control Is Slipping Faster Than Capability Is Improving

Customer Success was built for systems it could observe and influence. That assumption is starting to break. When the head of Amazon Web Services suggests models like Claude could replace large parts of SaaS, the implication goes beyond just product disruption. This means that more of the work customers care about is being executed inside systems CS doesn’t fully see or control.

That constraint is already shaping how Anthropic operates. Holding back model releases in a competitive market reflects a simple reality: capability is advancing faster than it can be reliably integrated. The system can do more things, but you can’t count on it to do them the same way every time. For CS, that means the connection between what the product does and what the customer experiences becomes less direct, and harder to manage.

Operators are feeling this before they can fully explain it. Leaders like Nick Mehta describe the current environment as unusually difficult, but the pressure isn’t coming from a single shift. Distribution, product boundaries, and execution are all moving at once, and CS sits at the intersection of all three. The actions that drive customer outcomes are becoming more powerful, but also less predictable, and that tradeoff shows up first in post-sales.

Large systems have always required coordination before they deliver results, but the timeline has collapsed. Missions like Artemis II depend on years of controlled iteration before launch. AI systems are being deployed into production environments in real time, without that buffer, and with immediate expectations for impact. The complexity is similar, but the tolerance for failure isn’t.

CS now operates in a system where it’s harder to read signals, connect actions to outcomes, and understand where we actually have control. At some point, we need to redesign the function around where outcomes are actually decided, not where they’re measured.

☕ Off Topic: What Else We’re Reading

“Claude, OpenClaw, and the New Reality: AI Agents Are Here—and So Is the Chaos”

As agents take on more of the work, outcomes become less predictable and harder to control because they depend on systems you don’t fully own.

📅 Coming Up

Pulse 2026 — Retention is being rewritten in real time. AI, scale, digital—everything is changing how customers stay. Pulse 2026 is the #1 conference where CS, education, community, and revenue leaders go to figure it out together. Join us May 27-28 in Las Vegas and use code UNCHURNED for a special rate.

Register at gainsightpulse.com →

The New Rules of CS — Gainsight’s ongoing webinar series is tackling the questions CS leaders are wrestling with right now. Three sessions are already on demand, and one more is coming up: Turning Risk Signals Into Action.

Catch up on the full series here →

Wrapping Up

Efficiency inside the system doesn’t matter if the decision happens outside it. So the question is: where is your team actually influencing the decision, and where are you just reacting to it?

See you next Tuesday 🧠

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