Demo • Gainsight — Agentic Systems for Scalable Retention

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Julia Nimchinski: And welcome back, Josh Scotter, SVP and GM at Atlas. Super excited to have you back again.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): I’m excited to… it was a quick turnaround, I’m excited to be back.

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Julia Nimchinski: Yeah!

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Julia Nimchinski: Let’s see it in action. What are we up to? Yeah, yeah. Adjusted, yeah.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): I thought it might be, actually most helpful for me to share some slides,

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): that I think it’ll be the kind of the most visual example that we can share of…

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): of Atlas, of what we’re doing for Agentic, and I’ll talk through how we see the worlds of CS and Agentic coming together, if that’s okay with you.

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Julia Nimchinski: Awesome.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): Great. So, yeah, so hi everybody, nice to meet you. My name’s Josh Hachter, I’m the Senior Vice President of Atlas at Gainsight, and Atlas is our agentic future chapter of the company that we’re really excited to be kicking off right now.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): I want to talk about a couple things, state of AI and kind of how that interplays with CS, and then for folks that are really thinking about Agentic in their world, and how to prepare for that. So…

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): I want to talk a little bit at first, you know, why Agentic is really important for the CS community, for the SaaS community at large, you know.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): We see that the world of building software has changed. On the left side here, you have vibe coding, everybody can create an application in a weekend, in a hackathon, overnight sort of thing, which is amazing, right? It’s all been democratized.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And on the right side, professional coders.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): engineers, developers, are given these superpowers as well, through Cursor and the other types of tooling. The net… those are all great things, but the net-net is that SaaS, as a software industry.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): you know, our moat is starting to… I don’t know if it’s collapsing, but it’s decaying. It’s becoming less fierce. We’re being attacked on the right side here by lots of competitors. I’m sure there’s many folks in the audience that are part of these competitors, these up-and-coming, you know, agentic of X types of companies that are out there.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And then, on the left side, the decision of build versus buy, you know, the build piece is more compelling for a lot of companies that have been our customers for a while now. Klarna ditched Salesforce, you know, built their own, and again, those coding

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): tools like the Cursors of the world, can really help to amplify those efforts as well.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And I mentioned this in the last fireside chat that we had, but we’ve latched on… I’ve latched on to this quote from Sam Altman about a month ago, that we’re now entering the fast fashion era of SaaS. Fast fashion meaning I can, you know.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): buy that shirt that I really liked, and then, unfortunately, throw it out a month later and buy something else. That now, you know, there’s more accessibility to different types of applications, and so it’s easy come easy go. Which is why retention

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): is now not just a high priority, it’s truly existential for SaaS companies, and we have to treat every customer like they’re our best customer. And so I mentioned this also in the last conversation, but

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): In the past, we would… We would bear hug our most important customers, give them the white glove service.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): and just assume that the rest of the mid-tier and long-tail customers, they’d kind of figure it out on their own. They would go through their auto renewals, they wouldn’t be much at risk. But that was really a trap, because now what we’re being asked to do is protect the mid-tier, protect the long tail.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): Because, again, no customer is too small to lose. And at the same time, we’re being asked to do this with

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): If not decreasing budgets, then the same amount of budget, right? So it’s do more with less, or do more with the same.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And so that’s really how we see AI and Agentic coming in to really save the day for this, to help us to serve that entire area under the curve. And so what this means is…

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): shifting our mindset. Now, for us as a company at Gainsight, it’s actually shifting our positioning as… from being a SaaS company, software as a service, to being a RAS company, retention as a service. We want to get closer to the outcomes, all… it’s beholden on all SaaS companies now to get much closer to the outcomes.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): As a CS org, it’s the same type of mentality shift. It means going from

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): These playbooks where it’s humans executing retention as just these standard workflows, to now humans and agents working together to deliver outcomes, to deliver rent retention outcomes.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And when we do that well, it means going from focusing on the few, like that last chart, going… focusing on the 20%, to now reaching every customer.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): Focusing on augmenting human work to really now fully automating it in the long tail, and then

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): you know, where CSMs traditionally may have been consumed by all the tactical, busy grunt work, whatever you want to call it, freeing them up now to be more strategic. And so on the right side, this is really the self-actualization that we’ve all been reaching for in the customer success space in our roles.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): So, this RAS is an opportunity, it’s an opportunity for Gainsight, quite frankly, to redefine ourselves in many ways. It’s an opportunity for CS orgs to redefine how they’re doing their work.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): by bringing together this human-led touch for the most important customers, digital-led for the customers that still, you know, need to be interacted with, but at larger scale, and some automation, and then agentic-led for the long tail. Now, agentic lead, of course, can also feed into the other layers, and just like digital-led can feed into human-led as well.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): But at that Agentic, that long tail, that’s where Agentic is super important, because previously, we didn’t have any exposure, to that area under the curve. We were not protecting that customer base at all.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): So, that’s what we’re doing at Gainsight. We have our Gainsight customer OS, that’s our ecosystem, our platform, our constellation of different products.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): Where we’re mapping across the customer journey that they go on, helping customers learn, helping them adopt your products, helping them connect with your community, and ultimately helping them succeed in a more traditional

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): customer success platform type of product, and so we’re building out Atlas around that experience, around that life cycle, so that it is able to really… like, our…

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): Discrete agents are able to work together to help you no matter where you are, where your customer is in their journey, to deliver those retention outcomes.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And so…

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): you know, a couple of… this is not showing our product, but I actually thought this would be more useful in some ways for folks. You know, we’re launching Atlas now with our existing customers. We’ve actually got a really full pipeline and top, mid, and bottom funnel of demand.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): So, I thought, actually, what could be more… of course, we want to elicit as much interest in that product, but we’ve got our hands full, quite frankly, with the demand piece, and I wanted to really show folks, you know, some of the insights that we have about how you can prepare for Agentic at your organization.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): I’m gonna skip over this for the sake of time.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): Let me skip over that one, too, and go straight here. That there’s 3 things that we… that we like to, profess, to get yourself the best position to apply Agentic successfully at your company.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): The first is having the right data.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): to act on. Second is having clear documented processes, and the third is being really specific about what your outcomes are, what your objectives are, because the beauty of Agentic is that it gets us so much closer to driving those outcomes, going end-to-end, not just selling seats with fuzzy math of what value they’re delivering.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): But that means that we really need to get closer to those outcomes at the get-go.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): On the data side, this is how we previously saw the world of customer success, and how we understood the health of a customer. It was, are they using the product? What are the surveys telling us? You know, what’s finger wage in the air? What’s my human judgment about the health of the customers?

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And, there’s so much beneath that iceberg, and so the net-net here is to really, when you’re thinking about putting in an agentic program, try to be more forward-thinking into what are the different types of data that I’m going to need to plug into that pipeline to get the agent to do its job the best.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And, you know, start setting these things up now, the clean data hygiene, making sure you’re tracking everything before… before it’s time to go into, you know, and try out your Argente experiments. When you have that data, you can do really good things. We do this in our Staircase product.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): But, you know, no matter how you want to approach it, you’re able to find golden nuggets and emails from customers, churn risk indicators, and customer support tickets, of all places. You can find upsell opportunities. You know, and of course, we all know the common use case around, you know, phone calls and note-taking.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): But also being able to spot the different types of churn risk signals and those sorts of insights from calls.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): The second area that we, you know, try to educate folks on as they prepare for Agentic is making sure that you have your processes documented, because the agents that you’re going to be using

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): are only going to be as successful as the blueprints that they can mimic from your human folks, from your human CSMs. So, it’s about being very intentional

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): with what’s the goal I’m trying to drive, which part of the customer lifecycle am I trying to augment or automate, and let me make sure that I, first of all, have the processes in place today, and then can map those processes out so that the agent can, again, mimic those processes when it does its job.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And then third piece I already mentioned a little bit was knowing what your objectives and outcomes are from the very beginning. In the past, we’ve all seen ROI calculators for buying software and things in the past, but it’s so much more important now.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): Because the benefit of Agentic is that, again, you can get closer to driving those specific outcomes, improving the ROI of your programs and your initiatives.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): But, of course, that’s a double-edged sword, because if you don’t take the time to think about those things up front, and you’re not measuring those things, and you’re not managing that, then, you know, it’s going to show much more clearly that you’re failing in your goals, that the agentic program or the software that you’re purchasing is not up to snuff.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): So, really be intentional about what is the North Star of your Agentic program.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): you know, break it down, build out that business case, use that ROI calculator, and then don’t just set it and forget it, but continue to measure it throughout your program with Agentic.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): it will help you demonstrate your ROI and really prove you out to be a rock star to your leadership, if you do this right.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): So, I host a podcast, I already plugged it last time, but it’s called Unchurned. It’s a customer success podcast that is bringing together the theme of Agentic and how folks are transforming their CS orgs through AI.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And we profile several folks here. I’ll go through these quickly, I know we’re almost up at time. But these are 3 women that have, transformed their roles and their organizations, but I’m actually more interested in their roles that they’ve transformed through AI.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And the first one, I’m proud to say, is a Gainster. So, Kalpanel Krishnakumar is an enterprise CSM at Gainsight. Her challenge is that she went from having 25 accounts in her book of business to 35 accounts overnight. It was… it was, you know, loaded upon her, 40% increase. And so, how is she going to scale the same level of quality

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): you know, while being able to sleep at night, have that peace of mind, and not just being completely inundated. So.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): Through the workflow that she developed on the right.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): she was able to reduce her time in preparing for EBRs and business reviews with customers by 60-75%.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And it involves taking all the data we talked about from Staircase, our product, from our co-pilot, from Notebook LM, which gives her mind maps, throwing it into ChatGBT, that gives her an outline of different slides. She then puts it into Gamma, and then she… it’s been able to help her scale her relationships.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): Sophia Barbosa on the other end, she’s the CCO of a giant company, BMC, and one of her first acts as CCO about a year ago was to implement a, a program to build an Agentic platform themselves called Sixedo. And you can see here the different, Agentic applications that are

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): have been deployed and are currently in development that have really driven value for her. Specifically, her first use case was building out a customer success story agent to showcase all the value stories from her company, and it immediately, overnight, was able to 3X the production of value stories that her team was able to gather.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): And then, at a smaller company, I think it’s a Series A, Series B company, a good friend of mine, Leron Yahalomi.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): she, she only had two people on her team, including herself, for a company that’s growing off the rails. And so she needed to develop these different GPTs and applications in order to really be able to keep up with the pace of her growth.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): So, you know, some concrete examples, wanted to leave you with that. No matter where you start in the Agendic world, whether you’re working with a company like Gainsight to help you get it off the ground, perhaps at a little more scale, or it’s more of a shadow AI initiative coming from the grounds up, you know, hopefully some of those tips and tricks are helpful.

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Julia Nimchinski: Phenomenal demo, thank you so much, Josh. Let’s just address a couple of questions, and we’re gonna transition to our next fireside chat. People are asking, how does Atlas work with the sales and CRM software they already use?

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): Yeah, so, we…

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): take in the data from, you know, so let’s say it’s Salesforce, right? You know, we’re able to ingest that data, and that’s a lot of the context that Atlas is using.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): to know about your customer, let’s say in the case of our renewal agent, to know the details of your customer before it initiates the sequence of reaching out to the customer and, you know, what way, and what approach it’s going to take, and all those sorts of things. Of course.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): It’s part of our CS, Gainsight CS platform as well, so we’re keeping it deeply embedded there. But yeah, it takes all the information from those different data sources.

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Julia Nimchinski: And let’s do one more. Can you speak about how your AI is able to spot hidden risks or opportunities across different customer interactions?

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): We’re over time, so I will leave you on this. Staircase AI, that is our platform for doing that. Staircase AI

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): It’s amazing. It takes all of your different data sources from email, from your Gong calls, your recordings, from your product telemetry, and that’s exactly what it does, is it spots those uncover risks and those expansion opportunities, which is potentially equally as important.

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Julia Nimchinski: Amazing. Thank you so much.

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Josh Schachter (Gainsight): Thank you.