Drive Expansion With AI (Without Breaking Your CS Stack)

Julia Nimchinski:
Transitioning to our next session, Gainsight. Expansion intelligence built into customer success. Welcome to the show, Brady! How are you doing? What’s the latest and greatest with Gainsight?

Brady Bluhm:
There’s a lot of late and great, that’s for sure. I’m doing really great, how are you, Julia?

Julia Nimchinski:
I’m very excited, lots of changes over there, so… excited.

Brady Bluhm:
There are a lot of changes and a lot of… a lot of growth happening with Gainsight, and one of them is… is the product that I’m focused on, Staircase AI. We acquired Staircase, it’s almost 18 months ago is when… when those conversations were happening at this point now, so just under for the official acquisition, and I’ve, I’ve been leading it since we acquired the product. I come from a CS background, sales and then CS child actor, actually, before that, and so, random, random fact on that end. But bringing my CS expertise, my product expertise, and CS leadership into Staircase has really been, like, the sweet spot in helping to build the product that I always wish I had as a CSM and account manager in that sense. So, excited to share some, and especially on some of these new features that I’m gonna demo and model today.

Julia Nimchinski:
Awesome. Let’s dive in.

Brady Bluhm:
Okay. I’m gonna go to slideshow mode, and then share. Alright, are you seeing my screen here?

Julia Nimchinski:
Yep.

Brady Bluhm:
Perfect. Okay, so we’re gonna focus today on our expansion analyst, and how we’re using AI to help identify and drive expansion within customer bases. So, just a little bit of context first. Where Staircase specializes is in taking the unstructured conversational data that all of your teams are having with customers, and turning that into structured, curated context. for your teams and for your AI systems. So, hopefully, that lands. I’ll have a little to show that in a minute, too, but ultimately, within our revenue teams right now, things are changing, and we’re gonna talk a little bit about that first. We’re seeing a lot of organizations move CS under revenue. Gainsight has done that. itself, which, when that happened here, it was like, like, okay, like, things are shifting, right? And things are definitely shifting in the market. There’s been a lot of market pressures, also, around this. Money is way more expensive than it was 3 or 4 years ago, and so teams are also shrinking. people are handling more and doing more, and we need to be collaborative more than ever. And so, in today’s world, there’s competitive pressures, not only from struggles financially in the market, but also with AI, these rising, quick, quick-built new applications that are putting pressures on SaaS products that have never existed before. And so, it’s critical now. CS used to be about keeping relationships really strong, and really relying on relationships to drive renewals and drive expansions in that sense. While that’s still important, and I’m a relational person. It is critical now that we also really prove revenue, and really help to drive revenue with our customers as well. That is clear from also the studies that are out there. This is a Forester study, and one of the trends also, a lot of companies are still putting 60-70% of their marketing spend into finding and getting new customers, but ultimately, where is your greatest treasure trove of expansion? And where is your greatest treasure trove of revenue? It’s with the customers you have right now. You already have buyers, you already have relationships with those buyers, and you have ways to upsell and new features and new opportunities that you can sell to new teams, etc. Cross-sell, upsell, more seats, all of those kinds of things, is really where companies are seeing the most success now. So Gainsight is really shifting, and, and driving a shift from software as a service to revenue as a service. That’s what our CEO is saying time in and time out. It’s now RAS, R-A-A-S. Revenue as a service is what we are driving with our products. And so, are you really tapping into your customers, and how? These signals are buried, and they’re hidden, also. A lot of times, like, our data can be messy. I heard that on some of the calls earlier, right? And so everyone… every customer I’ve ever worked with, and every company I’ve ever worked with, has had messy data in that sense, and had a hard time putting the pieces of the puzzle together to find Find out, where do we really drive these opportunities? And what has been most fascinating to me, as I’ve drilled in and been working with Staircase for these last 18 months, is how so much rich context lives in conversations. That is where people are talking about opportunities, that’s where they’re talking about gaps, that’s where they’re sharing their struggles, or where they want to have success with your products. It’s all in this conversational data. It’s in tickets, it’s in emails, it’s in chats, it’s in meetings, it’s in calls that your teams are having with customers. And previously, this was really hard to tap into. Before AI, it was like, whew, okay, like, there was no real cross-team visibility in this, but now with software like Staircase, we have connectors to all of these things and feed all of this unstructured data in, and then we, one, create signals for risk, expansion, new opportunities, but what our shift has been at Staircase over the last, like, 9 months, has not only been providing these signals, but also taking all of that unstructured data and turning it into structured, valuable, rich context for your teams, and again, for your agents. So… We are tapping into cross-conversations across all your teammates that are engaging with customers. Every call, every meeting, every email, every support ticket is all captured, analyzed, and brought into context in that sense. So, with that, because I’m not too big of a slide guy, I am going to show you one more slide to set the stage before I jump into the demo, and actually show you Staircase live as it is today. So, our first expansion analyst, or our first analyst agent, these are our insight agents, and I want you to think about… so, there’s been a lot of, like, actioning agents that we’ve seen. And Gainsight itself, Gainsight CS, that’s where Gainsight is focused on, is how to drive actions off of Insights, and help your teams to drive actions, along with Create agents to drive those actions. Where Staircase focuses is on insight. It’s on curating all the context. And so, just at the beginning of our Q4, we launched our expansion analyst. And this analyst is built off of 3 sub-agents, and so we have the first, which is our experience curator. When this turns on in an instance, it scans the last 9 months of ARR uplift that has been detected across all your customers, and then it drills in and it analyzes all of the conversations that led up to that win. What did your teams do, who were they talking with, etc. And it builds out an experience library for each of those past wins, so that we can learn and personalize to your teams how you work, how you sell your products, and then have our agents Personalized for you in the outputs that they create. Then we have our signal scout that’s constantly scanning all of the current comms for those signals and opportunities. When it finds those, it kicks it to our opportunity analyst, who then drills into that account, looks over the last few months of communications, and says, okay, here’s everything that’s going on, automatically builds out all the context around each opportunity happening at that account. So. The interest… the most interesting thing to me as the product manager on this, when this first came back from my engineers, at the beginning of last year, we set out to have a new signal, which was new opportunity detected. And we have that, but we also came back with. here’s every opportunity that’s in motion, and all the details about those opportunities. And when I first saw this, like, as a CS, former CS leader and CS professional, I was like, oh my god, this is so amazing. And so, without further ado, let me actually tap in. And show it to you. Too many tabs. Alright, here we go. So when you come into Staircase, you land on an executive dashboard, you get a personalized, summary, and you can ask Staircase questions right here about… across your accounts, right? Coming down, we have a few data visual views, and then these are our insight cards, which I would say are kind of inbox zero cards. These are things I’m looking as a CSM or a CS leader, like, do we have accounts dark? That should not be the case. When we launched the expansion analyst, we put in these two new cards as well. This is every account that has had expansion potential identified, and then these are the ones that are really in motion, like, that have a readiness level of 3 or higher. So, our readiness scale is 1, 2, 3, 4, up to 5. 5 is, like, the deal’s about to be signed. So I’m gonna hop into this view here. and look across my accounts. So, one, I come in here and I can see immediately I have the expansion readiness level that I can sort by and filter by in that sense. I have the high-level summary across all of these accounts of what’s happening on there, so I can quickly get up to speed on the accounts that have opportunities and understand that. I’m going to drill in, though, and open up Abbott. So, on this account, Staircase, honestly, I’m a big fan of our UX UI that we inherited with Staircase and have built upon. So, we can come down here, you can get a quick view of the account and its journey over the last 12 months to see what are the signals that have come in across that last year. Find, we had some risks happening at the… a few quarters or two quarters ago. But now we’re coming into a highly positive message, a commercial discussion, and we’ve identified opportunities. And so. Now I’m coming to this… what the opportunity analyst curates when we identify these opportunities. So you get, its… its speed and its velocity. Is it heating? Is it cooling? Is it steady? You get the readiness level from 4 to 5. You see the last time that it was generated. You get a high-level overview of the account. This is what we saw on that table earlier, is this summary level. And then, also, the AI is able to pick up on the ARR potential for this. One, if it’s been explicitly talked about on calls, it will… it will capture that, and it’ll say this is $120,000. This one has not been explicitly talked about, but it knows it’s significant because there’s a multi-year renewal being talked about with premium add-ons, plus seat and services expansion potential in this deal. So it knows that it’s significant. In certain circumstances, if they’re saying, like, oh, it’s going to be 15 seats, it can look back at that experience library and say, okay, across other deals with 15-seat uplift, about how much was that? And it’ll reason with that and give it to you in the ARR potential. Now, we didn’t want to overwhelm people with too much information, and so we do hide more details here that you can drill in and see more. You get who are the executive sponsors that are engaging on this, what’s the momentum context around this heating, cooling? Tell me what that context is. The last two weeks, what experience or what activity has been firing, and then are there any timeline pressure points that are happening, too? So this is all that. high-level account. Side of things. And then, on the opportunities that are at play here, we have a drill down for each of these. And so you’ll see we have some upsell potential here, we have cross-sell potential as well on this deal, platform expansion is there, so scaling their automation pilot, we have services is being potentially sold, and some seat growth. So this is really, like, a very rich opportunity that we have. And in any one of these, I can then click and drill down, and each of them essentially gets a one-pager of details. You get a summary about that, you get the opportunity details, you get an action plan that is based off of past experiences that your teams have had, and what they did that was successful. So this is personalized to your teams. And then also, what information don’t we have on this? So the next time your teams join a call, we can tee them up with, here’s some questions you should ask the customer to enrich… this data set even more, and then the opportunity analyst will capture that and add it to the context here. Beyond that, there are some other views of this that you can see. So, I showed you a table view, and within our reports, you can come to our expansion analysis, and here, this is organized in a way that makes sense. I’ve been using this as a resource personally, even as a product manager. I’ll download this and drop it into my Cloud instance and do some cross-analysis across this. That’s actually a feature in our near-term roadmap to add that functionality at the top here, our Ask Staircase and a summary at the top. We plan to add here as well. And then just one more view also on this expansion angle. is our topics view. So… Our topics is constantly scanning every conversation that’s happening. We have some out-of-the-box parent topics that are common post-sales and customer success focused lenses, and so one of those is growth and expansion. And so I can come in here to growth and expansion, and now I’m looking across all accounts. with this LLM-focused… the LLM is scanning every single conversation, every transcript, every email, and looking for the commonalities across these. So I get these subtopics that come up, and I can see if there’s positive, neutral, or negative mentions across these. And I can also drill into an account-focused view. So, I actually want to drill in… let’s look at the accounts that have seed expansion potential, because that’s something we’re focusing on, and we want to just drive these and close them quickly. So then I can come into this granular view and see all of the companies that are talking about seed expansion and have that potential in this cross-account view in that sense. Topics is really valuable. It’s valuable for a CSM, but it’s really valuable for an operations leader. an executive leader that’s looking for trends across all their customers, and also for product managers, to be honest. I get a lot of value out of our topics feature. So with that, I also want to show you one more thing that just launched this week. I know I’ve been focused on the expansion analyst and finding opportunities within our accounts, but let’s be real, like, what Staircase… one of the main purposes people buy Staircase is for risk management, and just really quick… Quick, I’m going to show you the architecture of this. We built off of the same agentic structure, and so we’ve upgraded our risk analysis to scan back, do the same, build out the experience library around all churn risks that had come up, and whether they were lost or won, what happened, what were the key learnings. It’s literally like a 5-6 page output that goes in for each of those risks into the experience library that our AI And then we’re scanning signals, we kick off the risk analyst, and now we’ve also added a playbook creator. So this is a new agent that we’ve added for our risk analyst that I will show you within the interface. It builds out the risk severity, what’s the trajectory, the risk reasons. It lays those out, and now it creates a playbook and also shows you those stakeholders. folders involved. So, I have one tab already loaded for this, because I do want to give us time to talk and get into questions as well. So, on this account here, we see… the new, risk analysis. And so, when a churn risk is detected, it fires off the risk analyst, and then it does an in-depth, over the last few months of everything that’s been happening that might have led to this becoming a risk. So it gives you… this is volatile, meaning it’s, like, it’s kind of back and forth. It’s a little bit… a little bit wild. It’s very at risk, so this is definitely a churn risk when we’re at level 4 or 5 on the risk severity. It gives me that high-level summary, tells me which product it’s about, and then it gives me those risk reasons. So it breaks down why is this customer at risk, it gives you the categories of that risk, so they haven’t been getting ROI, they have some pricing objections, they’re evaluating our… so there’s a competitive risk here as well that’s at play. Their business priorities have shifted, they have low usage, and so, like, at a glance, you can get up to speed and understand exactly what is happening with this account. and then take action on it. So over here, we have the actions laid out in the order that should be taken by the teammates. Our next, phase of iteration on this is to connect this into Gainsight CTAs to actually drive and automate… automate some of those and semi-automate them with teams in the loop as well. And so this is that insight intelligence layer that’s telling you, the first thing you should do, we gotta deliver the compliance package. That’s part of the risk that they have. You need to run a demo on that for them. This is all based on what your teams have done with similar risks in the past. And then it also lays out who are the stakeholders from the account that are involved, and whether they’re neutral, an advocate, or a detractor, according to this risk and this situation that we’re at right now. So again, curating incredibly rich context, and the other thing that, maybe as we’re talking, I can demo, we’ve launched our MCP connector in the last month. And I’ve been playing with that a lot, because I am a Claude fanboy, and I use Claude code myself, and now I’ve been building a lot more on Claude Desktop again, and having customer… rich and accurate customer context in workflows is absolutely incredible. Like, as I’ve been playing with MCP, it’s honestly been making me think about the future of UX and UI, And even though we… I personally love our UX UI in Staircase, in the future, I can see a lot of our users never logging into our platform, and instead leveraging Staircase in their workflows and pipelines. A lot of those tools I saw earlier… here today, reach out to other tools to bring in the right… to bring in what they need. That is the goal of Staircase, is to give you that data set, an accuracy that’s curated and easy to query, and get everything you need that’s valuable right to where you need it. So, with that, I’ll stop sharing for a little bit. If we want to get… I want to leave time for Q&A and conversation about this, and I know there’s been some questions about the future of CS, and that’s always on my mind, too, so we can go there if you’d like to.

Julia Nimchinski:
Super insightful demo, thank you so much, Brady, and your lads is really… helpful here. Product NCS, I mean, you’re just the ideal person to present it. We have a question from… from the audience, and The question is from Joe, and he’s asking, did you mention the source of the intent data used here? Is it purely native, or are you sourcing from, someone like Demandbase, XED, ZoomInfo? And that looks.

Brady Bluhm:
Yeah, so it is… Staircase right now is purely conversation-based. And so, we do… we create health scores, right? So, a sentiment score, we, an engagement score, an open item score, which is like, do you have things you need to do with this customer, that are open right now? So we create those scores with both ML models and also LLM on top of them as well. And all of it is running off of conversational data. So one way to think of our health scores is actually on… this is how your customer feels about their relationship with you, because this is what they’re saying. It’s gauging their sentiment based on the actual conversations that are happening.

Julia Nimchinski:
Awesome. You’ve mentioned that you would envision a future without logging in.

Brady Bluhm:
Yeah. So, I’m just curious.

Julia Nimchinski:
How far are we from that future? And in terms of 2026, what’s on the roadmap? What are you allowed to share?

Brady Bluhm:
Yeah, We have a… I have a pretty ambitious roadmap, I’m not gonna lie. How much we can accomplish and actually bite off of it. If I get to, like, 60% of my roadmap, it’s… I’m gonna be like, yes, like, this is amazing stuff that… just… there’s so much potential, honestly, and that’s one of the challenges I have right now as a product manager, is what to prioritize, because there’s so much opportunity. in what LLMs are able to do. Like, today compared to a year ago, so on your first question, Julia, like, how close are we to that point of, like, not needing to log in to different systems? I’ll say it depends on the type of user that you are. I would say, like. 3% of users? could already be at the point where they don’t need to log into most of their systems. Because of the advances that have happened with MCP tooling, with, like, Claude skills that they’ve open sourced as well, there’s just so much that you can tap into and bring to yourself in your LLM flows that if you have the right infrastructure built out. you don’t have to log in very much. It’s one of my goals this year, like, is to definitely, like, never have to log into my email. I’d love to never touch Slack again, right? Like, there’s so many tools that I would love to just, like, knock out a lot faster with my LLM flows and my agents. And so, for advanced users, I would say… I think we’ll get there this year. There’s still things I have to log into, because there’s tools that aren’t quite there yet, and that I need access to for data and other things, but there are a lot of tools I don’t really need to log into. I do occasionally, but I bring it to me a lot more often than I used to. Now, for an average user, that’s very different. And actually, that’s how I think about UX and UI. in Staircase is like, okay, I’m not building there for the expert users. Now, I’m building, like, okay, what do we add capability-wise to our MCP connector for advanced users, but for other users, like, these UX UI displays of the agents that I just showed, the risk and expansion analyst, it’s like, it’s incredibly important to me to help users that are not AI fluent to get a lot of value out of AI without having to go and build their own agent and build workflows that connect all these different things. It’s like, sure, some of us are geeks and we love that stuff, but the majority of people are not, and the majority of CSMs and sales reps are not, right? And so, we need to deliver value in the UX UI, I think for a few years. In ways that help those teammates start to use AI in ways that wow them.

Julia Nimchinski:
Love that. And in terms of product architecture, just curious your thoughts on, you know, all of the… type and popularity of Oppenclaw, MoldBot, and generally the ambient AI, Full context, absorption, sort of movement.

Brady Bluhm:
Yeah, I definitely have thoughts and opinions on it all. One of the things I love about my job is it starts to get into existential conversations pretty regularly, and having been, like, I’m a fan of Buddhism, and I’m a fan of, like, other, like, ancient… ancient ideas in that way, and just how that’s starting to play out in, like, this cumulative knowledge. Even getting on to, like. book, and starting to see the AI’s conversing with themselves, and learning from each other, and starting to have more and more recursive learning loops. I think we are very much at a state right now where things, like. we’re at the… it’s already been expen… like, exponentially growing, but I think we are coming this year and next into this point where it’s… it’s going to be skyrocketing as to how AI is learning from itself. As far as existential crises go, like, I have some existential crises about just all products in general. like, products, and, like, yeah, we could go… we could get into this for a very long time, Julia, but ultimately, most products have been built with a UX UI for people to log in, to click into different spaces, and do things. One of the things I believe will happen more and more, and that we will need to adapt as product people, and as product builders. Is people want things to come to them. They don’t want to search for things anymore. They don’t want to have to click to different places to find what they need to find. If they’re logging into your product, like, ultimately my goal would be to have one screen that you log into and have everything come to you in an intuitive way that helps you work effectively. We aren’t there yet, and I think there’s challenges to getting there, but I think that is the future.

Julia Nimchinski:
Yeah, one of the elephants in the room is obviously security, and you kind of touched on it, or the risk management agent. I’m curious, you know, how else Gainsight is addressing it.

Brady Bluhm:
Yeah, security is very top of mind for us at Gainsight, and man, being on the Staircase team in particular, I have joined more security calls than I had ever joined in my life before, that’s for sure. Security is a very important thing for us, especially when we’re tapping into emails, when we’re tapping into meetings, when we’re tapping into conversations. Right now, I have a full PRD ready. and we’re teeing up the work to meet workers’ council requirements for our EU customers. We launched an EU data center last year around that as well, so meeting compliance across different countries is a challenge because there’s different requirements across things, right? And so, being able to meet those is incredibly important. One of the stances we have at Staircase is that we will… we will never touch your internal conversations with Staircase. I know there’s value in, like, a meeting with teammates talking about a customer internally. That’s okay, they already have the context they need if they’re talking about it there. We only tap into customer conversations. We use the domain for that. We also… you can have a clear exclusion list of who will never be captured in any way. And for EU requirements, there’s also the ability, instead of mass adding all your teams in there, the teams have to opt in and have to actually accept and do it themselves. So there’s a lot of steps around that to make this secure and safe. And, we also have plans to… we have role-based access controls, but we want deeper role-based access controls around it as well.

Julia Nimchinski:
Love it. Patrick, you touched a little bit on, brady, I’m sorry.

Brady Bluhm:
Yeah, no problem.

Julia Nimchinski:
Patrick joining Yeah, so you touched a little bit on an interesting use case with your agents when, it just surfaces insights that are missing, essentially. So, you kind of push it to go, you know, beyond the obvious, workflows in terms of revenue workflows, ES workflows, expansion. What other, you know, edge cases or interesting use cases are you just a fan of?

Brady Bluhm:
Yeah, so roadmap-wise, there are a few other agents that we’re planning, inside agents. One, we want to bring the cross-account view of all of these, and make it really easy to operationalize. So that’s one area that we do some right now, and I want to make it just very easy and very intuitive for leaders to, like, know exactly who’s at risk and who to lean into across a book of business. But a couple other areas for our analyst agents in particular, adoption understanding and bringing in product usage data is something we plan to do inside a staircase. It just helps us to find the nuance across risk that might not show up in conversations. And then a value analyst is another that I’ll share, is being able to understand what do people want. Why did they buy the product? Where are we driving value with that? And measure that as well, both quantitatively and qualitatively. So… and that’ll feed into, like, Gainsight success plans, it’ll feed into other systems in that way, too.

Julia Nimchinski:
Awesome. Well, what’s the best next step, Brady?

Brady Bluhm:
Yeah, go to gainsight.com. And Staircase is a part of that Gainsight product family, and so Staircase is being sold in a bundle with Gainsight, so anytime Gainsight’s being sold, it’s being sold with Staircase, because we view this intelligence as such a core part of everything we’re doing, and our integration roadmap is really strong. And then, Staircase Standalone is available as well, so if you’re maybe a smaller mid-market customer and you feel like Gainsight might be a little much for you, Staircase can be a great place to start and start to feed you that intelligence within Staircase itself.

Julia Nimchinski:
Amazing. Thank you so much again.

Brady Bluhm:
You’re welcome. Thank you all.