This guest post is by Sean Brookover, a CSM on ChurnZero’s award-winning CX team.
Do you know who your customer team’s AI champions are—and are you setting them up for success? If you don’t, or aren’t, you’re missing one of the most effective ways to drive your team’s AI adoption.
What’s an AI champion, you ask?
Even before ChurnZero launched the first AI assistant built into a customer success platform, I was experimenting with AI. I loved its potential to help me minimize the most repetitive parts of my job so I could focus on the strategic challenges that unlock the most value for ChurnZero customers.
What I didn’t expect was how much AI would change the way I worked. It turned me from a reactive CSM into a proactive one, gave me a personal mentor when I needed to bounce around ideas, and helped me sharpen my strategic thinking.
I didn’t set out to be an “early adopter”, let alone an AI champion, but once my team saw what I was doing, they got excited and wanted to learn — which is exactly what you should want to happen as a customer leader.
So how can you find and activate your own AI champions, and set them up for success?
How do you find your customer team’s AI champion?
The first step is realizing that you have an AI champion. It’s probably the person on your team who’s already experimenting with AI and sharing their discoveries.
When my team first saw what I was doing, I got a reputation overnight. It started when I used AI to complete a success plan exercise in a training workshop. I fed AI a few examples, gave it some context, and let it generate an entire spreadsheet in 30 seconds—light years faster than anything my colleagues had put together manually. After that, the questions started rolling in.
AI champions already have frontline experience, which means they’re not just talking about AI in theory—they’re testing it in real-world CS scenarios, seeing what works, and adapting their workflows accordingly. They understand what’s possible and can translate that into meaningful efficiency gains across the team. If you want to get the most out of AI in customer success, you need to empower these people.
1. Encourage, empower, and incentivize your AI champions to lead.
Once an AI champion starts making an impact, the next logical step is for them to share their knowledge with the rest of the team. That’s where things get tricky.
Teaching others how to use AI effectively could be a full-time job in itself. It’s not just about telling people what prompts to use—it’s about showing them how to interact with AI, refine their inputs, and think in ways that make AI more useful. When my company realized what I was doing, leaders asked me to host training sessions, share my methods, and help the team adopt AI. I was happy to help, but the truth is, it’s time-consuming.
If companies really want to build AI competency across their CS team, they need to formalize knowledge sharing. That could mean creating structured training, building a shared AI knowledge base, or even establishing a hybrid role where a CSM splits their time between managing accounts and leading AI adoption.
You might consider putting financial incentives on the table. I’m not saying money is the only answer—public recognition and career growth opportunities go a long way—but you should empower your AI champions in a way that makes the additional effort worth their time.
Get more actionable advice on driving faster AI adoption in ChurnZero’s new AI guide for customer teams.
2. Give your team the tools to emulate your champions’ success.
A common roadblock I see is that teams try to replicate what an AI champion is doing, but they’re stuck using free versions of AI tools. That’s a surefire way to slow down adoption.
Early on, I was using the paid version of ChatGPT because it’s significantly more capable. It lets me upload files, analyze data, and get better, more nuanced responses. A lot of my teammates were trying to achieve the same results on the free version and they weren’t getting the same level of outcomes. This can lead to frustration or, in some cases, abandonment of AI altogether. If you’re serious about leveraging AI, you need to invest in the right tools.
The reality is, a paid AI tool—or better yet, an AI-powered customer platform—pays for itself over and over again in efficiency gains. Scale it across a CS team of 20, 50, or 100, and you’re looking at a massive impact. Free AI gives you free-tier results. If you want real value, invest.
3. Make AI training part of your team’s onboarding.
You wouldn’t dream of onboarding a new hire without giving them a deep dive into your customer success platform. Treat AI the same way. Right now, a big gap in most organizations is that AI knowledge is fragmented—some people use it, some don’t, and there’s no standardized training on best practices.
If I were designing an AI program for a CS team, I’d build it into onboarding from day one. New CSMs should learn how AI is used within the organization, what tools they have access to, and how to get the most out of them. This ensures AI adoption isn’t just dependent on a few power users—it becomes part of the company’s DNA.
4. As a leader, be open-minded and forward-thinking.
I admire ChurnZero’s leadership for how little pushback I received when I first started using AI. They saw the big picture—AI was making my job easier and my work better.
That’s not to say AI should be a free-for-all—you need guardrails in place as you feed AI the data that makes it so powerful. But to maximize efficiency gains and stay ahead of the curve, you need to encourage innovators too, which means taking an open-minded and forward-thinking leadership approach. Give your AI champions the support, tools, and incentives, and they’ll help you lead that charge.
