The fundamental questions facing leaders are: What happens when a journey that relies on human judgment is suddenly executed by AI? Who owns the handoffs, where does accountability sit, and who does the customer trust when automation falls short?

Most customer journeys already contain gaps that teams bridge through experience, intuition, and heroic effort. AI will expose and amplify those gaps. Applied thoughtfully, it can create a more proactive and scalable customer experience. Applied to an unchanged operating model, it will create more problems and faster.

This session focuses on the leadership decisions your journey redesign depends on, not a tour of features. You’ll get a live read on where your customer journey stands today and identify practical actions to advance to the next level.

Learn how to

• Assess where your customer journey sits on the maturity curve and distinguish perceived maturity from readiness to scale.
• Start from the customer, employee and business results AI has to deliver, rather than bolting it onto the process you have.
• Uncover one blind spot in your current operating model that breaks accountability once AI runs part of the journey.

Speakers

• Alexis Neal, Founder & Executive Operating Advisor, Sage CS Advisory
• Tess McGraw, Principal, Post-Sale Strategy & Operations, Sage CS Advisory

Bob London breaks down the principles of coaching conversational skills through the Radically Authentic Discovery (RAD) lens, then shows how AI makes that coaching scalable.

Bob will bring those principles to life by conducting live RAD call assessments and coaching exercises using real attendee conversations and scenarios. Selected calls will be evaluated in real time, with specific examples of what worked, what was missed, what RAD would look like instead, and how to improve the next conversation.

You’ll leave with a framework for coaching the skills that make customer conversations worth having.

Learn how to

• Assess discovery, listening, curiosity, business alignment and conversational discipline rather than generic call scores.
• Apply the RAD framework to a live call, from missed moment to stronger alternative.
• Turn call transcripts into specific coaching feedback with AI and prep for the next call.

Speaker

Bob London, Founder & Chief Listening Officer, BobLondon.co

Learn how to

• Identify the five structural failures of the generic Save Plan used in CS.
• Use AI to apply cross-industry frameworks directly to your at-risk accounts.
• Define what saved means in your org, and build a system that goes beyond the renewal.

Speaker

Naomi Aiken, Founder and Principal Strategist, Techtonic Lift

Participants will learn how to advocate for, build, and scale a commercial program for their CS teams.

Learn how to

• Assess your team’s maturity with regard to revenue ownership and design based on what you need
• Understand the fundamentals for team enablement, mindset, and success.
• Leadership ops – what to design and measure for success

Speaker

Parul Bhandari, CEO, CustomerXSuccess

Matt walks through a predictive scoring model that identifies roughly 80% of churn before it surfaces in renewal conversations, agentic workflows that trigger intervention without waiting for a CSM to notice, and a signal layer that replaces lagging health scores with behavioral and intent data that moves.

The result: a 46% increase in renewal rates.

This is not a talk about AI tools. It is a talk about what happens when CS leaders think like engineers, build like operators, and refuse to let a customer tell them something is wrong first.

Learn how to

• Identify the behavioral and intent signals that predict churn before the renewal window.
• Understand why CS owning activation, not just monitoring it, is the foundation every predictive model depends on.
• Architect an AI-native retention system that surfaces risk and triggers action.

Speaker

Matt Ryan, Vice President of Global Solutions & Success, G2

You will leave with a realistic framework for launching and maturing a digital success strategy, including operational lessons, quick wins, and scalable engagement tactics you can implement immediately.

Learn how to

• Prioritize progress over perfection to build and operationalize a digital success strategy in phases focusing on quick wins, measurable impact, and scalable processes.
• Use digital success to help increase GRR in a challenging customer segment.
• Use customer signals to identify onboarding risks early, accelerate time-to-value, re-engage low-adoption customers, and trigger targeted engagement.

Speakers

• Petros Perselis, SVP Global Customer Success, Hack the Box
• Alexandria Garrett, Senior CSM, Digital Success, Hack the Box

At Canto, we built an agentic AI framework for retention that does exactly that: combining ChurnZero’s AI Risk Signal agents with external sources (Gong, Zendesk, ZoomInfo, G2), Claude, and automated ChurnZero journey-based mitigation plans.

We’ll walk through what we built, how it works, and the decisions we made along the way. A core part of our approach: designing for quality over volume so those insights get used.

And we’ll share results, lessons, and a blueprint you can start applying today.

Learn how to

• Architect an end-to-end AI-powered risk workflow
• Keep AI trustworthy by building conflict detection when AI and human assessments diverge
• Apply the same agentic framework to growth.

Speakers

• Chad Estes, VP of Customer Experience, Canto
• Ariana Gum, Post-Sales Operations Manager, Canto

Drawing on their experience scaling a CS and support organizations, these leaders challenge the conventional view of customer success as a service function and make the case that every CSM interaction is a revenue moment. 

They cover three shifts. Moving your team’s identity from reactive relationship manager to proactive value seller, with the Challenger methodology as the operating model. Rebuilding executive business reviews (EBRs) around the customer’s pain points and outcome-based metrics, so an EBR influences the renewal instead of reporting activity. And defining the CS-owned revenue indicators that connect your team’s daily work to what your C-suite cares about.

Learn how to

• Reframe the CSM role from relationship manager to value seller using Challenger.
• Rebuild your EBRs around customer pain points and outcome-based metrics.
• Define the CS-owned revenue metrics that prove your impact to the C-suite.

Speakers

• Chelsea Madden, VP of CS & Support, Cinc Systems

• Elliot de Bruin, Senior Manager of Customer Intelligence – International Markets, Lightspeed

• Monica Tison, Director of CS Center of Excellence, Freshworks

Brendan shares how Black Duck built a Digital Experience Program on ChurnZero to support thousands of customers across the portfolio: automated enablement journeys, product-specific communications and a segmentation model that routes the right coverage to the right accounts.

Digital engagement doesn’t replace CSMs. It gives the Strategic CSMs their time back for executive relationships, adoption and expansion. Brendan also shares what breaks when you scale digital-first and the fixes that make it work.

You’ll leave with a segmentation model that funds both motions and the engagement metrics to prove it works.

Learn how to

• Fund high-touch and fully digital coverage from one segmentation model instead of competing strategies.
• Build automated journeys and product-specific communications on ChurnZero.
• Fix what breaks when you scale digital engagement.

Speaker

Brendan Nesheim, Senior Director of Global Customer Success and Digital Experience, Black Duck

Aaron distinguishes technology-first thinking from problem-first thinking, and the split turns on which question you ask first: “What can this do?” or “What do I need done?” That’s the decision point that determines whether an AI implementation succeeds or fails. He covers the three tech-first traps that push leaders toward the wrong question: FOMO, demo seduction and solution-seeking.

You’ll leave with a problem-first self-audit and at least one task in your own workflow where AI is on the table without a defined problem behind it.

Learn how to

• Distinguish technology-first thinking from problem-first thinking before you evaluate a tool.
• Recognize which of the three tech-first traps has shown up in your own team’s past or current AI decisions.
• Apply the problem-first self-audit to your own workflow.

Speaker

Aaron Thompson, Founder and CEO, Red Slacks

You’ll leave with a retention model that scales across regions and a way to align CS and sales around expansion.

Learn how to

• Design a retention operating model that scales across regions and products.
• Act on early risk signals before a renewal is already at risk.
• Activate CSQLs as a measurable path from retention to growth.

Speaker

Gillian Fischer, VP of Customer Success, Prophix

Andrea Bumstead shares research and findings from working with B2B SaaS companies ranging from $5 million to $3 billion + in ARR. Drawing on AI-native operating models and active transformation engagements, she covers how post-sales organizations are changing and why AI investment alone doesn’t drive the change.

She also names the capabilities post-sales teams need next: technical fluency, enablement, operational redesign, consultative engagement and AI-ready workflows. And she’s direct about what AI does and doesn’t mean for the CSM role.

Learn how to

• Read what the forward-deployed engineer model signals for post-sales organizations.
• Identify the capabilities your post-sales team needs to build for the AI era.
• Modernize your workflows and prepare your team for AI-driven change.

Speaker

Andrea Bumstead. Founder and CEO, CS Impact