As I write this, four astronauts are doing something no human has done since 1972: looping around the Moon on Artemis II, 252,756 miles from Earth, navigating genuinely uncharted territory. One of them—Victor Glover, the mission pilot—is a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo alum. Same as me.
Glover didn’t get to pilot a lunar mission by reading about space. He spent years flying T-38 jets and running emergency scenarios in the Orion simulator so he could confidently do the same skills 252,000 miles from home.
I keep thinking about that as we head into Pulse 2026.
The Customer Success (CS) profession is navigating its own uncharted territory right now: AI adoption, agentic workflows, headcount pressure, a board that suddenly expects CS to own revenue outcomes. The leaders figuring out the new map are the ones leaving their desks and exploring ideas in rooms with other people who are already three steps ahead.
That’s what Pulse is for. Our 2026 agenda is the most ambitious one we’ve ever built, with over 85 sessions and eight tracks, all taking place inLas Vegas on May 27–28.
63% of CS teams are still in AI pilot mode. Headcounts are down, renewal motions are under pressure and while the old frameworks aren’t wrong, they’re incomplete. The map has changed, and the leaders who figure out the new routes first are going to win the race.
This year at Pulse, we’re rolling out the map and plotting our path forward, together.
Here’s what’s on the agenda, what’s genuinely new, and why this might be the year you can’t afford to skip.
What Pulse Is (For the People Who Keep Meaning to Come)
If you’ve never been to Pulse, it’s the event you describe to your manager as “professional development” and to your colleagues as “the one that truly changed how I work.”
TLDR: There are 2,000+ post-sales professionals gathering for two days under the same roof at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. May 27–28, 2026.
Pulse is for anybody obsessed with retention. CS leaders, Customer Education builders, Community managers, RevOps and CS Ops tinkerers, CCOs and CROs—there’s content and networking experiences for everyone.
It’s the annual moment where attendees benchmark themselves, push each other forward, and absorb more usable ideas than they’ll be able to implement before the next one. Attendees come from Okta, IBM, Adobe, GitLab, SAP, Mastercard, Zoom, and thousands more.
There’s also a pre-conference option: Pulse Academy Live on May 26. This intensive hands-on learning day is for those who want more depth before the main event. Space is limited, so if you’re a practitioner who wants to go deep on Gainsight specifically, don’t overlook it. Learn more here.
What’s Different About 2026 (For the People Who Went A Few Years Ago)
Here’s what I hear from people who attended a few years back: “Is it worth coming back? Is the content actually new?”
Yes, and here’s why.
The format has more structure than ever. Pulse 2026 runs 85+ sessions across eight dedicated tracks. It’s the most organized, targeted agenda we’ve ever built. You won’t find yourself wondering whether that session fits your role, because every track is designed for a specific problem:
- AI That Works for You. Not AI theory. AI running in real CS environments, with real use cases, real failures, and real playbooks for what actually moves the needle.
- Winning with Digital CS. Building the connected digital customer hub—community, education, in-app, and email—that scales retention without adding headcount.
- Advanced Gainsight Strategies. For practitioners who are past the basics and want to get surgical about segmentation, automation, and cross-team workflows.
- Optimizing Rev Ops & CS Ops. Data architecture, Gainsight operational builds, and how to give leadership real visibility into retention and expansion.
- Future-Proofing CS. Modernizing your strategy and building for flexibility, so you’re ready for whatever’s next.
- Leading Through Change. For the leaders who’ve absorbed a restructure, a new charter, or a board that suddenly wants CS to be a profit center rather than a cost center.
- Mastering Gainsight Workflows. Tactical improvement. Real setups. “Steal This” templates from practitioners who built them in production.
- Workshop Your Way to Growth. My personal favorite! Interactive sessions where you leave with something you actually made.
That last track is my personal favorite! Pulse has historically been a sit-and-absorb conference. This new track offers workshops where you’ll build a playbook or draft an operational roadmap in real time. They’re designed to shorten the gap between “I heard a good idea” and “I’m actually implementing it.”
Sessions You Should Block Time For
Pull up the full agenda here. These are the sessions I’d rearrange my schedule for.
Intelligence at Scale: Okta’s AI-Augmented CS Playbook (Day 1 | AI That Works for You) Laurence Leong, Melissa Allen, and Alana Stoltzfus from Okta break down their actual AI journey—piloting Staircase and Atlas in scaled CS environments, applying AI to digital targeting, and making scaled CSMs more effective. Okta isn’t theorizing. They’re showing receipts.
The Power Pair: Community & Customer Education (Day 2 | Winning with Digital CS) Tiffany Oda and JJ Janikis from Asana built a shared operating model between their Community and CE teams—same goals, same metrics, co-created programs, a repeatable framework for cross-team partnership. If you run either function and wonder whether you should be working more closely with the other, this is the session that answers the question.
The Segmentation Paradox: How Scaling Low-Touch Made Us More Personal (Day 2 | Advanced Gainsight Strategies) Kirsty O’Sullivan, SVP of Customer Experience at ZoomInfo, redesigned her segmentation model so that digital programs for smaller accounts actually feel more personal, not less. This one will change how you think about the “low-touch” label.
Beyond One-Off Outbound: Mapping Engagement Governance Across Your Account Team (Day 1 | Mastering Gainsight Workflows) Romain Belvas from Boomi on coordinating CS, Sales, Renewals, and Compliance around a single revenue-driving journey. If your account team runs on a prayer and a shared spreadsheet, start here.
Cutting Time-to-Value by 55%: The Digital Onboarding Playbook (Day 1 | Future-Proofing CS) Kat Kenny from Drata transformed their onboarding with in-app checklists and just-in-time education. Doubled accounts achieving value in the first 30 days. Reduced TTV by 55%. And no, that number isn’t a typo.
The full catalog is at gainsightpulse.com/us/agenda. Take a look and build your dream agenda.
Tracks Built Specifically For You
In the past, Pulse was often described as a CS conference. We’d argue it’s evolved into a conference for everyone that plays a part in helping customers succeed.
Here’s how that breaks down by role:
If you lead Customer Success: The AI track alone justifies the ticket. You’ll hear from peers at Okta, ConnectWise, Tebra, and dozens more who are actually deploying AI. The Leading Through Change track is built for the moment you’re in: restructures, new charters, the board asking for CS-as-revenue-driver. You’ll leave with benchmarks, frameworks, and probably a new answer to the NRR conversation.
If you lead Customer Education: CE gets its own track at Pulse this year, and the sessions are sharp. Kevin Dunn from Airtable on AI workflows built for education teams. Asana’s CE and Community leads on building a unified operating model across two functions that are usually siloed. All of it is grounded in the question CE leaders are tired of dancing around: how do you prove education’s impact on revenue?
→ See the Education experience
If you lead Community: Community gets its own track too! A few highlights: Hear from Kathleen Orazio from Trimble on scaling a multi-product, global community without adding headcount—migrations, multilingual experiences, AI for discoverability. And catch Alexis Brown and Jeff Harling from Zoom talk about launching a global community mid-pandemic and keeping it thriving five years later.
→ See the Community experience
📣 Calling all Education, Community, and Digital CS professionals!
Pulse 2026 has a dedicated two-hour experience built specifically for you, and it runs right after the opening keynote on Day 1.
DCS: Digital Center Stage is an exclusive post-keynote experience for Customer Education, Community, and Digital CS leaders. It includes peer roundtables with leaders from Zapier, Calendly, Airtable, and Zoom. A live session with Brian Oblinger—one of the most sought-after practitioners in the field with over 20 years in CE and community. You’ll see product-focused presentations on the Gainsight Digital Customer Hub roadmap from the people who built it.
Kevin Dunn, Director of Digital CX & Programs at Airtable, put it better than I can: “Pulse is where I go to pressure-test how we’re building and scaling education programs. The value comes from being in the room with people actually doing the work, sharing what’s working, and leaving with ideas you can put into motion right away.”
Jillian Bejtlich, Senior Manager of Community + Customer Marketing at Calendly, said something after last year’s event that stuck with me: “I always leave with a backlog of things I’m eager to test, a long list of new industry colleagues I’m already plotting with.” That’s the Pulse experience for community practitioners.
You won’t want to miss this tailored experience!
If you run CS Ops or RevOps: The Ops track has sessions on Gainsight Data Designer, unified revenue data architecture, and what experienced Gainsight admins have learned in production environments. It’s the kind of real-world knowledge you can’t get from documentation. The “What ‘Good’ Actually Looks Like” panel brings together practitioners from Adobe, GitLab, Moodys, and ADP to talk about what breaks in real deployments and how to build for long-term trust.
If you’re a VP, CCO, or in the C-suite: Leading Through Change was built for the specifics of your moment: building buy-in under pressure, repositioning CS from a cost center to a boardroom-ready growth story, and building organizational resilience.
→ See the Executive experience
And Did I Mention There’s a Party?
The Pulse After Party closes out Day 1 on Wednesday evening. It’s the only night you’ll spend with 2,000 CS and post-sales professionals in one room, none of them on a call or in a meeting, all of them willing to have the real conversation.
Some of the best ideas I’ve seen come out of Pulse didn’t happen in a breakout session. They happened at dinner, in the hallways, on the escalators, and yes, even the Pulse dance floor!
Pulse 2026 Is All About “Learn by Doing”
Victor Glover didn’t become the pilot of a lunar mission by reading about space. He practiced his craft thousands of times, until he could do it far from Earth with a communication delay and no rescue option nearby.
Cal Poly’s “Learn by Doing” motto is why graduates like Victor Glover end up shaping space milestones. The philosophy is: show up, do the work, figure out the hard parts in practice rather than theory.
That’s the version of Pulse I want you to come for.
Not to collect a bunch of photos on your camera roll of presentation slides you found insightful (although those are great). But to walk into a workshop and build the playbook on the spot. To watch a practitioner from Drata show you exactly how they cut time-to-value (TTV) by 55%. To sit in a roundtable with five people who run community programs at companies like yours and come out with three ideas you’re already mentally assigning to next quarter.
The CS profession has an incredible opportunity to jump headfirst into uncharted territory and be the first to build the map. But as legendary explorer Indiana Jones once said, “”If you want to be a good archaeologist, you gotta get out of the library!”
Register for Pulse 2026 Today
Register now → gainsightpulse.com/us/ with code VIVAPULSE20 and save 20% at checkout.
If you need help making the case to your manager (because yes, we know how this works) there’s a ready-made Convince Your Boss template here. Fill it in, send it up the chain and I’ll see you in Vegas.
May 27–28 | Caesars Forum, Las Vegas.
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