Pulse 2026 started today in Las Vegas, where we pulled back the vines to reveal an undiscovered treasure trove of retention. Post-sales professionals from around the globe gathered at the keynote stage to hear from Gainsight leaders and customers from world-class companies, including Okta, Zendesk, and IBM.
Together, we charted a new path forward where AI agents handle the long tail, humans focus on what only humans can do, and outcomes are the only measure of success that matters. Here’s the recap of Pulse Day One.
In a World of Critics, Be an Explorer
Gainsight CEO Chuck Ganapathi took the stage and went back in time to show us how we can better move forward. Every great civilization reaches a moment where the path ahead disappears. Every technology revolution, be it the fire, the bronze age, or the industrial revolution, had critics who were convinced it would destroy everything. But time and time again, they were proven wrong. The people who won rose above the noise and explored the opportunities in front of them.
The ground beneath SaaS is shifting faster than quicksand. Agentic transformation is no longer a cloudy peak in the distance. It’s the imposing mountain right in front of us, forcing every CS leader to rethink who owns renewals, what AI is actually responsible for, and what it looks like when outcomes replace activity as the measure of success.
Chuck’s message: Gainsight’s role today is no different from when we started fifteen years ago. We’re here to make the exploration easier, faster, and more human-friendly for the entire community. What’s changed is how far we’re willing to go to deliver the outcome.
Gainsight Is Retention-as-a-Service
Today, we announced something the Customer Success industry has never seen before: an AI-native service that owns the retention outcome. Meet the next evolution of Atlas: Gainsight’s AI-Native Services.
Atlas seamlessly combines human expertise with advanced AI agents in a fully-managed service, where Gainsight owns your outcomes. We manage the platform, agents, playbooks, and the people, so your team doesn’t have to. You get full transparency and control, and we deliver the outcome for you. We succeed only when your renewals succeed.
Ed Daly, Chief Customer Officer at Okta, took the stage to share his experience with Atlas. With tens of thousands of customers in their long tail representing ~$100M of their business, Okta knows the cost of a broken handoff. Ed shared how a customer ready to expand, bounced between BPO agents with no context until the moment passed. Atlas, which Okta has nicknamed Oliver, is their answer: full customer context, instant response, no dropped threads. “Cover the long tail,” Ed told the room. “The customers making progress fast are the ones who picked a use case and started executing.”
The Future Is Build and Buy
In this era of AI exploration, one of the biggest questions on everyone’s mind is whether to build your own AI capabilities or buy something ready to deploy. Chuck’s keynote offered a different perspective. Instead of deciding between building and buying, embrace both.
Start by buying the foundation, which includes security, governance, pre-built data models, and enterprise scale built from years of experience. Then, build your own unique agentic workflows on top of that.
Today on our keynote stage, we unveiled how we’ve agentified the entire Gainsight platform. Tomorrow, we go deeper. Tune into the product keynote livestream to see everything we’ve agentified across the Gainsight platform in action.
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Explorers in the Field
Like hidden chambers revealing their secrets, our customers took to the keynote stage to show what this all looks like in practice.
Kim Humphrey, VP of Customer Success at IBM, shared how her team chose to build on top of Gainsight rather than start from scratch by embedding customer intelligence natively across Salesforce so the entire company could act on it. IBM built DeployIt on WatsonX and Gainsight data, an agent that drafts success plans, builds personalized playbooks, and submits everything directly into Gainsight in moments. No copying, no context switching. Her advice to the room: “The barrier to innovation has never been lower. What you need is momentum.”
Colin Murphy, Chief Customer Officer at Zendesk, shared what it looks like to bet on a platform rather than build everything yourself. Zendesk chose Gainsight Community last summer, went live in April, and since then 100% of posts are AI-moderated, freeing the team to focus on transforming the experience rather than policing it. The Forethought integration, now live on Gainsight Community, surfaces answers in context so customers can get help and get back to work without losing momentum. As Colin put it: “Retention isn’t only about the renewal experience. It’s about all the moments that add up, and reducing the friction that creates sludge and slows growth.”
Watch the Day 1 Keynote here:
The Expedition Continues
The map isn’t finished yet. Day Two of Pulse 2026 is just ahead with more bold ideas, more fellow explorers, and more proof that this community always finds what it’s looking for.
