Refounding Gainsight for the Agentic Economy
We are making a bold bet on Gainsight’s future and a bolder prediction about the evolution of Customer Success in the Agentic Economy.
We believe the defining shift of the Agentic Economy is from shipping bits to delivering outcomes. The outcome will become the organizing principle of every software company, not just something Customer Success cares about. Now everyone talks about outcomes: CEOs, boards and every AI-native company that prices on results.
We are refounding Gainsight to move from selling Customer Success software to delivering retention as an outcome. I want to explain the why, the how and what it means for our community.
From Bits to Outcomes
I’ve spent my career in CRM. I was at Siebel in the client-server era and at Salesforce as it built the cloud. What I learned is that companies rarely fail because they can’t adopt new technology. They fail because they won’t change their business model.
For the last two decades, we’ve been living in what’s come to be known as the Subscription Economy. Software helped people do the work, and recurring revenue sustained the SaaS business model even if the product didn’t fully deliver value to the customer. The vendor shipped the bits, and the customer was ultimately responsible for turning those bits into an outcome.
We are now entering the Agentic Economy. Software can actually do the work, revenue isn’t won on seats, and agents are increasingly part of the workforce. That breaks the foundations SaaS and Customer Success were built on.
As software becomes more capable of doing the work itself, customers are asking why they should buy tools that merely help people do work. They want tools that perform work and enable fewer people to drive more outcomes. We believe software companies need to deliver on that expectation.
SaaS companies now have to organize and monetize around the outcome. The rapid rise of Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs) is an early signal of this shift. Outcome pricing means that unrealized value for the customer becomes unrealized revenue for the vendor.
To survive in the Agentic Economy, SaaS companies must become outcome companies.
Category Re-creation
Gainsight created the Customer Success category. For 15 years, this community has been fighting the good fight for customer outcomes, while SaaS vendors (ourselves included) built their organizations around subscriptions, features and bookings. Metaphorically, the words didn’t match the music.
Now, revenue is directly tied to outcomes and SaaS companies must fundamentally change how they acquire, retain and grow their customers.
We are refounding the company to organize around outcomes in three ways:
- Business model: from selling seats to selling outcomes.
When software can do the work, revenue won’t be earned by selling seats. To maximize their revenue, vendors must therefore maximize the value their customers achieve.
At Gainsight: We are betting our future on our ability to sell retention as an outcome. Our software is moving from seat-based to value-based pricing. Atlas, our AI-Native Services (AINS) offering, delivers retention outcomes as a service: our people and agents delivering measurable improvement in our customers’ GRR and NRR.
- Team structure: from a team that renews to one accountable owner.
Customer Success has traditionally sat at the end of a chain: product built the software, sales sold it, services implemented it, and Customer Success renewed it. The new model brings together two complementary roles: one owner accountable for the customer’s outcomes and technical, product-specific experts who help deliver them. Other teams support that owner with the capabilities needed to achieve those outcomes, rather than serving as separate stops on the customer’s journey.
Bain’s recent article, The Rebirth of Customer Success, reaches the same conclusion: there must be one accountable owner for customer outcomes.
At Gainsight: Every customer will have a single “customer owner,” an Outcome Executive, accountable for the customer’s results: a dedicated person for our largest accounts, an AI agent for the long tail. Each is backed by Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs), aligned with Product, whose technical and domain expertise they can draw on as needed.
- How we work: from people alone to people and agents.
Whether the customer owner is a person serving our largest accounts or an agent serving the long tail, the work follows a continuous loop: set the goal, act, observe, adapt. Agents now handle routine tasks and make new work possible. This means fewer people in some roles, new skills in others, and roles that didn’t exist a year ago.
At Gainsight: Our human-in-the-loop approach pairs human expertise and judgment with agents doing what they do best. Engineers guide and review agents, helping smaller teams build faster. Customer-facing teams use Staircase and other AI tools to deliver better outcomes for more customers. This has enabled teammates to move into our AINS business, with more moves as we scale.
We expect many of our customers will go through a similar transition. We are undertaking this transition ourselves as Customer Zero and sharing our experience so others can benefit.
Gainsight’s core business remains highly profitable, and companies of all sizes, from AI-native startups to the largest enterprises in the world, rely on our technology and expertise. We will continue to support those customers as we build for the future. What we are retiring are the books we wrote. We’re writing a new one. We are choosing to disrupt ourselves rather than defend the approach that got us here.
What Happens Next
This letter describes our North Star. We know we have work to do to get there, and we don’t have every answer yet. We believe this is a journey we need to make both for our own company and to help the Customer Success community make the transition to the Agentic Economy.
As we go, we’ll share what we’re learning through blog and community posts, conversations on our [Un]Churned podcast and on LinkedIn: what’s working, what isn’t, and what we’re changing as a result. We want our experience to be useful to you, and we want to learn from yours.
To our customers and partners, your Gainsight team’s commitment to excellence and service levels doesn’t change. As we make this transition, you will experience what this change is designed to deliver: one accountable owner, fewer handoffs, and better outcomes.
The Agentic Economy will reward the companies that put customer outcomes first. I’ve never been more optimistic about our future, the importance of retention, or our ability to help you treat every customer like your best customer.
