Each year, we look for standout achievements in our community, and every year, you deliver. The 2026 GameChanger Award winners are teams that used Gainsight creatively to help their organizations better understand customers, identify risks, drive growth and demonstrate value. Here are the 2026 GameChangers.
- The Hyper Scaler: Anthropic
- The Retention Champion: CCC Intelligent Solutions
- The Adoption Accelerator: Sendoso
- The Digital Architect: Cloudera
- The Growth Engine: Netskope
- Customer Success Transformation of the Year: Payscale
- The Intelligent Innovator: PartsSource
- The Rising Star: Brad Sova at DailyPay
The Hyper Scaler: Anthropic
The Hyper Scaler award recognizes organizations that have achieved rapid, standout growth by creating systems that help every new customer get value quickly.
Anthropic, the AI safety and research company behind Claude, faced an extraordinary challenge when demand for its services skyrocketed. To address this, they used Skilljar to deliver certification-level onboarding.
In just five months, Anthropic Academy grew over 30x from 30,000 to 1 million monthly active learners, proving that customer education can deliver personalized, high-impact experiences at scale.
The Retention Champion: CCC Intelligent Solutions
The Retention Champion award recognizes a team that strengthened customer engagement in ways that support deeper, longer-lasting customer relationships.
CCC Intelligent Solutions, a market-leading technology provider for the property and casualty insurance industry, worked to evolve Customer Success from an activity-based function to a more value-oriented partner for customers.
To support this progress, the team built a value storytelling framework in Gainsight, helping connect customer goals, ongoing engagement and executive conversations in a more consistent way. They also developed engagement scoring that brings together insights across marketing, sales and CS, giving leaders better visibility into customer health and opportunities to strengthen relationships.
CCC Intelligent Solutions also created a business continuity process in Gainsight to help maintain a seamless customer experience across CCC. Together, these efforts have helped CSMs stay focused on delivering meaningful value, strengthening customer relationships, and supporting long-term growth.
The Adoption Accelerator: Sendoso
The Adoption Accelerator award honors a team that showed when customers use a product, they are more likely to stay.
Sendoso, the leading gifting and direct mail platform for CRM and HR teams, wanted to make their product essential. They learned that when customers see the value of their platform, they become advocates. So, they rebuilt their education program using Gainsight CE, moving from feature-based training to a results-focused curriculum with seven Strategic Use Case Certifications. New customers with no direct mail experience get one certification as part of onboarding, so they start with a clear plan for success.
By using Gainsight Customer Education to link education participation to financial results, Sendoso made education a key sign of customer health. In a study of 505 renewals, finishing courses was the fifth-strongest sign a customer would stay, ranking higher than tenure or license use. Accounts that left all had one thing in common: no education activity.
Customers who used Sendoso University had a 98% dollar retention rate. Accounts with at least one certified admin spent 127% more in the last 90 days than those without one.
The Digital Architect: Cloudera
The Digital Architect award goes to an organization that built systems to turn customer data into action.
Cloudera is a data and AI platform that helps businesses get more value from their data. They used Gainsight not just as a CS platform, but as the main system for their intelligence setup. By bringing together AI, real-time data, support signals and customer feedback into one system, they turned Customer Success from reactive to a predictive, data-driven revenue engine.
The main feature is TAMAgent, an AI assistant built on Cloudera AI. It gives CSMs real-time insights on product use, risk, and ways to improve. TAMAgent uses a dynamic model to trigger automated CTAs, playbooks and AI agents.
Six months after launching TAMAgent, accounts managed by CSMs reached 113% NRR and grew 30.7% year over year.
The Growth Engine: Netskope
The Growth Engine award goes to a team that turned their customer base into a clear source of new value.
Netskope is a global leader in cloud security. In the past year, they turned their Gainsight-powered community into a Customer Success engine that drives revenue. This meant rebuilding their model, moving to a new platform without any downtime, keeping 85% of users and focusing on three main areas: retention and deflection, adoption and time-to-value and smart innovation.
They built structured learning paths using webinars, expert-led sessions, and use-case content. With Ideas-to-JIRA automation, customers can now see how their feedback shapes the product roadmap. Netskope also worked with internal AI teams to use community knowledge in their internal LLMs for better post-sales insights.
Thanks to their investment in the customer community, Netskope saw user growth rise by 40% and gained over $250K in case deflection ROI.
The CS Transformation of the Year: Payscale
The CS Transformation of the Year award honors a team that went beyond improving a process and actually redesigned their operating model.
Payscale is a compensation intelligence platform for organizations that want to transform pay into a competitive advantage. In the last year, they changed Customer Success from a reactive renewal team to a predictive, revenue-focused growth engine using Gainsight.
Before this change, ownership was split, accountability was unclear and risks showed up late in the renewal process. Customer Success and Strategy teams worked together to rebuild the post-sales model, using Gainsight as the main hub. They added lifecycle orchestration, predictive health scoring, and structured ways to manage expansion.
Now, Customer Success runs as a data-driven engine, spotting risk signals months before renewals. In one year, retention went up by 5 points and GRR by 3 points.
The Intelligent Innovator: PartsSource
The Intelligent Innovator award honors an organization that has set a new standard for using intelligence in their operations.
PartsSource is a B2B marketplace and software platform with a mission focused on keeping healthcare equipment operational for patient care.
They wanted to fully understand the customer experience across their organization, including how many team members a customer interacts with, the quality of those relationships, and the key moments in the journey. To achieve this, they built a central intelligence system in Gainsight that brings together spend trends, operational results such as on-time delivery and feature adoption data into a single health view.
All interactions across Salesforce, email, and Teams are automatically tracked. If engagement patterns show risk, the system checks sentiment, finds the root cause and suggests actions. With Gainsight Copilot, any team member can ask questions in plain language and get answers without making a report.
As a result, retention rose from 93% to 99.6% in their first year using Gainsight.
The Rising Star: Brad Sova at DailyPay
The Rising Star award celebrates a first-year Gainsight user who made a big impact quickly.
DailyPay is the leading On-Demand Pay platform and financial wellness solution, and Brad Sova is their Senior Director of Customer Success Operations. When Brad saw that their old platform didn’t have the AI features or advanced signals needed for DailyPay’s growth, he led the whole process from RFP to rollout.
Brad’s first year stood out not just for how fast he worked, but for what he accomplished. He revamped forecasting and pipeline management, launched DailyPay’s first NPS program, rolled out Staircase AI to the whole CS team and rebuilt account health scoring to spot churn risk sooner. By year-end, churn attainment improved by 7 points, expansion attainment rose 20 points and upsell attainment reached 100%.
Congratulations to our 2026 GameChangers!
Our 2026 GameChangers are leading the way, but there’s always more to discover. Learn more about how CS leaders are driving retention, expansion, and growth.
