Customer Success (CS) teams face the ongoing challenge of managing vast amounts of data and identifying risks before they escalate into customer churn. However, customers don’t always vocalize their concerns, leaving gaps in visibility that can impact retention.
Enter team agents—AI-powered teammates designed to surface hidden risks, optimize resource allocation, and ensure teams stay ahead of customer needs. Gainsight, a pioneer in AI-driven customer success solutions, has taken the lead in advancing this technology with its Atlas suite of AI agents. By equipping CS leaders with tools like the Staircase AI Agent, Gainsight is redefining how teams identify risk, manage renewals, and engage customers at scale.
The Role of Team Agents in Aggregating Signals
Modern CS teams operate in a complex environment filled with data from diverse sources such as emails, calls, product usage analytics, support tickets, and Slack interactions. Amid this sea of information, valuable signals can often go unnoticed. Team agents are designed to tackle this challenge head on, acting as an intelligent layer of analysis that processes and consolidates these signals into actionable insights.
Learn more in our on-demand webinar, Team Agents: Agents that Tell You What Your Customers Won’t
By leveraging advanced AI capabilities, team agents identify patterns and sentiment shifts that might indicate dissatisfaction, low engagement, or potential churn risks. For instance, they can detect recurring negative language in emails, declining usage metrics, or unresolved support tickets—all factors that can signify hidden trouble. With this aggregated data, Customer Success teams are no longer reliant on manual guesswork or reactive responses. Instead, they have a centralized and real-time view of potential risks, allowing them to focus their energy where it matters most.
Acting on Surfaced At-Risk Accounts
While identifying risks is critical, taking action on these insights is where real impact occurs. Team agents empower CS teams to act swiftly and strategically on surfaced at-risk accounts, enabling proactive intervention long before issues escalate.
For example, if an AI agent identifies a drop in engagement or a spike in support tickets, the CS team can step in with a targeted response. This could include personalized check-ins, tailored training sessions, or re-engagement campaigns to address the underlying issues. Additionally, AI agents can trigger automated workflows that ensure immediate follow-up, such as sending proactive emails or creating tasks for Customer Success Managers (CSMs).
These interventions help improve customer retention by addressing dissatisfaction or confusion early on, preventing small issues from snowballing into full-blown churn scenarios. The ability to act on data-driven insights means CS teams can deliver more personalized and timely solutions, ultimately building stronger customer relationships.
Agent-Driven Segmentation for Resource Optimization
Not all accounts require the same level of attention, and determining how to allocate resources effectively can be a challenge for CS leaders. This is where agent-driven segmentation comes into play. By analyzing customer data and behaviors, team agents can segment accounts based on risk, engagement, or growth potential.
For instance, accounts identified as high-risk can be flagged for immediate attention, while those with high growth potential can be prioritized for strategic upsell opportunities. On the other hand, stable accounts requiring less hands-on management can be monitored with lower-touch interventions. This segmentation ensures that CS teams are focusing their time and resources on the areas with the greatest impact.
The result? Increased efficiency, better use of team bandwidth, and improved outcomes for both customers and businesses. With team agents taking on the heavy lifting of segmentation, CS leaders can drive more meaningful engagement without overextending their teams.
Gainsight’s Atlas Suite: A New Era of AI Agents
Gainsight’s Atlas suite of AI agents represents a major leap forward in empowering Customer Success teams to operate at scale. In addition to the Staircase AI agent, our forthcoming Atlas agents are designed to tackle key challenges like risk identification, renewal management, and adoption.
The Staircase AI Agent, for example, continuously scans customer touchpoints such as emails, Slack conversations, meetings, product usage data, and support tickets. By identifying hidden sentiment and risk, it serves as a second set of eyes for CS teams, enabling proactive interventions. Gainsight has also introduced the Renewal AI Agent, which focuses on managing renewals for long-tail customer segments. This AI agent mirrors the practices of top-performing CSMs, delivering personalized outreach and engagement strategies to increase renewal rates even in resource-constrained environments.
Additionally, the forthcoming Adoption AI Agent promises to address one of the most common challenges CS teams face: driving consistent product usage. By identifying dips in adoption and recommending targeted actions, this agent ensures customers receive the value they signed up for.
These AI-powered tools are a game-changer for CS leaders, providing scalable solutions that free up teams to focus on strategic initiatives while maintaining a personal touch.
The Future of CS: Balancing AI and Human Expertise
While AI agents bring significant efficiency and scalability to Customer Success Operations, human expertise remains irreplaceable. AI excels at handling repetitive, data-driven tasks like sentiment analysis, risk identification, and personalized outreach strategies. This allows human teams to focus on what they do best—building relationships, solving complex problems, and fostering trust with customers.
The collaboration between AI agents and human CSMs creates a win-win scenario. By offloading routine tasks to AI, human teams gain the bandwidth to engage with customers on a deeper level, driving meaningful outcomes and strengthening loyalty. As Gainsight’s CEO, Nick Mehta, puts it, Our vision is simple: We want to shift the paradigm from people serving software to software serving people.
This balance between automation and human expertise ensures that CS teams can operate with both efficiency and empathy, creating an unparalleled customer experience.
Embracing Agentic AI for Customer Success
The future of Customer Success lies in harnessing the power of AI to complement and elevate human expertise. With team agents like those in Gainsight’s Atlas suite, CS leaders can uncover hidden risks, optimize resource allocation, and proactively address customer needs. These tools enable teams to scale their efforts without sacrificing personalization, ensuring every customer feels valued and supported.
Ready to learn more? Check out our on-demand webinar hosted by Ori Entis, Gainsight’s SVP of Product: Team Agents: Agents that Tell You What Your Customers Won’t.
