146. What Really Happens When AI Becomes Your Teammate ft. Brady Bluhm & Kalpana Krishna Kumar

I can get to 80% of the way there so fast compared to two years ago right in what I was able to accomplish and do.

 

Brady Bluhm:

And then my time is spent in the fine tuning. It’s spent on like the creative aspects or like the key call outs, the things that I need to really fine tune and curate. And just to quote actually Kalpana, she said my purpose with using AI is to be able to get the best version of myself as quickly as possible. And I can’t like rubber stamp that enough. That is exactly it.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Welcome everybody, to this episode. I’m very excited this week because I have two esteemed colleagues from Gainsight joining us on Unchurned. Brady Bloom and Kalpana KrishnaKumar. Thank you both for being on the show. You were handpicked, cherry picked from the organization because I asked around as like, you know, who are the folks that are at the frontier of AI? Who do we really want to learn from? For all the listeners out there, of course, learn from. For AI. Right. That’s the theme of the year.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

And you were the two names that came up from everybody. So welcome to the broadcast podcast. Thank you.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Happy to be here.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

Loving it.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Why don’t you guys both take a second just to introduce yourselves to the show.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Kalpana, you want to start?

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

Sure. My name is Kalpana Krishna Kumar. I’m an enterprise csm, a customer success manager at Gainsight. I’ve been here for almost four years.

 

Brady Bluhm:

And I’m Brady Bloom. I’m Staircase AI, senior product manager here at Gainsight. I came to Gainsight as an enterprise csm, High Touch CSM when I arrived. And in my background, it goes all the way back to a Doogie Howser episode when I was five years old is when I started working. So child actor turned tech, whatever.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Yeah, you. Wow. I was gonna ask us to all go around Brady and give fun facts about ourselves only for the. For the. The goal of, you know what. So just go just. You’ve already laid it out there for everybody.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Go ahead and tell them about the Doogie Howser episode or about.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

No, you know what about. About your. You have multiple claims of him, but the two big ones.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Yes, the two big ones are my pretty bird background. So from Dumb and Dumber Jim Carrey sold me his dead bird. I’m Billy the Blind Kid in dumb and dumber one and two. Actually, they brought me back for the second one that came out like 10 years ago or something like that. And then I was the voice of Christopher Robin as well for about seven years until my voice changed and I was out of a job. But Christopher Robin in the Winnie the Pooh movies. So I’ll do that one. You’re braver than you believe and stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Silly old bear. So again, voice change. Forgive me a little on that, but.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I, I, I. To be honest with you, Brady, I’d prefer the pretty bird voiceover. Can you, can you do it? Pretty Bird? Yes. Can you say pretty bird? Love it. Iconic. Iconic. Okay, so where do we go from there? How did both of you become so enamored by and power users of AI? What’s the origin story within this realm for each of you?

 

Brady Bluhm:

It was GPT3 when that launched, and AI really landed right. So that’s been two years, I think now, ish. A little over two years since that landed. And I clamored to get a license as quickly as I could of that internally and permission to use it, and then just started playing and exploring and figuring out different use cases, figuring out the behaviors of the model and just like just chatting back and forth and figuring out how to do things. The image model launched. And so I started playing with it. I made like a tarot card puller that could draw the tarot cards, and I created a prompt to like, give me the output in the way I wanted it. And then I ended up connecting internally with a friend, Seth Wiley, and we started having weekly chats because he was also just like, playing around with it a ton.

 

Brady Bluhm:

And after six months of that, of us just like back and forth, playing, doing things, that’s when the team’s license of ChatGPT launched first. That was like January of last year. And we immediately went to the business and we’re like, hey, we want to get, we want, we want to get teams licenses. We want to open this up for CSMs and for some other people. And Seth and I will just start teaching a weekly class on it and helping people learn AI fluency. And so over like eight or nine months of doing that and then acquiring Staircase, that’s actually where a bunch of my expertise is kind of converged and why I moved into the role that I’m in now of Staircase AI.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

What was Leadership’s response when you first made that ask to get enterprise licenses for the org to ChatGPT.

 

Brady Bluhm:

It started with team. The team plan is a lot easier to do than the enterprise plan because the enterprise plan you have like a minimum of 150 licenses, other stuff like that. So the team plan was our stepping stone to then having the business pull the trigger on the enterprise license on that side of things. But the reaction. So one thing I love about gainsight is its openness to creativity, openness to people raising their hands and being able to do things and help where we can. And so the whole we called it AI for all was the sessions that, that we’ve ran that was just so well received and we, we had about like 45 people starting on that and it, it whittled down because it was a longer class that we did, but every week it was 90 minutes. We ended up having about like 20 people graduate from that first, that, that first round of instruction that we had and, and join our GPT builders club and, and start to experiment with use cases and things like that internally.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

I don’t think I was aware of the full extent of this subculture within gains. I mean because I’ve been here now for two months about and so I’ve seen a lot of it and been very impressed with this playground that’s been available for gainsters, but I didn’t realize to that extent. So you were, you were actually running curriculum for folks in the org that wanted to learn how to make the most out of the technology.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

Yeah, Brady’s a teacher so he absolutely does that. And I can tell you that that was also somewhere where. Okay, so backing up. I’m a die hard Star Trek junkie. Okay. So live long in France for kinds so long, long ago. I mean all of Star Trek episodes obviously have the whole AI and the data and all of those robots and constantly been super, super impressed. And I have to give credit to update AI, it just dropped in my email and the very first time I used it I was like, wow, this is awesome, I love this.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

And then Brady and Seth just came on the scene and the way they put this whole thing together, they took the onus on themselves to start that grassroots movement. Right. And I think that was really the best part of it. I did of course my free chat GPT items and you know, the very first time I put in a question and it gave me this near perfect answer, I was like, wow, of course I’m jaded today. But yeah, Brady, go ahead and tell us the story.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Yeah, no, I mean I’m really interested in the grassroots movement of things because I think that’s unique and I think that’s something that folks listening, they would love to emulate. And you talk to listeners on the show, they don’t always necessarily have that, let’s call it jurisdiction or authority to go ahead and like you said, like buy 100 Enterprise seats. But like what can they do? What have you done, Brady, you and Seth and others that have created a grassroots movement around this.

 

Brady Bluhm:

The initial instruction course we, we created and every week Seth and I would like plan. All right, how are we going to approach this? We, we made it really fun or that was our intent at least. Who, who knows if people really had fun or not. Right. But we did our best to make it fun. We would have icebreakers with it. We’d be making, having them play around with, making images that like represented their teams and other things like that. We would do new exercises of like find my voice and like pull in your emails and, and have the AI analyze that.

 

Brady Bluhm:

We’d write a prompt together and then I’ll analyze that and see what we came out with with our tone and our style and our formatting and all of that kind of thing to write like us. We also then shifted that to be able to write like other people. So like ghostwrite for our leaders and other things to like send, send them emails to be able to send to customers. So lots of just like playful practical ways of using just ChatGPT, right. Like without any other containers or wrappers or anything else around it. Just like how can you use AI and play around with it and start to understand how to engage with AI, how the back and forth, the ping pong nature of it, we would practice. Right. So a lot of that was in our like AI fluency course.

 

Brady Bluhm:

And then after that once we had like our group of people that had been through that, then we changed it to Builders Club and that’s been more just like open form. We show up and we talk about like any AI news. What does that mean? What have people been playing with? So it’s really, there’s just so much opportunity to learn right now both from AI directly. Like it can help you learn, but learning from how other people are using it and their use cases, it may not be a one to one match with what you’re doing but. But the way they’re doing things is what matters. It’s the method that they’re using that you can then apply in other ways that fit your use cases. Yeah.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Kalpana, let’s talk about the way you’re doing things. I want to go into your day to day here and tell me what are the most valuable. Like you said, you’re an enterprise csm. What are the most valuable use cases that you’re applying AI towards?

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

Yeah, that’s, it’s actually depends kind of a question. And so I may not give you a direct answer, but you know, I’m basically a very curious person by nature and I’m always ready for that next adventure kind of a thing. Something like Bilbo Baggins from the Hobbit. So I’m always ready for that. And so the biggest thing that really excites me today is the our own Staircase product. Really speaking. Because it is something that has.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

There’s no commission for being on this program, Kalpana.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

I know that.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

I don’t forgot the memo. Okay, Okay.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

I will tell you the reason why is because earlier this year, from almost 25 odd accounts, my book of business suddenly went up to 35. I just needed to find a way to scale myself. I needed to be able to to be the CSM that my customers really want. Right? How do I do that? So I started to use whatever was at hand. Biggest thing that came our way was Staircase. And it has really, really. That’s the one thing I’m really excited about because it has become a thought partner for me and truly speaking.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

So pause there because there’s a very exciting LinkedIn post headline for me right now for this podcast, which is Kalpana increased her book of business by 40% through staircase AI.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

I can totally go behind that. It’s actually a very conservative estimate, but definitely that is something that can go behind that. But what I do like to do is to blend multiple tools, right? I want richer output. So I would definitely blend something like the output from staircase with ChatGPT and then throw it into a Gamma to create a slide deck. Right? That’s the output that I’m looking for. So the excitement is not just about shiny tools, really speaking. It’s more about how I can reimagine my workflows and be able to deliver those customer outcomes. I will use any AI really available to me at any point in time.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

And I do have some examples. If you have some time, I’d be happy to tell you about something.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Well, let’s go into it. I mean, so what goes into Staircase that then goes out of staircase and into ChatGPT, and then goes out of ChatGPT into Gamma? What the heck is Gamma? And how do you use that output?

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

Absolutely. So three different tools. I will tell you. Staircase is our own gain sites superpower for lack of a better word right now. So the one typical thing that every CSM has to do is, you know, business reviews, whether it is quarterly or annual. In my segment we have to do annual, but I do have a customer that does quarterly business reviews. And so I have to put that executive level deck together so that I can talk to them about the State of the Union, show them where they’re at, give them an idea of the value realization that they have had with our tool up until now and where we are going to go going forward, as well as add in some thought leadership in between. Right.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

So I will start in, in Staircase where I am getting all that information. I’m getting this literally the State of the Union piece directly from Staircase. Staircase can also pull out all those happy, you know, winnings wins that we have had in the past period, whether it’s a quarter or you the past 12 months. I’ll take all of this, throw it into ChatGPT and I’ll ask it to kind of pull things together sometimes. I also use Notebook LM. So the way I use NotebookLM is I have a notebook for each of my customers where I have thrown in some of my call transcripts and I will add in all of this information and kind of create a mind map and pull out the key themes that are coming out of it. And with that mind map I am able to now take it and put it into Gamma, which is simply, it just creates nice polished decks for me. And so I’ll take all of this content, put it into gamma and then comes the human aspect of it.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

Right. So all of this takes me about 70, 75% of the way. And then I add in items that come to my mind. I feel like, oh this, this piece is not truly reflecting everything. So I might go back to Gainsight’s Copilot, which is another AI feature that we have. It pulls up, you know, with data that is within Gainsight. It gives me a nice little summary. And so there are, there are insights that come out of that that I then I’ll go in and plug in.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

So it’s that human and AI blend, really speaking.

 

Brady Bluhm:

On that note, really the process with working with AI, even if it’s in a single tool or across tools, is you’re taking, you want to gather the right context, you need to pull in all the right information and then you need to give it the right goal of like what are we doing with this, how do I want it structured? What’s the end goal?

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

And.

 

Brady Bluhm:

And then you get to that. I agree, Kalpana, like 80% of the way there, right? It’s like. But I can get to 80% of the way there so fast compared to two years ago, right. In what I was able to accomplish and do. And then my time is spent in the fine tuning. It’s spent on, like, the creative aspects or like the key call outs, the things that I need to really fine tune and curate. And just to quote, actually, Kalpana, right before this, we were on our Builders Club call and Kalpana said it so perfectly that I actually, I used Zoom’s AI companion to pull the quote directly also. So Zoom’s AI companion, if you have Zoom, is a fantastic feature for like all the content within.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Within the call that you’re in or after a call. But she said my purpose with using AI is to be able to get the best version of myself as quickly as possible. And I can’t, like, rubber stamp that enough. That is exactly it. Because the best version of yourself is what you can sculpt, right. With like the way you have it, structuring things the way you want to deliver it, all of that, that. That fine detail, and then you can do it as quickly as possible. And that’s where that scaling comes.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Kalp. And I agree, like, I. I don’t. Yeah, I see CS teams being able to scale so much more efficiently and effectively with so much less stress at the end of this.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

That is the key part of it. Sorry, Brady, to interrupt, but I will tell you the biggest thing that has happened for me is the fact that I go to bed without worrying that, oh, my God, I have an EBR coming up next week and I haven’t done X, Y and Z. So I can go to bed knowing that I can pull this whole thing together. And it has taken a few repetitions for me to get to a point where I have the workflow in place. And even that keeps. Every time I do something, then a new shiny tool comes along and something else changes. But that’s a different issue altogether. But just being able to go to bed without that stress is a huge thing.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

That’s interesting. You don’t hear that. It’s so obvious, but I’ve never heard that before explicitly stated. So thank you. Thank you for bringing that up, Kalpana. Brady, what are you. You are yourself an AI power using protege, and you’re very exposed to organizations that through staircase and through a lot of Your discovery and whatnot, how folks are using AI. What are your favorite use cases for using AI in your role? You’re working at a customer success post sales company in a product management role, previously in a customer success role.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

So yeah, how are you using it?

 

Brady Bluhm:

I’ll say first and foremost, if you’re working in this space at all, you’re on a lot of calls and in a lot of meetings. And so find your meeting recording tool of choice. I don’t care what it is, honestly, at this point, it’s like if you can get a transcript, you’re set that that’s what you really want, right? Every meeting is like 30 to an hour long, 30 minutes to an hour long of unstructured data that then you can have the structured data. So the way I’ll use a call tool that, well, it’s changed the way I meet is the truth because one, it helps me to prep. Staircase helps me to prep. So I’m, I’m going to toot that horn another time and, and yeah, shamelessly, I guess. But as a pm, I’m not always engaged with the customers that I’m brought into calls on. I’m brought in occasionally.

 

Brady Bluhm:

My, my engagement is a little more similar to like how an exec would be brought in as like in an operation to help with something, right? Or to like get feedback or to do this kind of thing. And so I don’t have the full context of the customer. And so before I would always have to ping the CSM and say, hey, can you get me up to speed? Like, what do I need to talk with them about? Like, prep me on this. That would take probably the CSM at least 15 minutes of a context switch out of what they’re doing, right? And it takes me out of that too, out of my flow. I have to wait for them to respond and then it might be in a time I don’t have the time to do it, et cetera, right? There’s all these like weird time delays with Staircase, it’s capturing all engagements with the customer across the board, with all people engaging with them. So I can go in there and reliably get the context I need. And every time I’ve checked it with the CSM beforehand, they’re like, yeah, that’s great. Like, how did you do that? And I was like, you should start asking Staircase.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Like, it’s a great, it’s a great source for that. So it helps me prep. And then the aftermath too, though. So while I’m on the call, rather than having to take notes and jot things down and be like, oh, I’m going to remember this. The things I find myself writing are, oh, I want to ask them about this a little bit later. I’ll jot that down while I’m on a call because I want to let the customer keep talking is the truth. Because I can ask questions and then they give me information and I don’t even have to remember any of the information. I just have to remember that they talked about it with me and, and so then I can ask a better question.

 

Brady Bluhm:

I cannot interrupt them because I can. I can write my questions down and then follow up afterward and ask then. And then after the call I can go in because I’m a product manager. I have a prompt that I’ll use that act like a technical product manager, pull out all the details of the requirements that were talked about on this call and, and lay those out for me so that I have them and then I can bring that into. I like using cloud a lot. Cloud’s my favorite LLM.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Why? Why?

 

Brady Bluhm:

So that. I think that’s actually a total rabbit hole, Josh, that I could go down. But it was last year, around this time, it was last July, I think, 3.5 Sonnet was launched and a couple of teammates on the AI for All Club were, were talking about Claude. And I was heavy Chat GPT user at the time, so I started playing with cloud and I was like, I like the way this thing like thinks and writes and, and it just like resonated with me. And then I started investing in building out my projects, building out my knowledge and all that stuff can be Translated to like ChatGPT projects. And I even in the back of my mind, like, wish I had a week that I could do that and have it living in both places, to be honest. But I’m so invested in that tool and I know how it thinks and works and behaves and I’ve tuned it and other things that I’m kind of. It’s like being in the Apple Eco ecosphere.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Right. Like, it’s going to be hard to get me to jump to Google products.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

They’re building moats, right? These, these, these, these, these LLMs, right? They have the mode of all the context they have about you and at a certain point there’s no, there’s no climbing out of that ditch.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Yeah. So. So I’m familiar with it. I have all my stuff in it and so I’ve been able to stick with it. And I feel like Claude has also stayed at the Top of the game in the use cases that I use it for, especially like writing and technical documentation and other things like that. Like Opus 4.1 recently has just been like a godsend. It’s so great. I love working with it.

 

Brady Bluhm:

So, yeah, that’s my Klodge spiel. So anyway, after a call, I can bring it in there and I can work with it in my LLM space and then I can drive a bunch of outputs from calls, right? I can gather a bunch of feedback from calls. If you’re able to search across calls. I’ve been able to do this. It’s like recently I’m working on a feature for multi product association and I can ask it tell me all the customers that I’ve talked about multi product association with. And it scans all my calls and it’s like, here you go, here’s the list. Then I can add those to my feature area, right? So there’s just. There’s a lot of value.

 

Brady Bluhm:

There’s a lot of value in call recording right now is the truth. Especially in CS land. Figure out your workflows with how you’re meeting with customers. And I, I think, I believe that’s one of the core shifts we will see in CS is like way less. Manual data entry, way less. And my goal is to actually make calls where all the work gets done. Like have the conversations, talk about the things you need to talk about, know what those things are and then have those outputs even be automated in updating your systems and updating it. I think that is a very real future that’s not very far off.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

I’m hearing a theme from both of you guys as well now about peace of mind. So for Brady, it’s more in the moment, the peace of mind that there’s a note taker there capturing everything for me after the fact. And Kalpana, it’s peace of mind to go to bed knowing that next week I won’t have to scramble to dig up all the resources. I’ve already got them working for me in the background and I’ll just press play on outputting those and I’ll have all the context I need. On that note, around peace of mind, AI can also be disconcerting for some folks in a few ways. Right now I think there are people that feel like they’re behind. They feel like they don’t know where to start. How to make the time and the space for it is the first thing.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

And secondly, I think there’s folks that are worried about jobs, labor displacement, labor replacement. So How? I gave you two different prompts there, but address either for me. What are your thoughts?

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

Well, I’ll go first. So I heard this long time ago and it stuck with me. I think AI will not replace jobs outright. It may do that at one point in time. Like Brady said, there will be some tasks which will definitely be taken over by AI. But I am going to talk specifically about a CSM and the CS space per se. Right. It will not replace, it’ll replace bundles of tasks.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

My job is not simply the administrative aspects of it. My job is also relationship building. So it’ll allow me to focus on those, as we call it, higher value tasks than doing it otherwise. So for example, you know, Brady talked about it in any customer call. I am now 100% present. And so my reactions are based on fully hearing what the customer is saying. Not just hearing what they’re saying, but also some undertones which I might miss if I’m busy taking notes, just giving an example. Right.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

And so I’m 100% there. That definitely makes a difference in the relationship that you’re building with your customer. Number one. The other aspect of it is the fact that I told you about the bundles of tasks that are being taken away. Right. It allowed me to scale in a big way. It allowed me to take on way more accounts and do what the organization needed me to do at that particular point in time. Be able to go to bed in peace.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

As I was mentioning, I feel like AI is probably not going to replace right now, at least in the next foreseeable future. I don’t see it replacing many tasks, but I feel like it makes me reinvent myself to do deeper work here. I am now able to do deeper work, look at more the customer in a more strategic way. Not just my high value customers, but also the customers that are on the lower end of my ARR. I’m able to give them the same kind of treatment.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Kalpana, can you, can you dig into that? Because we hear a lot about, you know, okay, it’s going to free up folks time so they can be more strategic, eliminate the busy work, eliminate the. They’re going to be more strategic. What specifically are you doing or you know, what strategic activities are you able to dive more into with that time?

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

Awesome. So that’s a great question. So one of the things that I talked about was going in deeper, right. So I am able to offer some of those additional services that again, site CSM does offer. We are CSMs for CSMs. Right. And so our task here is to make the other CSMS tasks work easier in gainside itself. So one of the things we do is called a chairside activity.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

Now, typically, I would not offer the chairside activity unless the customer is really having some issues here. Now I’m able to do many chair sides without having to worry about, oh, my goodness, this is a very intense exercise. At one point in time, we would do something called an instance review, which is also called a health review with many other SaaS products. So we would do a health review, which is a very intense exercise. It takes a lot of time going into a customer’s instance and tying it back to what the best practices are that I would want to suggest to them. I’m able to offer that without worrying about the amount of time it is going to take me because it has already taken off the busy work of my plate. So I am not having to worry about, oh, my goodness, I have to take notes. I have to make sure that I’m sending a proper recap and so on and so forth.

 

Kalpana Krishna Kumar:

That’s already being taken care of for me. I’m able to reduce the time taken to put all of this, collate all of this information into true prescriptive recommendations in a much simpler way, in a much faster way. And so I can actually offer these services across the breadth, not just one specific area, you know, and I’m like, not being selective about it very much. And I’m not worried about it because I can offer it and know that I will deliver.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

You’ve been able to be less discriminating to your customers, being able to offer them better, you know, higher touch service at larger scale. Let’s end on this, Brady. You are the educator in the organization. You’re the one that’s charting the path. Some might even call you a trailblazer. Where are you going for your education on AI and agentic to stay up to speed on the latest and greatest. Because the challenge is that things move very quickly and that can be difficult.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Good question. I’m definitely leaning into a lot of podcasts. I use AI a lot to learn about it too. And I have, I like to call them AI minds instead of agents because I like to anthropomorphize it a little bit. It’s easier for me to relate to it other things like that. Right. So I have an AI mind. Her name is Lumi and she’s an AI fluency coach.

 

Brady Bluhm:

And what she does is she actually the first engagement that a person has with her is like evaluative. She’s asking questions, having conversations about AI use.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

So you’ve actually create, you’ve created a, you’ve created a GPT or an agent for, for this called Lumi.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Yeah.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Yeah, In Claude.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Yeah, in Claude.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Oh, wonderful. Okay, cool. All right, sorry, keep going.

 

Brady Bluhm:

So, yeah, she evaluates you and then she builds a profile of the person and like their likes what they want to learn about all that kind of stuff too and where they’re at too, on, on their path of learning. And then say you save that profile to the project and then she knows you and then you can dive in and anytime. Like I’ve gone into AI ethics with, with Lumi a lot deeply on that. I’ve definitely gone into age conversations and understanding about like the different layers of agents that you can bring into things. And so that’s where I like to do a lot of like my creative exploration where it’s, it’s like it’s my brain leading it in a way. Right. And guiding that. But then I learn a ton though, from listening to a host of different podcasts.

 

Brady Bluhm:

I’m subscribed to some substacks, but it’s hard for me to keep up is the truth too. I do get like in my, in my news feed though, or in my email, I’m subscribed to a few of the different AI like RSS type feeds and stuff like that. So I’ll stay up to date on the happenings and what’s going on in AI in that way. I do want to touch one thing too, Josh, on the replacement. Right. Of people. I’ve thought a lot about this and actually in a session last year in Pulse, I talked about like, the scary thing is we’re all doing the low level tasks right now in our job and we think that is our job or a core chunk of our job is like doing these low level tasks that actually are pretty easy to automate or see it being automated in the next few years with AI, right. And so that can feel really, really scary.

 

Brady Bluhm:

But there’s these high level skills and tasks that we should be doing more often. Like Kalpana was talking about, it’s like get in and do your chairside, sit down with the people using your software and like listen to them and know you can do it in a matter of a few hours rather than it used to take 15 to do something like that, right? So like you can speed up and give people superpowers. And truly the way I think about it is I have almost like a team of people underneath me that they’re agents or AI minds that I can. I can use to do things. And the truth is, like, we’re not going to hire five people under me to do it. We don’t have. Like, we don’t have. It’s not going to happen.

 

Brady Bluhm:

I could ask for it, but it’s going to get denied. Right. But instead of needing that or feeling like I can’t do it and I’m drowning, I can leverage AI as my teammate in a way to help accelerate me and give me superpowers. And that’s the same with CSMs. That’s the same with CS admins too. It’s like these are our. We should start really cultivating our skills of how we can use these things because it really is about leveling ourselves up and leveling the whole community up in that way too.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Yeah. Okay. So, Brady, I know you’re an ultra yogi, if that’s even the right term for it, but you’re in that realm. So I want to end this episode on a note of gratitude. I want to express gratitude to gainsight big brother who’s watching, for allowing you the space, you and Seth and others the space to play around, to have that sandbox, that playground and promote it and buy the licenses and those things. I want to thank you, Brady, for educating and inspiring Kalpana and showing her and others within the organization the way because this thing, these things do need to bubble up and have a groundswell from the community, from the ground roots of things. And Kalpana, I want to thank you for sharing very concrete examples of how you’ve been able to up your game to really, in very, again, very concrete ways. It’s not just that you’re doing more strategic things like you’ve increased your book of business by 40%, the customers that you interact with, you’ve very concretely been able to have more of these chairside chats with more stakeholders and those things have resulted in much better outcomes.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

So thank you for sharing a very vivid example because sometimes these things are abstracted and we don’t always get those values examples. And sure, we’ll thank the audience as well. So thank you guys all for being here on the show.

 

Brady Bluhm:

Thank you, Josh.

 

(Host) Josh Schachter:

Yeah, looking. Yeah, yeah, of course. And looking forward to. To more innovation to come.