177. How OpenAI Built a Champion Network to Drive AI Adoption ft. Christina Meng (OpenAI)

And so, the organizations that are keeping humans at the center of this massive change management initiative are succeeding in that, and I think that, like, that’s something that is worth noting and calling out, and why I see this as very much a customer success and education initiative.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight Podcast Network. Imagine you’re handed a blank page, no playbook, no precedent, just a mandate. Take the most transformative technology in a generation and make sure people inside the world’s biggest companies don’t just use it, But truly believe in it, become champions for it. That’s what Christina Meng has spent her career doing. First at Slack, where she helped grow a champion network to nearly 4,000 members. And now at OpenAI, where in just one year she built their champion network from nothing to over 600 members. This week on Unchurned, the art of turning customers into your most powerful growth engine. Unchurned is proudly presented by the Gainsight Podcast Network.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Hey everybody, welcome to this week’s episode of Unchurned. I’m your host, Josh Schachter, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Market Development at Gainsight, and I am super excited to be here today with Christina Meng. Christina is the Champion Programs Lead at OpenAI, a little known company called OpenAI. Welcome, Christina.

Christina Meng:
Thank you. Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay. So in my notes, you tell me if this is correct or not. This is what my ChatGPT told me is—

Christina Meng:
better be right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Better be right. No hallucinations here. You are— I’m gonna throw in like a random hallucination just to see if you can catch it. Christina Meng is the person who built the OpenAI Champion Network from nothing and grew it to 600+ members in a year. True or false?

Christina Meng:
True.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Great.

Christina Meng:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Before that, she did the same thing at Slack. True or false?

Christina Meng:
True. I didn’t build from the ground up at Slack, but I took the program over relatively early.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, you know how they say that like ChatGPT can be a little bit overeager sometimes, like very like positive, like reinforcement. So that’s the piece where it’s giving you a little extra boost.

Christina Meng:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
A little extra boost there. Okay. So, but you were running the show there. We’ll just say that like, yeah, sport looked up to you. Okay. So we’re gonna go into a couple segments here. I don’t even know if you know all these segments. We, we didn’t really discuss these too much, but I wanna talk about how you got into, to champion.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, I wanna talk about what champions is, what champion advocacy, customer education, community, all those, like what that is.

Christina Meng:
Mm-hmm.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Um, why you joined OpenAI. I mean, obvious, I suppose, but good question still. Uh, where your role sits, what it’s been like building out the network. We wanna talk about internal champions and what that is. Mm-hmm. Um, and then where this is all going. So, um, let’s kind of, let’s, let’s rewind the clock a little bit and you started at Slack.

Christina Meng:
Yes.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What were you doing at Slack?

Christina Meng:
I started at Slack in 2015, January, I believe, 2015. We didn’t have any different teams really on this, on the sales or customer success side. We were all accounts. And so, I started as an account manager and then I was in sales for about 2 weeks and realized that was not a good fit for me. And then, they were like, do you wanna, head on over to the customer success team. I didn’t really know what that was at the time. I had very little experience in tech when I started at Slack, but—

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Why wasn’t sales? Why wasn’t sales your thing?

Christina Meng:
Oh, someone heard me try to have a pricing negotiation.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re too nice.

Christina Meng:
I’m from Canada.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh, yeah, that says it all.

Christina Meng:
But yeah, customer success sort of just aligned a lot with what I was passionate about and what I was good at. And so, I was a high-touch CSM for about 3 years, and I was sort of dabbling in champion programs that someone had, someone on the marketing team had started to build out. And it was a lot of sort of roundtable events around the product. And I grew up a debater, public speaker. I also love event planning, and I was like, this is a great little sort of side hustle for me. And I loved attending the events, speaking at the events, and helping to plan them. And then when that person left the company, um, they sort of asked if I wanted to take it over, um, and I was looking for a new, new challenge and sort of fell, fell into it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah, just stumbled upon it. Uh, should we step back and, and talk about, like, you can kind of clear the air here. You got a lot of CS, um, ICs and, and leaders listening to this show and, and other go-to-market functions as well. What is a champion program?

Christina Meng:
So, a champion program is a program that connects, at least here at OpenAI, I would say connects individuals who are advocating for, but also driving adoption of your product or your services within their organizations. And so, I think it can fall under different organizations in different places, both at Slack and now here at OpenAI, we’re aligned to sort of the post-sale success, uh, organization. That’s where we, that’s where we fall under. Um, I think I work very closely with advocacy teams and I work closely, uh, with community just to make sure we’re aligned.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Um, but a lot of it’s not, but it’s not, ’cause what you just described a second ago to me sounded like, oh, it’s advocacy. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s people who love the product and they’re helping to other others to learn about the product as well. But then you said it’s not advocacy.

Christina Meng:
We connect into advocacy, we find advocates from our champion programs, but our champions are, I guess if you wanna define them as internal advocates, but I think what we’re seeing more and more now is that they’re actually the individuals who are pro leading these programs that are driving adoption internally. And so, yeah, the, I work with our marketing team to find champions who are advocates, but the role is a little bit different that we’re learning, especially now. I think it was a little bit more aligned to advocacy when I was at Slack, but, but is it a little bit different here?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So if I’m hearing it right, an advocate is somebody who— and I’m sure champions can do this too— but an advocate is somebody who maybe gets on stage to talk about the company or sits in on a webinar and is in a fireside chat, or obviously they’re used for a reference that you, that you need to, or a peer exchange. That’s an advocate. Champion can do all those things, but champion is also the person that’s like the node within the organization, the power user, the person that’s that’s hosting like the internal fireside chat and really kind of helping to, to, to, to spread the word internally.

Christina Meng:
Exactly. And they’re, they’re almost like an extension of our customer success organization. They’re doing a lot of similar things that our customer success managers or success team is doing in terms of, you know, leading enablement sessions, designing programs that support adoption and continuing to measure value and telling that story. And so, I think it does make sense, at least for us, for it to sit under our success organization.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
How did Slack use Slack for champion management?

Christina Meng:
The entire champion network was run through Slack at Slack. And so, yeah, when I took the program over, it was primarily in-person events. And so, that’s— I had one under my belt and then COVID hit and I had to shift to virtual entirely. And so, it was It was a lot of trial and error figuring out like the, the best structure for the Champion Network in Slack now that we’re virtual, the right cadence. But yeah, we were 100% on Slack in a separate designated workspace for the Champion Network.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
With all your champions, they were together in Slack?

Christina Meng:
Mm-hmm, yeah, we did things like we would hide email addresses. We made sure that champions knew upon joining that there were going to be external folks within the same Slack workspace, and all of them were their customers. So, um, we had, you know, the NDAs in place and privacy agreement.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Yeah. And how many folks was it?

Christina Meng:
Uh, by the time I left, it’s actually no longer around, but, uh, we were at, I think just under 4,000 champions.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Wow. Most of which were in Slack. You were, you were, um, had, uh, some kind of form of communication with. Uh, oh, okay. Well, so wait, why isn’t it around anymore?

Christina Meng:
Um, I think it’s now folded under, uh, the Trailblazers in some company.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh, I see.

Christina Meng:
Yeah, I think it was just a separate Slack workspace. I don’t think it was scalable. Um, and Trailblazers has such a tremendous reach. Um, but yeah, yeah, it was, it was so good.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Because that’s what I’m kind of wondering. I’m trying to think about like, for folks that are out there listening that have a, you know, whatever, Series A, B, C, D, um, uh, growth company, uh, is that, is that an effective way to, to run a program? Is through this Slack community.

Christina Meng:
I think it really depends as well on sort of how you wanna structure who your champions are. There’s not one size fits all, I would say, who your champions are, how they wanna engage with you, and then looking at different features like content management, is that important? Do you wanna, I think it’s changed a lot now, there’s a lot better reporting and things like that, but there are trade-offs I think between different platforms. But I think as you’re getting started, especially if you really want to drive that very high engagement and real-time engagement as well, Slack is such a good way to start and run your community.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Christina Meng:
Yeah. I mean, I was there for almost 10 years. I love Slack. I will always love Slack.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So who, who’s the, who’s the persona? Who was the champion persona at, at Slack if you’re able to put a finger on it? And then And then let’s shift over to OpenAI and who is the champion persona now at OpenAI?

Christina Meng:
Yeah, at Slack, we had a lot of IT admins, and then it started to shift more towards folks who were in internal comms, naturally. We had a lot of people from people teams, and primarily I would say, like, I don’t like to ever say what type of role or title should be a champion, more focusing on, like, the champion skills and activities that they’re driving. But at Slack, it was a lot of organizing comms for internal champions, as well as trainings, and a lot more of it was wanting to learn from us, from Slack, about best practices of, you know, structuring their Slack workspace. So, it was a bit more, tactical, I think, on the spot. Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And I know you don’t wanna typecast who the champion is at OpenAI, but tell us, who is the champion? Who’s your archetypal champion at OpenAI right now? I mean, I suppose it would be also, was this fall under your enterprise model or also, you know, which segment of the business are you really working with?

Christina Meng:
Yeah, so I’m primarily focused on our enterprise customers, cross-product now, but primarily our champions are typically director plus, or head of AI type role. They’re the individuals, and I should preface this by saying, we sort of identified 3 different champion personas. So, there’s not just like one type of champion. We have our executive champions, we have our champion leads, and then internal champions, which we can talk about a little bit later. Right now, our programs are designed around really supporting our executive champions and champion leads. And so our champion leads are typically head of AI, head of AI enablement, again, the individuals who are really designing the systems and the programs to support education for their— and adoption for their organization.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So, so they’re, they’re kind of leading the str— probably both strategic and tactical on AI transformation at the organization.

Christina Meng:
Exactly. Our, our champion leads are the individuals who really have that sort of bidirectional influence. So, they’re taking,, the guidance from their executive or their board, and then turning it into programs that activate the internal champions to, to lead the, um, trainings and sort of the, the hands-on workshops, et cetera.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And you said there’s 3 levels. There’s the executive level, there’s the internal champion. Sorry, what was the one that sat in the middle? Champion lead. Champion lead. So, champion lead is like your director of enablement. The executive champion is like your, your CIO or, or VP of, of something right below them. Exactly. Okay, which should we start? I want to learn all about it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I want like the gory details of how you run the program. So let’s start with the executive. You know, I’m so just a little bit background myself. I’m pretty open about this on my LinkedIn. Like, I don’t think I knew what customer marketing was. I’m— you’re the first person I’m ever telling this to. I don’t think I knew what customer marketing was 4 months ago. I don’t think I even knew what the term was.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I think I had to go ChatGPT it. Book customer marketing. Now I’m running customer marketing at Gainsight. Topsy-turvy world. Good luck to that team. So, yeah, so I want to— and one of our key initiatives is executive engagement. That’s actually one of the reasons that Chuck kind of tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to look over the program was to build more of that connectivity, that muscle. So, tell us a little bit about champion engagement, excuse me, executive championship.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
At OpenAI?

Christina Meng:
Yeah, so I always say our exec champions are like our executive sponsors plus, because they’re more hands-on than you would typically, I don’t wanna stereotype, but from what we’ve traditionally seen, and our customer marketing team does an amazing job of like executive engagement in terms of like dinners and events and conferences, very, very high quality. For my scope for executive champions, I’m really hoping to bring these individuals together who are a little bit more hands-on and active in the actual change management and like leading initiatives, bringing them together and sort of like off the record, real talk. We do dinners and we’re talking about things like how to be a good and effective executive champion and sponsor. But again, it really is just bringing people together, our executives together to talk about common challenges and then bringing in OpenAI leadership as well as their account teams to be really be able to hear that as well.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What’s the coolest event that you’ve been in that you can talk about?

Christina Meng:
The coolest event? Oh my gosh, that’s from our customer marketing team or from, from what, what I’ve done?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
No, from your time at OpenAI. Yeah, in customer marketing at OpenAI.

Christina Meng:
So I mean, our customer marketing team does just the most polished,, and our events team, really, really polished events. We were at Slush in Helsinki, I think, was it 2 years ago? And we had just the coolest, like, not even after hours, but like party that was club vibes that we were talking, everyone was really excited about OpenAI. We had really cool swag and it was just the light, everything was designed to perfection. It was a lot of fun. I’d say the events that I run are a little bit more scrappy, but I really love, I don’t wanna play favorites, but I love the champion dinners that we have for some of our executive champions. Again, it’s just intimate conversation and, you know, what comes up, what comes up?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What is the typical, like in recent months, what’s the typical talking points that, that you can share?

Christina Meng:
I would say the biggest shift that I’m noticing again is just how hands-on our executive champions are, are becoming, and they’re realizing that in order to I mean, of course it’s very important to have that bottoms-up usage and, and champions. They’re realizing that in order to actually have AI transformation across organization, they need to play a more active role in change management.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Right. Like they need to lead by example. They need to be doing all these things in the vibing and stuff in, in their free time.

Christina Meng:
Yeah. And they’re asking like, how can we be more effective executive partners? Um, and I think the biggest thing is they’re really stepping up to provide that space and unblock what needs to be unblocked to foster a lot of, um, safe experimentation with AI, saying it’s okay to use— this is how we are using it with the organization. Um, it’s okay to use it in this way. Um, and really making sure that they’re almost setting aside time and, and making it okay to do things like you know, hackathons or workshops, or 10% of your time should be dedicated to experimenting with AI. That’s, that’s a big shift that we’re seeing.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I remember a good friend of mine, David Karp, um, he’s a senior vice president at Build Trust. He was the CCO at Disco, and he was telling me months ago, um, how Disco had done an AI hackathon. It was already like a year and a half ago. Um, but, but he actually shared kind of the playbook with me of like, and it was like very collaborative, like very organized, very intentional. The whole executive team really planned it out and they had like huge participation and, and it just, it did wonders for, for getting them to the next level with their, their LLM usage and tinkering. Is there any program that you’ve heard of or any company? I don’t know, you can name names if you want or don’t want, but like, who’s doing this really well? Like, what’s a program that’s really effective?

Christina Meng:
I think obviously Salesforce Trailblazers, uh, when it comes to the education element.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Why do you say that? No, I’m not being— listen, I’m, I’m naive. Tell me, tell me.

Christina Meng:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What did I miss? No. Yeah.

Christina Meng:
Tell me. Obviously, there’s just such a strong brand. There’s, I think even though some of these champion, like the champion programs that we run, we, it’s not technically, you know, 100% community. I think having that brand and identity and like shared purpose is so important. And so, that’s something that I’ve definitely taken inspiration from is how do we start to really like, you know, you’re an OpenAI champion, like you’re a trailblazer, like you know what that is and what it stands for. I think that’s really important. I think—

Josh Schachter [Host]:
what do you do? What do you do? What do you do to have them have that self-identity?

Christina Meng:
I have had to definitely, like, this is my LinkedIn champion, champion of champions, but really champion the term champion and make it really clear what an OpenAI champion is doing, who they are, making sure our champions know that and they’re able to, to speak to that as well. Of course, we have OpenAI champion.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What is it? What is, what is, what is the definition of the champion then?

Christina Meng:
The OpenAI champion is someone who is driving the AI transformation and adoption for the organization. I will add to that though, I’m now also including the sustained adoption. I think that is extremely important and that we can segue into this later, but a lot of our customers are starting to build their own internal champion networks. And I think that is a crucial way to sustain adoption because what we’re seeing is that there’s initial excitement. Of course there is, you know, and then it’s, it’s sort of getting, it teeters off or it becomes very uneven. And these internal champions, the way that, that we’re sustaining that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Okay. So, so executive championship is, is fancy dinners and, and Chatham House rules of of, of Jeffersonian dinners of talking different topics, right? Of like what’s in their mind, like group therapy type of stuff. Right. I, I, it sounds like that’s the case, which makes sense. Probably like, you know, some World Cup tickets and stuff here and there as well.

Christina Meng:
Honestly, there’s some Champions swag and my secret is good wine and good wine. Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And good wine. Okay. Then we’ve got the, geez, I forgot it again. What’s it called? What’s the middle level championship? Champion Leeds. Champion leads. So what, what’s the program look like for champion leads?

Christina Meng:
Mm-hmm. So champion leads. So I, we launched the OpenAI Champion Network in January of last year. Uh, wow, time flies. Um, and that is an online forum, um, that we are inviting our champion leads to. Um, and within the Champion Network, um, there’s a series of events, uh, both virtual and in-person and at different levels of scale. And that’s sort of the primary way that we’re engaging with them. Now, what’s coming now is we’re also doing recognition dinners for our champion leads.

Christina Meng:
And there’s also been some really great dinners where we’ve brought champion leads and executive champions together. I think that’s been really impactful to, to sort of for both to be able to talk about the challenges that they’re facing and how they can be better partners, but Primarily it is our Champion Network, um, and the events that we’re running there.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So it’s, it’s a little bit of like the mid-touch for the Champion leads. You’re, you’re running the, the, the dinners, the in-person stuff, but also then the community forum it sounds like as well for them.

Christina Meng:
Yeah. And I think where we’re actually seeing, and so for the first year I just tried to do as many different event types and program types as I could to really understand how our champions want to engage with us in the right type of content. And so I would say it’s, it’s actually pretty high touch, but virtual is easier because the sweet spot is around 25 to 30 attendees to get really deep insights. And we’re talking about, you know, common adoption challenges and things like that. We’re getting really deep in those conversations. And then I take those insights and that’s what I use to design some more of the scaled content and programming.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And so, wait, so, so like literally you’re like, again, I don’t know anything about customer marketing and I’m running this group here. So, so like teach me in real time. Yeah. We have a session probably when this podcast comes out, or maybe this might come out just afterwards with this amazing CCO, Teresa Ananya. She’s gonna do a virtual roundtable for our customers. Usually we’ve done all the webinars and roundtables for our prospects, but I said, no, no, no, let’s do it for our customers. Yes. You know, like, let’s do it for our customers and then we can sell them later.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay, no, just joking. Not really. So she’s going to do an amazing roundtable on work that she’s done around coming up with an ROI attribution model for customer success. Um, and she’s going to be pitching that, uh, and we’ll probably get about 20 people. So it sounds similar to kind of what you guys have been doing. Yeah. What, um, so that’s one that I’m excited about. What, what, how else are you running these? Like, are you bringing, uh, luminaries from within OpenAI or outside of OpenAI to the table? Are you moderating them? Is there a common challenge that everybody’s going around the table, like preparing?

Christina Meng:
Like, give me tactically how these things work. Totally. And so, I don’t, I don’t mean to correct you, but I don’t actually sit on the customer marketing team.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Please correct me. I’m usually wrong, so this is helpful. And if I’m thinking it, then others are as well.

Christina Meng:
So, but sometimes champions does fall, or similar programs does fall under champions. I, again, I work really closely with their customer marketing team as—

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Why don’t you work on the customer marketing team? Mm-hmm. Why aren’t you, why don’t you sit under the customer marketing team?

Christina Meng:
Um, I think because we’re very much focused on education, um, and that the post-sale act, the activation of the usage, those are our primary metrics that, um, we’re focused on for champions.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh, right. As opposed to advocacy, it’s, it’s like you said before, it’s the, the post-sale, um, internal championship.

Christina Meng:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay.

Christina Meng:
We have a, I, I work with the customer marketing team of if we find really strong champions who would be a good advocate to speak at some of our conferences or a customer story, we have a strong channel of communication and pipeline there.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, no, it makes sense. And thank you for correcting me because again, that like reinforces the marketing advocacy, that’s more on the selling motion. The championship is more on the adoption, sustained usage motion, that sort of thing. So, so yeah, so tell me, Like, let’s get tactical. How do, how do these roundtables run?

Christina Meng:
Honestly, sometimes I don’t even say much. I’m creating these spaces. I create, I, I figure out what is a, a good topic to have this conversation around, um, based on all of the insights that I’m hearing from our champions. I think I, I sit in a really interesting spot because I get to hear from, you know, across so many different types of organizations and org different sizes of organizations. Um, and it’s, Interesting to hear that at least in the earlier days that they were mostly solving the same challenges. And so, just creating spaces for these champions to come together, share their stories, share their insights, they’re helping each other. I kick off the conversations. I know I have a couple questions, but it always amazes me and it amazes all of the folks that I bring in from OpenAI just how much our champions want to talk to each other and learn from each other.

Christina Meng:
Interesting. We also do a series where we bring in folks from different areas of, um, OpenAI to, um, talk about, you know, how they’re using, um, ChatGPT for their role. Um, or, uh, we brought in one of our CSMs to talk about how we’re measuring value. But again, we, I try to keep the content to max like half of the, the conversation because there’s just so much discussion, uh, that happens and that’s really where the magic happens.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Do you have to be a champion to have access to these roundtables?

Christina Meng:
Yes. Sometimes, sometimes I do ones for experimenting. Again, we’re all about experimentation here with these types of events for folks outside of the Champion Network. I’m trying to stay focused. It’s hard.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Stay in your lane.

Christina Meng:
Yes. Yeah. But I think what’s been really cool is that I’m starting to sort of like scale through playbooks, and I hate that word, they don’t last very long, but like events in a box that I’m sharing with other parts of the organization, like our sales teams, to be able to run some of these types of events just based on what I’ve seen work with our champions.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And do you see that the folks that attend, that they communicate beyond just that virtual session?

Christina Meng:
Yes, I hear— I just— it warms my heart when I hear stories of champions who have met through champion events and the network. And then they’re having now like, you know, weekly check-ins with each other ongoing. And it’s— I don’t get to see exactly or it’s hard to track when that’s happening, but I do hear it from our champions. And I think that’s the beauty of it. It’s— I think because the nature of what we’re doing and You know, AI is— these champions are one of very few people in their organization who are leading these efforts, and everything is new. So, um, we’re, we’re— the questions really aren’t that I’m getting from champions. It’s not like, how do I use like this, this part of the product? How do I, um, like, give me the, the playbook for how to create internal champion network that like, that’s helpful. But the number one question is, I just wanna hear from other people how they’re doing it.

Christina Meng:
Mm-hmm. And they’re helping each other and I really love that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That’s awesome. We’re all learning together. This is awesome. Okay. Internal champions. Talk about that segment of your championship.

Christina Meng:
So, that is next for us to start to work with, but the internal champions are the individuals within an organization who often sit within different departments and they are really executing on the enablement strategy or the AI strategy that the champion leads have created. And so, often, more and more now, we’re seeing that our customers are creating internal champion networks. And so, sort of bringing together all of these champions and making sure that they are, have a way to connect with each other internally, have a way to share back their learnings from working with their teams and departments., and then are also sort of aligned when it comes to what they’re trying to accomplish as a champion, what that internal champion role is. Um, and it does, it’s different at different organizations.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So, these are the people that are, that are hosting kind of the internal pizza party hackathons, and, and they’re like the people, the peers that everybody goes to for help. They’re, they’re maybe a little bit more at the, the individual contributor level potentially.

Christina Meng:
Again, it’s a mix, but yeah, I think what’s Another shift that we’re seeing is I think earlier on there was sort of power user and champion were used interchangeably. And I think that’s still the case for a lot of organizations who are just getting started with, you know, their AI adoption journey. I think one, one thing that we’re seeing with some more, more of our mature customers is that there is a moment where that shifts, where they realize, okay, a lot of power users and enthusiasts can become champions, but champions need to want to have some level of influence and have some level of influence in terms of teaching, um, their peers because there’s that step between loving using AI and OpenAI products for yourself, and then there’s that additional step of, okay, now I want to teach others and figure out how I can, you know, customize this training or this, this workflow for this team. Um, so it becomes almost a little bit more, um, like a consultant type of role.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Let’s talk more about you. Let’s go back to you for a second. Okay. Uh, before we go professional again, let’s go back. Let’s go personal. I also found out through my research that you are a big musical theater person. Is that right?

Christina Meng:
Or is that a hallucination? Oh, that’s so right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So right. OK, I live in New York City. What’s your favorite Broadway musical?

Christina Meng:
That’s— OK, I have different categories. I would say Little Shop of Horrors, off-Broadway, but one of my favorites of all time. Moulin Rouge is always a favorite of mine. I love that they sort of— when they switch out the leads and you get to see a different— I love rewatching musicals, but you get to see a different take on it every time. And then Of course, as a Canadian, I have to say Come from Away is one of my favorites as well. Mm-hmm. Um, but the list goes on.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay. All right, good. We got it. All right, now back to professional. That after that little, leave you a little TV time out there. Paint me a picture of your job through the week.

Christina Meng:
It, it really varies, uh, week by week. I hate, I know that’s a, that’s a non-answer. Um, but there’s a lot of travel, a lot of event planning, um, a lot of collecting insights and sharing them. But one thing that is a constant is I get to be very creative, and I think that’s sort of a big part of what I love about what I do. And then I get to talk to a lot of our champions and our customers, which is, again, that was one thing that I was worried about switching from becoming a, from being a CSM to more of a programs role. I didn’t want to lose that customer-facing element. Um, but again, it, it’s really driven, and you know, I’m sure OpenAI, we’re releasing new features and products and things are changing so rapidly, um, that the, the, the constant really is just talking to our customers and thinking about like what, what new types of programs, or how do I incorporate these learnings back into what I’m building, um, to stay on top of everything.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. You sit across CS, product, marketing, community, you sit in post-sales, which of your cross-functional relationships is the easiest and which is the hardest?

Christina Meng:
I would say, I mean, I don’t know if this counts as cross-functional because now we’re, we’re on this, the same org, but working with our, um, our customer success, uh, team and partners. Um, obviously we need to stay very aligned and sort of making sure that we’re aligned in our messaging and what we’re trying to capture in our priorities. One relationship that I’ve had to— I wouldn’t say it’s hardest because it’s great now, was the product because no one knew what champions were when I started at OpenAI. It was so— I just had to continuously really, again, champion champions and sort of reiterate the value of talking to these individuals and at this scale. And now our product managers are some of the most engaged partners that we have. And yeah, I think that’s the one that I’m most proud of, I would say.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
How do you, how do you work with product managers? Because that feels like a huge value proposition of having a champion program. Yeah.

Christina Meng:
The back and forth with them. Yeah, it’s definitely sort of another buzzword here, co-creation, but bringing our product managers in or tapping into our champions when we want to sort of run early stage ideas by our champions and things like, you know, even directionally, we won’t even name what the feature is or, you know, pressure test some value messaging, some like UX design as well. It’s just that we have this group of amazingly engaged individuals who not only know how to advocate for themselves, but advocate for their entire organization and their feedback, and really understand the blockers and the challenges. And so, it’s just such a valuable group to tap into. And I think as soon as I had, you know, the first couple of product champions from internally at OpenAI, folks started to see the value in tapping into them. Yeah. What metric are you measuring? At the beginning, it was, it was a little bit vibes-based, a lot of attend— people thought I was in marketing. No, I’m not joking.

Christina Meng:
There was a lot of, you know, attendance and engagement. And so, but that was what our marketing organization was really focused on and crushing. And so, we had to really get a lot more, put a lot more operational rigor behind the champion program, what we’re measuring. And now we’re, we’re effectively aligned to driving activation., and then not just activation, again, sustained, activation. Um, and so that’s sort of the big bet that we’re making. And now I’m, I’m, I’m not a data person. I think the last, the last month or so I’ve been like living in spreadsheets trying to do this with the help of ChatGPT and Codex. I can’t live without those things.

Christina Meng:
Um, but trying to really hone in on, you know, it’s, it’s hard to measure the impact that this champion is having internally because Like they’re leading the programs that drive the adoption. And so, yeah, it’s, it’s something that I’m, I’ve been thinking a lot about, but at the baseline is, is activation and sustained activation.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Christina Meng:
And do you guys have a definition of activation?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Weekly active usage over enabled. Okay. And so you’re trying to correlate for the activities that they’re engaging in, in your program, what’s the correlation to higher activation?

Christina Meng:
And it’s tough because again, there’s a lot of correlation, but I think my hunch is that because we’re focusing a lot of our programs right now on our champion leads and our executive champions who have, who are, have influence and, uh, decision-making power, um, we can attribute a little bit better. But again, our data team’s probably like, Christina, stop talking. Um, but yeah, uh, that’s definitely something that we’re, we’re trying to really hone in on. Like, even when we’re about to launch an expansion of our champion network, and we’re trying to look at the metrics that define what a champion is, we looked at things like, you know, GPT usage or creation and how many people are using that GPT. But really, it is— we actually took a step away from that and got a little bit creative of how we find our champions, the individuals who are sort of leading these adoption efforts. So, it’s tough, but I’m confident we’ll get there.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Stay tuned. A friend and former colleague of mine at my startup Update.ai, his name’s Mickey, and he used to say facetiously, he was very facetious. He used to say, you know who doesn’t have customer success? Google, because you just type in a Google search and everybody knows how to use it. And that’s the ultimate is when you don’t even need CS because it’s just as simple as typing in a search. It’s kind of the same with OpenAI. You just type in a prompt. So here’s what I’m facetiously asking you to help. Ooh, I like the mug.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I want one with the OpenAI branding and everything.

Christina Meng:
Maybe you should become a champion.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Do I have to be a mug? I have to become a champion. Yeah. So for all the SaaS post-sales go-to-market leaders listening, right now, why do they need customer education? Why do they need a champion program to increase usage, adoption, GRR?

Christina Meng:
AI maturity and usage, um, I think is, is drastically shifting very quickly. I think what we’re seeing across a lot of our, um, customers is that the, the organizations who are treating the rollout of AI as purely a tech rollout, they’re not successfully driving AI adoption because yes, you can, you know, ask ChatGPT a question and it’ll spit out an answer. But the real value, um, and, and where we’re at now is, is moving beyond that. Um, and so I think the organizations that are keeping humans at the center of this massive change management, uh, initiative are succeeding in that. And I think that, like, that’s, that’s something that is worth noting and calling out and why I see this as very much a customer success and education initiative. If you think about it too, it’s not just like a one-time, like, roll out this tech. It is changing so quickly. So if I think about it through the champion lens, they are needing to create these programs at sustained adoption and they’re driving the change, but they’re also needing to keep up with all of the product updates and releases and figure out how to lead those releases internally as well.

Christina Meng:
So, it’s constantly keeping up with the chain and change management, you know, celebrating the wins and things like that. So, to me, it definitely makes sense that this aligns very closely to customer success.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. And education. Yeah. What’s something that, just to wrap us up here, what’s something that you haven’t yet tried in your program management that you would love to experiment with?

Christina Meng:
I wanna do some global async and live champion, uh, event slash activation, you know? Um, ooh. Yeah. Um, but making sure that it’s very much aligned to what our champions need and they’re doing. Because again, like, this is not anyone’s full-time job. Even our champion leads, like, they’re working across other AI initiatives and AI tools. And so, I always try to think through the lens of how am I designing this program or this initiative that is going to make their lives a little bit easier, but then again, leaning into the global scale of it, which we’re really trying to do. So, that’s next on my list of things to figure out is how can we do this, like, I don’t wanna say not even just a hackathon, but you know, use case showcase hackathon, global champion activation, uh, type thing.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So, stay tuned. Actually, last questions for you. Yes. Are you using Agentic in any way in what you’re doing?

Christina Meng:
I am. Yes. Um, as a pro, like as I, I couldn’t do what I do, uh, without, without it. And this is something that I’ve actually had to intentionally carve out time to learn as well. I think I was so heads down focused on like launching this program that I was starting to fall behind on, um, some of, oh, I shouldn’t be saying this, but some of the, uh, things. We all are, we’re all falling behind. But, but the beauty of it is, is that because it’s moving so quickly, I think it’s also, you can catch up just as quickly. Um, if you dedicate some time to learning it.

Christina Meng:
Um, but in terms of, you know, capturing insights and creating content and, um, creating, um, exp— like, I, I, I’m not a technical person at all. I don’t know how to code. This has now become my whole personality is how much I use and love Codex. And I have done so many new initiatives, um, and, and taken them on and, and streamlined so many of my, um, internal, um, processes that using Codex and some of the agentics.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What’s the one that you’re— that’s the coolest or most effective?

Christina Meng:
I’m trying to think through if it’s something that incorporates anything that we haven’t released yet, but I think the biggest one right now is, well, this is going to sound— so one thing that I’m really bad at is keeping up a internal or internal and external calendar of what’s happening for our champion programs and our champion events. And so that’s one thing that I’ve been able to create is I have this spreadsheet that makes absolutely no sense to anyone else, but I was able to use Codex to help me build a web app that essentially pulls the right level of information for our internal teams and links to the, you know, event recaps in Slack and and notes and landing pages and everything like that. So it’s sort of like a one-stop shop.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That’s so cool. It’s like a hub of all of your champion events.

Christina Meng:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And now we’re thinking through also like, how do we use some of these workflows to support our champions better in terms of, you know, helping them create content and making it tailored for their organization.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So more on that to come as well. That is really cool. Okay, awesome. Christina, thank you so much. Christina Meng of OpenAI, champion of champions at OpenAI. Uh, this was delightful. I learned a lot. I’m sure our audience did as well, all 5 of them.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And so thank you so much for being on the program.

Christina Meng:
Thank you so much. This was so much fun.