Taking CS Into the Agentic Future: A Decade of Evolution
Explore how AI and Agentic systems are reshaping the way leading companies drive growth and serve their customers.
Where We Are Now
The Agentic Future of CS
In today’s market, growth doesn’t come from just landing new logos. It comes from delivering customer value and expanding existing relationships—and doing it efficiently. But managing hundreds of customers at scale, ensuring their success, and capturing the right signals to track impact has become impossible for historically manual efforts.
That’s why the most forward-looking revenue and CS leaders are turning to AI and agentic systems to unlock customer intelligence at scale. AI doesn’t just offer another customer dashboard. It brings dynamic, embedded copilots that surface risks, alerts that identify expansion opportunities, and the insights and automations teams need to act in real time.
AI-powered teams don’t wait for NPS surveys or quarterly business reviews. They’re always on, always ready—because AI is continuously analyzing, prioritizing, and prompting the right customer action.
0%
of B2B revenue comes form existing customers.
AI-powered insights ensure you stay ahead of risk, strengthen relationships, and spot expansion opportunities before your competition does.
The Evangelists
Rally Around AI-Driven Revenue
Gainsight is leading the next shift in CS and post-sales growth—giving CS teams, CROs, and RevOps the AI-powered insights they need to keep and grow their customers. Early adopters of AI customer intelligence tools like Staircase AI are already seeing the tangible business impact.
Agentic CS = higher retention, faster action, smarter growth
Hint:
0%
0x more visibility into customer relationships. Tangible ROI that brought exec alignment across GTM.
0x
AI surfaced early churn risk before customers raised concerns, helping CSMs prioritize actions that saved accounts.
0ptRenewal Increase $0M+in pipeline
AI Cheat Sheet helped surface high-impact actions, driving smarter engagement and stronger revenue outcomes.
More Accurate Customer Health Scores
AI-powered scorecards helped surface the right metrics—like support tickets—to proactively spot risk and improve retention.
Took the Guesswork Out of Risk Management
The AI Cheat Sheet identified key signals to watch, helping CSMs prioritize actions and reduce preventable escalations.
Investment with an impact.
We examined Bessemer Venture Partners’ Cloud Index and found that Gainsight customers grow faster and have higher net retention than their peers.
- Compare Gainsight customers → 20 Gainsight customers grew revenue at 40% after adopting Gainsight, and increased share price at ~45%.
- To Non-Gainsight customers → 21 companies that did not use Gainsight and had at least three years of publicly available financial data. They grew revenue at 32% and share price at 30% in the last twelve months.
- How value-based selling impacts NRR → Gainsight usage explains 13% of the variation in their NRR, which is 10% higher than non-Gainsight customers’ average of 107%.
When Gainsight becomes the connective tissue across CS, Sales, and Revenue Ops, every team works from the same insights—and accelerates enhanced outcomes.
NRR of 0%
Gainsight customers on the Bessemer Venture Partners’ Cloud Index have an average
How We Got Here
Take a journey through the evolving maturity of Customer Success teams and technology, and discover how teams have doubled down on existing customers in the era of AI and growth at scale.
2012-2014
The experimental stage of customer success.
The business challenge in focus is reducing churn, presenting both a reactive and unsustainable approach. Companies rely on periodic check-ins resulting in sending the fire trucks to save accounts.
The unreliable results of this approach breeds frustration and, thus, the seed of customer success is planted.
Milestone Event
- Forrester publishes the book “Outside In: The Power Of Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business.”
2015-2016
A broader influence and impact.
A more sophisticated approach to managing customer relationships unfolds, particularly with the CSM role. The private SaaS market grows exponentially and Customer Success scales along with it.
SaaS organizations monitor usage as a component of their customer retention strategy.
Milestone Events
- Nick Mehta publishes the book “Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue.”
- In 2015, Forbes publishes an article “Customer Success: The Best Kept Secret of Hyper-Growth Startups”.
- According to LinkedIn data, the role of CSM has seen a 0% increase from 2015 to 2019, especially amongst the Software and IT industry, showcasing how pivotal the position is for subscription-based business growth.
The role of CSM has seen a
0%
increase from 2015-2019.
2017-2019
SaaS Kick-starts the movement.
Traditional companies with both on-prem and cloud products increase their customer success efforts.
Leadership roles within CS become more prominent and the focus on metrics comes front and center with Gross Retention Rate and Net Retention Rates.
As the benefits of CS gain more attention, so does the need for scalability across the customer base.
Milestone Events
- LinkedIn’s Most Promising Jobs of 2019 Report ranked Customer Success Manager as one of the fastest growing roles of today.
- G2 creates the first customer success grid in Spring 2018
Organization with a CXO or CCO
2017
2019
In 2017, only 0% of organizations had a chief experience officer (CXO) or chief customer officer (CCO). In 2019, that number grew to 0% and 0%, respectively.
2019–2022
CS category soars.
In April 2020, the economic downtown hit hard. Keeping customers becomes paramount, and those that once doubted the importance of customer success are forced to come to terms with the facts – customer success is paramount to business success.
Organizations increasingly associate robust customer success programs with strong NRR and valuations, treating it as the ‘north star’. Career opportunities in CS soar with more CCOs than ever before, and CS gets more sophisticated - tracking metrics like NPS, product usage, and customer engagement while Customer Success Platforms go ‘mainstream’.
Milestone Events
- Gartner® publishes the first-ever Customer Success Market Guide
- Gainsight acquires Aptrinsic (product experience and analytics solution)
2022–2023
Rise of digital CS.
Companies collectively prioritize CS, but hit roadblocks to scale. Automation and digital or tech-touch CS sees massive interest and adoption.
With CS as a mainstream requirement, companies invest in large CSM teams and technology. But as new customers outpace internal headcount, the need for scale becomes apparent. Customer Success evolves to incorporate means of digital scale - including self-service via online communities, academies for self-led learning, and scalable guidance in the product experience.
With more pieces of the puzzle, CS begins to unify the holistic post-sales experience and customer journey driving both efficiency and scalability.
Milestone Events
- Gainsight publishes Digital Customer Success book
- Gainsight acquires inSided (community platform) and Northpass (education offering)
2023–2025
AI enters the picture.
AI turns SaaS, CS and scale on its head. Post-sales teams ability to automate and scale customer engagement increases exponentially, though early AI tools require some fine tuning to be effective.
ChatGPT truly revolutionized how we work and live, with the first wave of AI tools helping teams analyze larger datasets and automate basic tasks. Teams experiment with using AI to enhance workflows, like taking meeting notes, or summarizing historical customer information. Leading AI starts to provide deeper sentiment analysis and churn modeling, scaling data consumption and our ability to proactively alert and engage with the right customers. And AI accelerates self-service, scaling our customer’s consumption of training and content with chat-like interfaces making support simpler.
Milestone Event
- Gartner® publishes first ever Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Success Platforms
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Revolutionizes the World
- In just 5 days, ChatGPT reached 1 million users, and in just two months, 100 million users
- 0% of companies now see use of AI as a top business priority
- According to Forbes, common AI uses for business include customer service (0%) and customer relationship management (0%)
- 0% of CS teams globally are already using AI in their workflows (Gainsight’s State of AI in CS Report, 2024)
2026 and Beyond
Agentic and revenue shifts in CS.
Today’s market is tough. Landing new logos is getting harder and harder, and keeping current customers—particularly as AI introduces both opportunity and uncertainty in SaaS—is mission-critical. CS teams are becoming more and more integral to company revenue, often now rolling up into a Chief Revenue Officer. And AI is the means by which holistic revenue teams can remain competitive and capture expansion opportunities with precision.
Agentic tools are increasingly critical as CS looks to the future—where AI doesn’t just analyze, it acts. Revenue leaders are looking to AI to solve the scale and manual challenges that still plague customer teams, and keep more customers by delivering better experiences without significant added overhead.
To deliver on these needs, Gainsight is refining AI to deliver on the agentic promise. Better tuned for post-sales, more capable of executing rote tasks, and increasingly aligned with the need for more proactive churn management and customer growth.
The future isn’t just automated. It’s agentic.
And it’s already here.