Hey {{first_name | CS Pro}},

Everyone wants an AI powered digital CS motion right now, and almost nobody knows where to start.

Most leaders I speak to are either intimidated by it or convinced they need perfect data before they can touch it.

This week I sat down with Joe Di Grande, Director of Digital Customer Success at Gong, who has been building digital and tech touch programs for over a decade. His take surprised me: AI is not the first stop.

If you are trying to scale your long tail without adding headcount, this one is for you.

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Joe's team at Gong just got a new name. What used to be digital CS is now the digital revenue architecture team, because the job is working out which levers to pull to get a customer to an outcome, like an architect building a house.

So what has actually changed with AI? Joe compared it to the calculator. You still need to know that two plus two equals four, but you no longer have to do the math by hand. Back in the day, building a digital flow meant borrowing marketing tools like Marketo and mapping every branch yourself. Now you can drop a plain language prompt into a tool like Zapier and get a working mock-up in minutes instead of days.

Here is the catch. Speed does not replace experience. You still need to know how the workflow should and should not run, where the gotcha moments are, and how to audit what AI hands you. AI works with you, not against you. But the judgement is still yours.

I asked Joe what he would build first if he had a solid CS motion and was told to go digital. His answer had nothing to do with AI.

Start with the problems in front of you. Pick one stage of the journey, whether that is onboarding, implementation or renewal, and choose the one with the biggest impact. Then work backwards. What information do you need? If X happens, what needs to happen next?

Then comes the part most people skip: data. You can train the most exceptional Claude agent in the world to handle a process, then realise you do not have the data to feed it, or approval to connect it to the system that does.

And if your data is messy (whose isn't?), that is exactly why AI should not be your first stop. Go back to rule based automation. Pull a list, handpick the contacts, run a small experiment and prove the business case. Once you can show the impact, then you fight for the data clean up and scale it. Crawl, walk, run. Do not boil the ocean.

If your team is still stuck on which conversations to hand to automation and which ones need a human, that is exactly what my from check-in calls to value calls workshop is built for, and you can book a call here to talk it through.

Joe admitted he might get some flack for this, but his number one metric for digital is deflection. The whole point of tech touch is efficiency and scale. If you can teach customers to solve problems and see value on their own, the human gets freed up for the bigger impact conversations.

From there, look at adoption. Logins, activation, whatever your baseline was before you automated, and whether it moved after. Joe raised a question I keep thinking about: were all those human conversations driving impact, or were we just talking to whoever shouted loudest for a person?

But none of that replaces revenue. Even with a title like digital revenue architect, there is still selling involved. GDR or NDR is the lagging indicator that tells you whether any of it worked. If your digital team is measuring activity but nobody can tie it back to renewals and expansions, that is where a forecasting renewals and upsells workshop for your team can help.

Joe's prediction for next year? Virtual AI agents, the kind where you cannot tell if you are speaking to a person. Neither of us thinks that is ready for a 500K ARR customer yet. Humans trust humans.

Pick one stage of your customer journey where you are losing the most time. Write out what should happen, what data you would need to trigger it, and what you actually have today. Then run one small experiment with a handpicked list this week, no AI required. If the data gap turns out to be bigger than the process gap, you have found your real starting point.

That's it for this week! Joe and I could have talked for another hour, so have a listen to the full conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube and let me know what you think.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us.

Cheers to your CS success,
Anika