Tag: gen ai

  • Unlocking AI’s Black Box: How Monitors and Scorecards Elevate CX with Confidence

    Unlocking AI’s Black Box: How Monitors and Scorecards Elevate CX with Confidence

    I followed the energy at Fin Labs Paris and immediately zeroed in on the announcement of Monitors. In my view, it’s the missing piece that turns Fin’s powerful automation into an observable, trustworthy system—sitting alongside Insights and Recommendations to form a complete observability suite that gives teams confidence in what Fin is doing.

    With Monitors, you define what conversations get reviewed, both Fin and human, and set evaluation criteria using Custom Scorecards. That level of control ensures you’re measuring the metrics that matter most to your business and holding support quality to your bar, not a generic one.

    Used in concert with Insights and Recommendations, you can finally see what’s happening across your support operation, evaluate every conversation against your standards, and take targeted action to continuously move toward perfect customer experiences.

    As Agents become more powerful, transparency and control become critical. I’ve seen this shift firsthand: AI is advancing fast, and the stakes are no longer theoretical—Agents are resolving real customer issues with real consequences at scale.

    Diagram of the AI model lifecycle loop with four stages—Train, Test, Deploy, Analyze—with Analyze highlighted in orange to show monitoring that closes the feedback loop and opens the AI black box.
    Visualizing the AI development flywheel—Train, Test, Deploy, Analyze—this graphic spotlights Analyze in orange to introduce Monitors, turning opaque model behavior into measurable signals and continuous customer service insights.

    Fin has almost 8,000 customers, averages a 67% resolution rate, and resolves close to 2 million customer queries every single week, including highly complex queries in regulated industries.

    At that scale, observability isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity. Traditional CSAT and small QA samples weren’t built for Agent-led operations—they miss edge cases, don’t scale, and can’t explain drift. The result is a black box. What teams need most right now is confidence, built on data you can trust and act on.

    At Intercom, this is called the Fin Flywheel: Train, Test, Deploy, Analyze.

    Intercom Monitors dashboard with review queues and analytics cards, plus an Edit monitor panel configuring a 'Vulnerable customers' rule set with sample testing and continuous monitoring for Fin conversations.
    See inside Intercom's Monitors: a streamlined dashboard with pass‑rate charts and review queues, alongside a panel to define a 'Vulnerable customers' monitor, test it on sample chats, and run continuous checks.

    Analyze is the step where you find out what’s actually happening and it’s where improvement begins.

    In my experience, achieving confidence in an AI support operation requires three things: (1) a complete understanding of what Fin, your human team, and your customers are talking about; (2) a way to monitor and score conversations based on the criteria that matter most to your business; and (3) AI-powered recommendations that make it easy to act on what you find. Intercom launched Insights and Recommendations to address the first and third. Now, Monitors completes the system for full observability and opens the black box.

    Monitors: know whether every conversation met your standards. Customer sentiment is important, but it’s different from determining whether a conversation was handled correctly. With Monitors, you can do both—and do it at scale.

    Quote graphic for Announcing Monitors: Opening the AI black box, featuring a testimonial on tracking AI quality continuously vs. spot checks, attributed to Ineke Oates, Head of Support at Agorapulse.
    Customer support leaders praise Monitors for turning AI performance from a black box into measurable signals. This quote from Ineke Oates of Agorapulse highlights the shift from manual spot checks to continuous quality tracking.

    Monitors is a new QA capability that delivers a structured, repeatable way to define which conversations get reviewed and evaluate them against quality criteria you set. It replaces ad-hoc sampling and spreadsheet-driven QA with a system that scales as your volume grows.

    Two components work together: Monitors define what gets reviewed and Custom Scorecards define how each conversation is evaluated. That pairing brings the rigor of Agent Analytics and the discipline of eval-driven development to everyday CX operations.

    Random sampling has always been a blunt tool. When AI is handling thousands of conversations a week, a small, arbitrary slice won’t reliably capture your highest-risk edge cases, your most complex escalations, or where quality is starting to drift. I’ve felt that pain in operations reviews—too many unknowns, not enough signal.

    Product screenshot of a Monitors dashboard with review queues and bar-chart analytics, plus a New scorecard panel to assess human teammates or an AI agent using configurable criteria and pass rates.
    Open the AI black box with Monitors: track conversations, triage unreviewed items, and build transparent scorecards with criteria like accuracy, process adherence, and efficiency to lift customer support quality.

    With Monitors, you select and evaluate conversations with intent. You can target specific signals of risk or failure, like “the customer showed signs of financial vulnerability” or “Fin looped around with the same answer without resolving the issue.” Or you can create consistent, repeatable samples to benchmark quality over time. Use the existing library of filters (customer data, channel, Fin-specific metrics) or describe nuanced scenarios in natural language. Most teams will do both: hone in on the conversations that matter most and maintain a steady, structured QA sample each week.

    "When I saw Monitors, my first reaction was — this is exactly what we need. The ability to track quality continuously, instead of relying on spot checks, is a big shift for us." Ineke Oates, Head of Support, Agorapulse

    Custom Scorecards make your standards explicit and enforceable. One-size-fits-all rubrics never reflect your brand voice, industry constraints, or customer expectations. With Custom Scorecards, you define what “good” looks like for your business and turn that into a measurable, comparable quality score for every conversation.

    Minimalist testimonial graphic on an off‑white background quoting a customer about Monitors enabling QA where conversations happen, running across Fin and human support in one place; attributed to a Culture Amp leader.
    A customer testimonial underscores the promise of Monitors: bring quality assurance into the flow of work, unifying AI assistant Fin and human agents in a single place for faster, clearer customer support.

    You define the criteria that matters, how each should be measured, and how important each one is. Some criteria can be scored automatically by AI, others reviewed by a human, or both — all within the same scorecard. This means you’re not choosing between scale and judgment; you get both in one system.

    Each conversation is then evaluated against these criteria, and the system calculates an overall quality score based on your configuration. You can weigh what matters most, or mark certain criteria as critical, so a single failure can fail the entire evaluation when needed.

    The result is a single, consistent quality score that reflects your standards—not a generic metric, and not a collection of disconnected checks. That’s what makes quality measurable over time and comparable across AI and human support.

    Dashboard screenshot of Monitors review queues showing users, monitor types, colored review scores, reviewers, review status, notes, and follow-up actions with AI auto-review labels.
    Monitors helps open the AI black box by turning model outputs into trackable reviews. This clean queue groups customers, monitor types, scores, and actions—with AI auto-review—so teams improve quality faster.

    There’s an important distinction here: CX Score tells you how customers felt about a conversation. Custom Scorecards tell you whether it met your standards. You need both.

    "We looked at dedicated QA tools, but what's compelling about Monitors is that it lives where our conversations already happen. We don't need another system — we can run QA across Fin and our human team in one place." Jared Ellis, Senior Director, Global Product Support, Culture Amp

    When a conversation meets your criteria for review, Monitors routes it into a Review Queue. Each conversation is assigned to the right reviewer with its scorecard attached and status tracked end to end: Not reviewed, Reviewed, Needs a fix, Fix complete. Reviewers work directly in Intercom, capture what went wrong, and propose concrete fixes—like updating documentation or refining a workflow—so quality loops end in action, not just scores.

    Fin quality dashboard showing AI support monitor metrics and a line chart of criteria trends over time; cards list 75.2% average review score, 92.8% reviews passed, 856 reviews, and 62 failed, with date and filter controls.
    Monitors turn AI performance from opaque to measurable. The Fin quality view summarizes review score, pass rate, and review counts while a time‑series chart tracks escalation ease, clarification, and efficiency—delivering fast, actionable CX insights.

    Reporting turns QA into a continuous signal rather than a one-off audit. You can track review scores over time across Monitors and Scorecards, and compare them directly to CX Score, resolution rate, and other performance metrics. Patterns that were previously invisible become clear: a topic consistently underperforming, a quality dip correlated with a recent knowledge base change, or a team whose scores are improving week over week. This is observability applied to CX—evidence you can act on.

    Monitors for Fin conversations is live today, and the roadmap goes further. Human agent QA will bring the same structured evaluation to your human team’s conversations, creating one consistent quality system across your entire support operation.

    Real-time alerts will notify you the moment a conversation crosses a threshold you’ve defined—before the issue reaches more customers and risks compounding negative sentiment.

    Promotional banner reading "Get started with the #1 Agent today" over a dark, aurora-like gradient background, featuring a white button labeled "Start a free trial"; marketing graphic for an AI support agent.
    Kick off your journey with the #1 Agent—an AI partner designed to turn resolutions into real outcomes. Tap “Start a free trial” to explore faster, smarter customer service and see how Fin delivers value from day one.

    Knowledge base evaluation will connect AI scoring directly to your content so conversations are assessed against your latest policies and documentation, catching inaccurate or outdated responses and providing clear rationale linked to the relevant source.

    Creating perfect customer experience with AI requires transparency. You need to understand how the system is performing if you want to maintain and improve quality over time. With Insights, Monitors, and Recommendations, this is now possible—a complete analysis suite that lets you see what’s happening across every conversation, ensure it meets your standards, and pinpoint improvement opportunities when they matter most.

    I’ve long advocated for a retrieval-first, eval-driven approach to AI Strategy because it makes risk visible and manageable. Monitors operationalizes that philosophy for CX leaders: you get continuous signal, shared definitions of quality, and a direct path from flags to fixes. If you’re scaling AI support, this is how you replace uncertainty with control—and turn the black box into a competitive advantage.


    Inspired by this post on The Intercom Blog.


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  • Bad Advice from Your AI Clone? Ethics, IP, and How Product Leaders Protect Quality

    Bad Advice from Your AI Clone? Ethics, IP, and How Product Leaders Protect Quality

    What happens when an AI starts giving advice in your voice—advice you’d never actually give? I’ve been thinking a lot about that question, and this conversation hit home for me as a product leader navigating the fast-evolving reality of AI “clones.”

    Listen to this episode on: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7DNDIlIimwbbMOytArewRp?ref=producttalk.org | https://podcasts.apple.com/kh/podcast/bad-advice/id1794203808?i=1000756914818&ref=producttalk.org. Prefer video? Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/RF4BwaeMMlg?feature=oembed

    The episode examines AI “clones” built from podcast transcripts and public content—where the experimentation feels exciting, where it crosses ethical lines, and what happens when mediocre AI outputs get attributed to real people. The tension is real: when a bot confidently answers in your style but misses the nuance, “it’s not me” becomes more than a disclaimer—it’s a reputational defense.

    We dig into the messy parts: IP ownership of open-sourced transcripts, the role of pirated books in LLM training sets, rising inference costs, and the uncomfortable economic question: if anyone can prompt “act like Teresa,” how do creators make a living? In my own decision-making, I look for clear consent, guardrails that prevent impersonation, and transparent UX that never confuses a synthetic perspective with a human expert.

    This isn’t anti-AI. It’s a nuanced conversation about quality, consent, and remembering there are real humans behind the ideas.

    Here’s how I translate the key takeaways into practice. Using AI for perspective is fine—equating it to the real person isn’t. Free-feeling AI outputs still rely on someone’s work. Expertise is more than past content—it’s context, judgment, and evolution. If someone’s work influences you, find a way to support them. These principles help teams benefit from gen ai without eroding trust or the creator ecosystem.

    “Technically possible” doesn’t mean “ethically okay.” My AI Strategy playbook includes privacy-by-design, clear data governance on training materials, and a bright line between inspiration and impersonation. When we ship AI features, we label synthetic outputs, avoid mimicking living experts without permission, and create paths to compensate or promote the humans whose thinking underpins the experience.

    I’ve also tested the “act like X” pattern to stress-test product quality. Even when outputs sound plausible, they rarely capture the expert’s mental models, trade-offs, or the evolution of their thinking—especially in complex product discovery work. That gap is the difference between average AI text and expert product management leadership.

    If you listen, consider a few reflection prompts: Have you ever used AI to “act like” someone you admire? Could you tell whether the output matched that person’s actual thinking? How do you decide what’s ethically okay when using public content in LLMs? And how can we support creators while still embracing new tools?

    Resources & Links you may find helpful: Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org; Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com; Delphi.ai (AI bot platform discussed): https://www.delphi.ai/?ref=producttalk.org; Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/podcast?ref=producttalk.org; ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/?ref=producttalk.org; Petra’s Coaching Packages: https://www.petra-wille.com/coaching-packages?ref=producttalk.org; Teresa’s Product Talk: https://www.producttalk.org/; Teresa’s book Continuous Discovery Habits: https://www.producttalk.org/continuous-discovery-habits/; Lenny’s open-sourced podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&e=1&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0&ref=producttalk.org

    Have thoughts on this episode or practices that have worked in your org? Share them below—I’m keen to learn how other teams are balancing innovation with integrity.


    Inspired by this post on Product Talk.


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  • From Resolutions to Outcomes: How We Price AI Agents Fairly and Amplify Customer Value

    From Resolutions to Outcomes: How We Price AI Agents Fairly and Amplify Customer Value

    I’ve long believed a simple truth about AI in customer support: if AI is going to earn trust, pricing has to be aligned with value. That principle has guided my product decisions and the way I hold our teams accountable for measurable outcomes, not activity.

    When we shared our perspective on pricing AI Agents in 2023, we made a simple argument: if AI is going to earn trust, pricing has to be aligned with value. At the time for Fin, that value was clear. You pay when the AI resolves a customer’s problem. If it doesn’t, you don’t. That’s fair, easy to understand, and grounded in results, not activity. We were the first to introduce this pricing model because we believed that pricing and value should be inherently linked.

    That belief hasn’t changed, it’s grown stronger over time. What’s changed is what Fin can do. As we expanded capabilities and pushed deeper into complex workflows, it became clear that measuring value solely by end-to-end resolutions no longer captured the full picture of impact.

    Resolutions were the right place to start. Historically, we measured value based on whether Fin fully resolved a conversation on its own. These are known as resolutions and they gave support teams a clear way to measure ROI, easily comparing the cost of AI versus human support. They also aligned our incentives with our customers, as our revenue was directly tied to Fin’s performance.

    That clarity worked. Today, more than 7,000 teams use Fin. Our average resolution rate across customers has increased every month and now stands at 67%, even as Fin increasingly handles more complex queries. That progress came from building an Agent that could take on harder problems and still deliver.

    But as Fin got more powerful, “success” stopped being binary. I saw this first-hand in customer design sessions where policy, risk, and compliance needs rightly demanded human-in-the-loop confirmation. We weren’t failing to deliver value; we were delivering it differently.

    Over the last couple of years, we invested heavily to ensure Fin could handle the most complex parts of support. As Fin’s capabilities expanded, customers began pushing what Fin can do for them by deploying Fin deeper into their workflows to handle the toughest queries.

    In some cases, this required Fin to work in tandem with a human agent because that’s what customer policies and oversight needs dictated. Subscription changes, transaction disputes, billing issues, and other multi-step support scenarios can often require Fin to gather context, read and write to external systems, and execute actions before handing off to a human agent for confirmation.

    Fin is still doing what it was configured for – intentionally handing off after doing more of the heavy lifting, saving valuable time for support teams and overall time to serve for their customers. But our pricing metric only recognized value when the conversation ended in a full “AI resolution” (i.e. a human was never involved).

    That’s why we’re evolving Fin’s pricing metric from resolutions to outcomes. This shift reflects how customers now define value: not just in full automation, but in safe, efficient progress toward the right result across complex, multi-step, and policy-constrained workflows.

    An outcome represents when Fin successfully completes the action it was configured to perform, as part of a conversation. Resolutions are still one type of outcome Fin can deliver, where it handles the issue end-to-end. Another type of outcome can be a Procedure where Fin gathers context, takes action, and hands the conversation off when that’s what customers configured it to do.

    Promotional banner reading "Get started with the #1 Agent today" over a dark, aurora-like gradient background, featuring a white button labeled "Start a free trial"; marketing graphic for an AI support agent.
    Kick off your journey with the #1 Agent—an AI partner designed to turn resolutions into real outcomes. Tap “Start a free trial” to explore faster, smarter customer service and see how Fin delivers value from day one.

    Increasing end-to-end AI resolutions is still a core component of scaling Agents, but they are no longer the only measure of Fin's success and utility. Especially as Fin takes on more complex work. Moving to outcomes recognizes that solving a customer problem with full automation isn’t always appropriate. It’s about getting to the right result, safely, and efficiently.

    As Fin’s capabilities expand, teams should feel empowered to use it in more nuanced, collaborative work. Outcomes support that by allowing customers to design workflows that meet compliance requirements and include a human agent when necessary. From a product management standpoint, this is how we align incentives, keep risk controls intact, and still accelerate time-to-value.

    Fin is becoming even more powerful at handling complex, multi-step support queries. With outcomes, we can support that growth without constantly reinventing how value is measured. And this change gives us a strong pricing foundation that can scale as Fin continues to grow and take on more roles beyond service. This aligns with our vision of Fin becoming a “Customer Agent,” capable of handling the entire customer experience.

    What this means for pricing is intentionally straightforward. An outcome will be counted when Fin successfully completes an action it was configured to perform, as part of a conversation. That keeps the model predictable for finance leaders while staying transparent for operators and product teams managing AI workflows.

    The pricing model stays simple and the definition of value becomes more accurate. In other words, we’re doubling down on fairness, predictability, and competitiveness—core tenets for any consumption SaaS pricing strategy tied to real business impact.

    When we first wrote about outcome-based pricing, we said that trust is the currency of AI. That’s still true. Trust is earned when customers see pricing move in lockstep with utility and risk posture, especially as gen AI and agentic AI take on higher-stakes tasks.

    Pricing has to feel fair, it has to be predictable, and it has to stay competitive. Evolving from resolutions to outcomes isn’t a departure from that belief. It’s the natural maturation of how we measure value as AI moves from simple Q&A into complex procedures and human-in-the-loop collaboration.

    Fin has grown more powerful because customers asked more of it. Outcomes are how we reflect that progress honestly, while staying true to the same principles that guided us from the start. This is product strategy in action: align incentives, measure what matters, and scale what works.

    And as Fin continues to get stronger, we’ll keep holding ourselves to the same standard: price based on the value delivered. That’s how we build durable trust, sustainable ROI, and a better customer experience at scale.


    Inspired by this post on The Intercom Blog.


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  • Inside Amplitude’s AI Acquisition: Career Lessons Product Managers Can Use to 10x Impact

    Inside Amplitude’s AI Acquisition: Career Lessons Product Managers Can Use to 10x Impact

    I’m often asked how to translate early-stage experience into outsized product impact at scale. In my own practice, I study real career arcs that crystallize the habits of high-leverage product managers—especially those operating at the intersection of analytics and AI strategy.

    Consider this path: Lucas is a Product Manager at Amplitude. Previously, he was employee #1 at Command AI, acquired by Amplitude in October 2024. Lucas studied computer science at Princeton.

    What stands out to me is the compounding effect of being an early builder. When you are employee #1, you live close to the user problem, own outcomes end-to-end, and develop a bias toward focused, continuous discovery. That foundation creates durable instincts around product strategy, sharp prioritization, and empowered product teams—skills that transfer directly to later-stage environments where clarity and speed become competitive advantages.

    Acquisition integration is where those instincts meet enterprise rigor. Folding Command AI into a unified analytics platform like Amplitude requires disciplined product roadmapping and sprint planning, precise stakeholder management, and a strong POV on where AI augments core “Amplitude analytics” versus where it creates net-new value. The north star remains unchanged: deliver measurable customer outcomes that strengthen product-led growth and reduce time-to-value.

    On the AI front, I’ve seen the most successful PMs treat gen ai and LLMs for product managers as means, not ends. They anchor use cases to concrete analytics workflows—accelerating insight generation, surfacing anomaly detection, improving retention analysis, and driving user activation—while validating each step through continuous discovery and rigorous experiment design. This balance of ambition and evidence protects teams from shiny-object drift and keeps investment tethered to business impact.

    Execution-wise, the playbook is straightforward but unforgiving: clarify the problem through customer interviews; define crisp outcomes vs output OKRs; map the journey end-to-end; ship in thin slices; and iterate with observability baked into every release. Along the way, keep your cross-functional partners close—solutions engineering, customer success, and GTM—so that your learning loops extend beyond the product surface and into real adoption dynamics.

    If you’re building analytics or AI-powered experiences today, borrow these lessons: translate early-stage builder energy into enterprise-scale focus; make AI serve the product, not the other way around; and use Amplitude analytics to close the loop from idea to impact. That is how PMs compound credibility, accelerate careers, and, most importantly, create products customers can’t live without.


    Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.


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  • Ship MVPs in Days, Not Months: My Proven Prompt Prototyping Playbook for Product Teams

    Ship MVPs in Days, Not Months: My Proven Prompt Prototyping Playbook for Product Teams

    Most MVPs take too long, cost too much, and still miss the mark. Over the past year, I’ve shifted my team to a prototyping prompts approach that lets us validate problem-solution fit in days, not months. The result is faster learning loops, clearer tradeoffs, and a dramatically higher hit rate on features that actually move the needle.

    When I say prototyping prompts, I mean structured, layered instructions that guide gen ai systems to produce the right artifacts at the right fidelity. Instead of jumping straight to code, we generate concise problem briefs, user stories, interaction flows, low-fidelity UI descriptions, and test plans. Each pass is constrained by acceptance criteria and business outcomes, which keeps the work grounded in value rather than output.

    Here’s the playbook my product trios use to go from idea to a testable MVP in 48–72 hours. First, we anchor on outcomes vs output OKRs and clarify the customer job-to-be-done using evidence from customer interviews and support data. This is classic continuous discovery, but we compress it by focusing on the single riskiest assumption to de-risk this week.

    Second, we build a prompt scaffold. We specify the role, constraints, target users, success metrics, and the exact output format we expect. We also define evaluation upfront, borrowing from eval-driven development. For example, before any generation, we list the acceptance tests that a good solution must pass, including edge cases and compliance considerations. This discipline keeps hallucinations in check and improves repeatability.

    Third, we spin up multiple prototypes in parallel. One prompt generates a lean product brief; another outlines user flows; a third proposes UI states and error handling. If we’re exploring voice, we add prompt engineering for voice to script dialogs and repair strategies. For data-heavy features, we call out retrieval-first pipeline patterns so the model references source-of-truth data rather than guessing.

    Fourth, we validate with real users using the lightest-weight experiment possible. Fake-door tests, concierge workflows, and guided click-throughs let us measure intent before we invest. Where we can, we run quick A/B testing and size the effort using minimum detectable effect (MDE) so we don’t over- or under-sample. The point isn’t perfection; it’s fast, directional signal to inform the next iteration.

    Fifth, we instrument and ship behind feature flags. We track activation, task completion, and time-to-value from day one. On the delivery side, we watch DORA metrics and deployment frequency to ensure we’re learning continuously rather than batching big bets. This bridges discovery and delivery so roadmaps reflect real-world feedback, not assumptions.

    One recent example: we needed to evaluate a voice AI agent for appointment scheduling. In 72 hours, prompts produced the problem brief, dialog flows, error recovery strategies, and a sandbox to simulate inbound requests across three user personas. We exposed a thin slice to a pilot cohort, captured call outcomes, and iterated the repair prompts twice before writing any production code. The pilot converted at a higher rate than our control flow and gave us the confidence to invest in full integration.

    This approach only works if we treat governance as a first-class concern. We bake in privacy-by-design, clear data governance boundaries, and AI risk management from the start. Prompts include guardrails on personally identifiable information, explicit constraints on data use, and links to approved sources. We also maintain a prompt repository with versioning and automated evaluations so changes are observable and reversible.

    Practically, strong prompt scaffolds share three traits. They’re specific about context and constraints, they define success in measurable terms, and they separate concerns by artifact type. I’ll often ask for three variants with different tradeoffs, then run a quick synthesis prompt that highlights points of parity and differentiation. This gives the team structured options rather than a single, brittle path.

    If you’re starting from zero, begin with one high-leverage workflow. Write a crisp outcome statement, draft your acceptance tests, and create a prompt that outputs a one-page brief, three user flows, and the top five risks with mitigations. Validate with five users in 48 hours, then decide: double down, pivot, or park. Rinse and repeat, and your product roadmapping and sprint planning will shift from speculation to evidence.

    The bottom line is simple. Prototyping prompts won’t replace product judgment, but they will accelerate it. By turning ideas into testable artifacts in hours, you minimize waste, maximize learning, and ship better MVPs—fast.


    Inspired by this post on Product School.


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  • Turn Support Wins into a Company-Wide AI Blueprint for Consistent, End-to-End CX

    Turn Support Wins into a Company-Wide AI Blueprint for Consistent, End-to-End CX

    Building a great end-to-end customer experience with AI means going beyond support, and I’ve seen firsthand how transformative that shift can be when we treat every interaction as part of one cohesive journey.

    Every customer touchpoint, from the first sales conversation through to post-sales support and success, is an opportunity to get it right. Other teams are now turning to AI to transform how they show up for customers, and support, which led the way, has already written the blueprint. In my role, I focus on making that blueprint actionable across the entire lifecycle.

    In The 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report, it’s clear most businesses are thinking about what’s next, with more than half planning to scale AI to other departments. Interestingly, they often cite their early success with AI in support as motivation for the move. This makes support teams uniquely positioned to help lead the transition, a strategic role unimaginable just two years ago.

    In this piece, I share how teams are introducing AI to other parts of the business, how to think about this expansion effort, and the new opportunities it creates for support leaders who want to drive a unified customer experience.

    Support was the first proving ground for AI, and our research suggests that businesses are now planning to expand its use to other areas based on the results it’s yielded so far. Fifty-two percent of respondents said that their organizations are actively planning to scale AI to other departments in 2026.

    What will this look like? Leading companies are already finding out.

    Survey chart showing why organizations expand AI beyond support: success with AI in support 57%, unified customer experience 49%, scaling other functions without added headcount 33%, and cross-department requests 31%.
    Wins in support are setting the pace for company-wide AI. Survey results rank the drivers: proven success in support (57%), the push for a unified customer experience (49%), scaling other functions without more headcount (33%), and cross-department demand (31%).

    My favorite example is WHOOP, the fitness wearables company. They offer a premium product which makes their sales conversations more consultative than transactional. Customers want to know “Which membership is right for me?” or “How often do I need to charge my WHOOP?” According to Emily Shirley, Business Manager for Growth Product at WHOOP, if someone chatted with the inside sales team, they were twice as likely to convert, but they didn’t have enough reps to respond to incoming queries fast enough. Customers could wait more than 10 hours for a reply.

    With a big product launch on the line and an anticipated spike in prospective customer conversations, their three-person team needed help. So they deployed Fin to the "Join" page, the final step before purchase.

    With Fin resolving 84% of inbound questions, the sales team was able to focus on high-value leads. Together, they drove a 130% increase in attributable sales. The team is now exploring ways to expand Fin beyond FAQs, focusing on personalised conversation flows, multi-product recommendations, and richer data capture. As Emily says: “There are so many parts of the buyer journey where this applies. We’ve only scratched the surface.”

    It’s clear there’s a desire to push AI to other parts of the customer lifecycle, but there is a risk hidden in this expansion. If sales, customer success, and other departments all launch their own Agent, each operating in isolation, you can end up fragmenting the very thing our research says teams want to create. The second-most cited reason for pushing AI beyond support: desire for a unified customer experience.

    Without shared context, each handoff becomes a source of friction where customers could receive inconsistent answers or be asked to repeat information. I’ve watched even well-intentioned AI rollouts struggle here—great local wins, but an overall journey that feels disjointed.

    Diagram of an AI support blueprint showing roles (SDR, CSM, Sales, Shopping Assistant, Support Rep, Custom) stacked above layers for Goals, Memory & User Context, Business Knowledge, and Interoperability.
    A translucent UI visual maps a support-led AI blueprint that scales across the business—from SDR and sales to custom assistants—anchored by layers for goals, memory and user context, business knowledge, and interoperability.

    The opportunity (and the challenge) is to keep the customer at the center. Instead of department-specific Agents that operate independently, we must strive for cohesion. That means shared memory, consistent governance, and connected AI workflows that respect the customer’s history and intent across channels.

    This is the future I’m building toward: solutions like Fin becoming a “Customer Agent,” capable of handling the entire customer experience. This will mean Fin can function in many roles, supported by a memory that grows with the customer over time and deep knowledge of the business, creating a seamless experience for every interaction. In practice, that’s agentic AI designed to collaborate across teams, systems, and journeys—without losing context.

    Pushing AI into new parts of the business requires someone to own the process. And for many organizations, that’s the support team. Nearly a third of respondents (32%) confirmed their customer service teams are leading their business' AI transformation strategy.

    This presents a real opportunity for support teams to shape the future of customer experience. Instead of each function reinventing the wheel, support can act as a center of excellence, defining shared standards, guardrails, and operating practices that drive performance.

    “You already manage the most complex, high-volume customer interactions; you have rich data on customer needs and behavior; and you know how Agents perform in the real world. Those insights will be invaluable as AI scales across your business.”

    Neon green hero graphic reading 'The 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report', with subhead 'The AI deployment gap is widening' and a black 'Get the report' button over a bar-chart pattern.
    Leaders are racing ahead with real AI in support. Explore the 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report to see where deployment is stalling, benchmark your team, and get practical steps to scale automation that delights.

    In my organization, when we extended AI from support into sales, we deliberately brought our conversation design expertise, Agent Analytics, and governance models along with it. One team owns the orchestration, memory strategy, and CRM integration so a customer can start with a sales question and end up with a support one—without ever feeling a seam. That continuity is where journey mapping meets product strategy and turns into measurable outcomes.

    As Agents like Fin expand their capabilities and move into new areas, I expect many customer service leaders will see their roles expand to include AI implementation across the customer journey. It’s a natural progression for product management leadership in support: owning the experience, the data, and the operating model.

    Achieving perfect customer experience is AI’s biggest promise. But in order to get there, teams need to be smart about the solutions they deploy. A unified Customer Agent capable of handling the entire journey end-to-end will have a significant advantage, delivering consistent, context-aware experiences across every interaction.

    The Customer Agent future is being built right now, and it’s starting with the team pioneering AI transformation from the very beginning: support. For leaders in these organizations, this is a rare opportunity to shape how customer relationships will be built and maintained in the AI era.

    If you’d like to dig deeper into the data and benchmarks guiding these decisions, download The 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report.


    Inspired by this post on The Intercom Blog.


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  • Stop Selling Your Roadmap: Win Stakeholder Trust by Showing Your Work, Not Conclusions

    Stop Selling Your Roadmap: Win Stakeholder Trust by Showing Your Work, Not Conclusions

    I’m seeing the same pattern in product orgs everywhere—inside HighLevel and across my network: everyone is racing to add AI to the roadmap, and every stakeholder has a strong opinion about what to build next. Delivery has never been faster, which makes it dangerously easy to confuse speed with progress.

    When we chase features without grounding in continuous discovery, we drift back into a feature factory. We ship more, but we ship the wrong things faster. The antidote is simple and hard at the same time: recommit to product discovery, validate with assumption testing, and let the evidence steer our AI Strategy—not the hype.

    Of course, that only works if we can bring our stakeholders along. In the AI moment, it’s deceptively easy to get to a slick prototype and painfully hard to harden it for production. Early demos make almost any idea look promising. That’s precisely why stakeholder management must evolve from pitching solutions to showing our work.

    In practice, stakeholder management is about alignment with the people who influence our product decisions—executives, sales, marketing, customer success, engineering leadership, and sometimes legal or finance. Some have veto power; others have input. Knowing who can block versus who can shape is crucial for where we spend our time. Even in empowered product trios, the best discovery can derail if we reveal only conclusions at the end.

    I’ve tried every mapping framework—power-interest grids, RACI matrices—and they help. But the real challenge isn’t identifying stakeholders. It’s figuring out how to bring them along so that our product roadmapping and sprint planning decisions stick.

    Infographic for product teams on stakeholder management, showing three groups—veto power, influences, and needs to be informed—with guidance on prioritizing stakeholder influence.
    Identify who shapes your product decisions. This visual groups stakeholders into three tiers—those with veto power, key influencers, and audiences to inform—so teams can align, communicate, and reduce delivery risk.

    Here’s the most common trap I see (and have fallen into): focusing stakeholder reviews on the roadmap, release plan, or prioritized backlog. That invites an opinion battle. And stakeholders have their own conclusions—usually shaped by the last customer call, a board meeting, or a market headline.

    This is how the HiPPO dynamic gets created. HiPPO stands for the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion,” and the saying goes, “The HiPPO always wins.” When we present conclusions without the journey, we set ourselves up to lose. In the gen ai rush, the chorus of “everyone is doing AI” makes that opinion even harder to counter.

    So I don’t try to win opinion battles. I bring new information—fresh customer interviews, clear opportunity mapping, and results from assumption tests. The gap between what the market hypes and what customers actually need is often enormous. Our edge is evidence.

    The strategy that consistently works for me is simple: show your work. If you’re practicing continuous discovery, your opportunity solution tree isn’t just a thinking tool—it’s your strongest stakeholder management asset. It helps you build confidence in your decisions, and it can help your stakeholders build the same confidence.

    Infographic for product teams on stakeholder management, outlining the trap of anchoring in solution space, the HiPPO consequences, and the lever of bringing new discovery insights and data.
    Avoid the stakeholder trap of selling conclusions. This visual shows how anchoring on solutions invites HiPPO battles—and how to shift the conversation by sharing discovery evidence, insights, and data.

    Step 1 — Start with the outcome. I open every conversation by restating the shared goal and asking whether anything has changed. Anchoring on outcomes vs output OKRs reframes hot-button solution debates (like “we need an AI feature”) back to what will move the needle on the outcome we agreed to pursue.

    Step 2 — Share the opportunity space. I show how we mapped customer needs, pain points, and desires. Then I ask, “What did we miss?” Stakeholders often surface opportunities we haven’t seen yet—signals from the field, market shifts, or partner feedback. I capture their input and commit to validating it in upcoming customer interviews.

    Step 3 — Walk through prioritization. Using the tree’s structure, I explain why we prioritized one branch over another. Then I ask where they might have chosen differently. This turns debate into collaboration and lets me leverage their expertise without ceding the discovery framework.

    Step 4 — Go deep on the target opportunity. Before we talk solutions, I make the customer’s problem vivid and real. Interview snapshots help stakeholders empathize and see what matters most. Once the opportunity is crisp, solution discussions become dramatically more objective.

    Infographic titled A Better Stakeholder Management Strategy: Show Your Work, showing seven steps for product teams using the Opportunity Solution Tree to align outcomes, prioritize, test assumptions, and iterate.
    Show your work, not just your conclusions. This infographic guides product teams through seven steps to build stakeholder confidence—align on outcomes, map opportunities, prioritize, test assumptions, and repeat.

    Step 5 — Share solutions and invite theirs. I present our solution set and explicitly ask for additional ideas. If their suggestions diversify our set, we include them. Solution ideas are cheap; the opportunity is what matters. This is where product trios can benefit from leadership’s pattern recognition and industry context.

    Step 6 — Share your assumption tests and results. I walk through our story maps, high-risk assumptions, and what we’ve learned so far. I invite stakeholders to add assumptions—this is where their knowledge shines. If we have data, we share it; if we’re pre-data, we share the plan to get it and ask for feedback.

    Step 7 — Repeat. I don’t batch this into a big reveal. I keep a steady cadence and tailor depth to each audience: weekly for my manager, monthly highlights for marketing, and concise updates for executives. Continuous discovery pairs with continuous stakeholder management.

    Showing your work doesn’t mean drowning people in detail. It means tailoring the signal to the audience. My rule of thumb is outcome, opportunity, solution, evidence—walk the lines of the tree at the right altitude for each stakeholder.

    Infographic for product teams on tailoring stakeholder communication. A smart-filter funnel turns the full discovery journey into updates for a direct manager, marketing counterpart, and CEO.
    Show your work the right way for each stakeholder. Use a smart filter to turn discovery noise into clear signals—weekly journeys for your manager, focused monthly highlights for marketing, and a 30-second CEO pitch.

    In a 30-second update with a CEO, it might sound like this:

    “Our goal is to reduce time-to-first-value for new users. We’ve been interviewing customers and learned that onboarding is where most people get stuck—specifically, they don’t know which features to try first. We explored a few approaches and tested them. The most promising one is a guided setup flow that adapts based on the user’s role. In early tests, new users completed onboarding 40% faster.”

    That pattern works across channels—Slack updates, monthly reviews, or quarterly planning. The format flexes, the structure doesn’t: outcome, opportunity, solution, evidence.

    As you adopt this approach, watch for four anti-patterns that quietly erode trust.

    Infographic titled Four Anti-Patterns That Destroy Stakeholder Trust, listing: 1) telling instead of showing, 2) shooting down stakeholder ideas, 3) saving for a big reveal, 4) fighting the ideological war.
    Avoid the traps that erode stakeholder trust. This infographic guides product teams to show their work, welcome ideas, provide frequent updates, and prioritize results over ideology to build alignment and credibility.

    Anti-pattern 1 — Telling instead of showing. The curse of knowledge makes our conclusions feel obvious to us and opaque to others. The fix: slow down, start at the top of the tree, walk the decisions, and let stakeholders reach the conclusion with you.

    Anti-pattern 2 — Shooting down stakeholder ideas. As you build a library of validated assumptions, it’s easy to spot flaws in a suggestion and say “no” too quickly. Instead, place their idea within your discovery framework. If it maps to a different opportunity, say, “That idea has promise—we’ll consider it when we address that opportunity.” If it rests on risky assumptions, story map the idea together, list the assumptions, and share what you’ve already learned. People accept the evidence they help generate.

    Anti-pattern 3 — Saving everything for a big reveal. Infrequent, comprehensive updates invite opinion battles because stakeholders have formed their own conclusions in the dark. Short, frequent updates build alignment as the work unfolds.

    Anti-pattern 4 — Fighting the ideological war. Sometimes a more senior stakeholder will overrule you. Don’t turn it into a debate about how product decisions “should” be made. Focus on the decision at hand, do the best work within constraints, and let results—not ideology—prove the value of discovery over time.

    Infographic for product teams on stakeholder management as co-creation, showing four steps: stop selling, invite co-creation, leverage stakeholder expertise, and transform relationships.
    Shift from selling to showing. This co-creation guide invites stakeholders into discovery, taps their expertise, and turns relationships from obstacles into partnerships for smarter product decisions.

    Here’s the mindset shift that changes everything: stakeholder management is a co-creation opportunity. When we show our work with artifacts like an opportunity solution tree, experience maps, and interview snapshots, we’re not just communicating—we’re inviting collaboration. We’re leveraging stakeholders’ expertise, context, and connections to make better product decisions.

    When stakeholders have walked the path with us, they don’t need to be sold on the destination. They become allies. Engagement stops being a status ritual and starts being real partnership—the kind that moves outcomes and builds durable trust.

    Try this in your next review: don’t start with your roadmap. Start at the top of the tree. Reaffirm the outcome. Share the opportunity space. Explain your prioritization. Show what you’re learning. Invite contribution. You might be surprised how quickly alignment—and confidence—follow when you stop selling conclusions and start showing your work.


    Inspired by this post on Product Talk.


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  • From Tickets to Strategy: How AI Is Rewriting Support Careers—and Why Now Is the Moment

    From Tickets to Strategy: How AI Is Rewriting Support Careers—and Why Now Is the Moment

    To truly transform with AI, I’ve learned it’s never just about the technology—it’s about redesigning how we work. The teams that win don’t bolt AI on; they re-architect around it. That means rethinking roles, workflows, and governance to build a system that sustains and improves AI performance over time.

    In The 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report, teams at every stage of maturity describe human agents taking on more proactive work—training AI systems, handling the hardest queries, and owning tasks that demand judgment. Job descriptions are shifting, too, with many organizations explicitly adding AI-related responsibilities.

    I’m also seeing a clear rise in dedicated AI specialists. Conversation analysts, knowledge managers, and AI operations leads are fast becoming standard. For support professionals, this opens new, higher-leverage career paths—and creates a talent pipeline that blends service excellence, data fluency, and product thinking.

    Support once centered on queue-level activity—ticket triage, routing, translations, and answering FAQs. Now, as AI handles more frontline interactions, our human roles are moving up the stack toward optimization, oversight, and continuous improvement.

    According to the latest research, 45% of teams report updating job descriptions to include AI-related responsibilities, with 40% saying their human agents are now more focused on training AI systems. Another 27% report that human agents primarily handle the most complex escalations and edge cases, while a quarter say agents are doing more consultative and strategic work.

    Even at the initial deployment stage, 16% of teams report spending less time handling support volume since implementing AI – and among teams who’ve reached maturity, that figure rises to 28%.

    When Intercom’s Research, Analytics & Data Science (RAD) team interviewed 166 of our customers, similar themes emerged. Nearly all participants (≈95%) reported meaningful workflow changes, with manual processes being handled by AI, and humans focusing more on monitoring or fine-tuning AI outputs. Eighty-three percent of participants also reported seeing their team’s roles and responsibilities change to become more strategic and supervisory in nature.

    Infographic of AI-driven customer support roles and adoption rates: conversation analyst 32%, knowledge manager 30%, AI operations lead 28%, support automation specialist 24%; 8% say no new roles added.
    AI is reshaping support teams: organizations are adding conversation analysts (32%), knowledge managers (30%), AI operations leads (28%), and support automation specialists (24%). Just 8% report no new AI roles.

    It’s not just the work that’s evolving; organizational structures are, too. Some teams are reallocating existing talent into AI-focused roles; others are hiring entirely new skill sets. Many of the most common job titles in this space didn’t exist two years ago.

    Consider a Senior AI Knowledge Manager, Beth-Ann Sher, who transitioned from a help center manager role. Like many careers transformed by AI, her work evolved from administrative to strategic. Instead of focusing solely on customer-facing, self-serve content, her mandate expanded to designing and optimizing knowledge inputs that directly improve AI Agent Fin’s performance—work that materially lifts resolution rates.

    Or look at a Senior Conversation Designer, Fred Walton, hired specifically for an AI-first function. He focuses on frictionless customer journeys with Fin, smoothing handoffs between automation and human support while keeping customer satisfaction front and center—hallmarks of mature AI workflows and conversation design.

    In high-performing organizations, roles like these typically sit within a dedicated AI support team under senior CS leadership. Clear ownership and accountability for AI performance is critical; without it, optimization stalls and trust erodes.

    These shifts aren’t isolated. Take Robb Clarke from RB2B. He went from Head of Technical Operations to Head of AI. With Fin, his focus moved from repetitive support questions to managing knowledge and improving the system behind it—freeing him to be proactive about product improvements and fix issues before they hit customers.

    Or consider Eric Broulette from Bloomerang, a support leader who leaned into AI and became the VP of Support and Education. By deploying Fin, his team found breathing room to invest in what’s next. Agents stepped into new roles, contributed to meaningful projects, and built skills that had previously felt out of reach. As Eric puts it: “Do not wait to embrace AI. It will unlock more career growth for your teams than you can imagine.”

    Neon green hero graphic reading 'The 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report', with subhead 'The AI deployment gap is widening' and a black 'Get the report' button over a bar-chart pattern.
    Leaders are racing ahead with real AI in support. Explore the 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report to see where deployment is stalling, benchmark your team, and get practical steps to scale automation that delights.

    Bringing AI into support will eventually change every agent’s day-to-day work. For leaders at the start of the journey, that can feel daunting. My perspective: the most successful teams treat this as an operating model shift, not a tooling rollout—anchored in AI Strategy, governance, and continuous improvement.

    Be transparent about what’s changing, why it matters, and how success will be measured. Define how AI performance will be evaluated (resolution rate, containment, CSAT impact), empower agents to train and improve the system, and communicate how responsibilities will evolve. When teams help build the AI, they’re invested in making it great.

    Here’s the playbook I rely on with support leaders: First, reset expectations about time allocation—less time in the queue, more time improving the AI system that serves the queue. Second, elevate knowledge management as a core capability. Prioritize content quality and coverage for your AI Agent, and carve out dedicated “out of the inbox” time so every agent contributes. Third, keep outcome metrics—especially resolution rate—front and center. It gives the team a north star for experimentation and iteration.

    Scaling AI is as much a people challenge as it is a technology challenge. As automation takes on more work, support roles become more proactive, strategic, and cross-functional—even early in the journey. Responsibilities expand, new roles emerge, and team structures adapt to concentrate on and amplify AI performance. In the process, support careers are transformed.

    If you’re leading this shift, now’s the moment to reimagine your operating model: clarify ownership, invest in knowledge and conversation design, adopt eval-driven development, and build the muscle for continuous improvement. That’s how you move from tickets to strategy—and unlock compounding value for your customers, your business, and your teams.


    Inspired by this post on The Intercom Blog.


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  • How Deep AI Transforms Support Into Proactive, Omnichannel CX—No Extra Headcount Needed

    How Deep AI Transforms Support Into Proactive, Omnichannel CX—No Extra Headcount Needed

    For years, I chased the elusive goal of delivering a perfect customer experience. Today, with AI embedded in our support operations, that standard is finally within reach—and it’s reshaping how we prioritize, design, and scale service.

    In “The 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report,” teams report early, tangible wins from AI: faster responses, higher efficiency, and consistent coverage across languages and time zones. Those gains create the capacity we’ve always needed. The more we push the technology, the more quality improvements we unlock.

    This marks a fundamental shift. As AI takes on more, our focus can finally move from firefighting to crafting the customer experience. When the AI is working, the measure of success becomes how well it’s working—across accuracy, tone, resolution, and end-to-end journey quality.

    I’ve seen this transformation firsthand. Mature AI deployment gives my team “breathing room,” so we can design for consistently excellent outcomes rather than obsess over deflection. That means widening access to support, removing friction on the path to resolution, and anticipating customer needs before they escalate.

    In our own support organization, we opened support to trial customers, accelerated first response times, and added consultative sessions during onboarding. We absorbed a 300% increase in total demand without adding headcount—made possible by deep integration of an AI Agent and a disciplined AI strategy.

    Infographic comparing ability to meet rising customer expectations: 27% of organizations with mature deployments say support always meets expectations, versus 9% at initial deployment, shown as orange and gray bubbles.
    Teams with mature customer service deployments are nearly three times likelier to say they always meet increasing expectations—27% vs 9% at initial rollout—highlighted by bold orange and gray comparison bubbles.

    Across the industry, the pattern is similar. When teams initially deploy AI, only 9% say they can always meet customer expectations. That number triples as teams reach a mature level of deployment. Even as expectations rise, the organizations that deeply integrate AI—complete with clear ownership, robust instrumentation, and continuous improvement loops—are the ones most likely to meet (and exceed) the bar.

    Looking ahead to 2026, I expect omnichannel consistency to become a key differentiator. The data shows planned investment is distributed nearly equally across chat, email, and social messaging (36% each), closely followed by phone/voice (31%). The question is no longer “Which channel should we optimize?” but “How do we deliver a consistent, AI-powered experience everywhere our customers are?”

    Teams that solve for omnichannel consistency will bridge the long-standing gap between what customers expect and what support can deliver. Every touchpoint becomes an opportunity to exceed expectations and build durable trust.

    Consider Clay, a team that scaled support without sacrificing quality. Support is one of their main growth drivers, and as their customer base expanded, ticket volume surged. Early on, they concentrated much of their effort in Slack, cultivating close, transparent community relationships. But relying on a single channel created friction as they grew; customers wanted the flexibility of email and in-app chat, and Clay needed to deliver the same high standard everywhere.

    Infographic showing channels where teams plan to expand AI usage in 2026: chat 36%, social 36%, email 36%, and phone/voice 31%, displayed as four bold orange blocks with labels.
    Where AI investment is headed for customer service in 2026: chat, social, and email lead at 36%, with phone/voice close behind at 31%. A bold visual snapshot of shifting channel priorities in CX.

    By unifying their support experience with an AI Agent, Clay brought consistency across channels. Today, AI is involved in 90% of all queries and handles half of Clay’s total volume, upwards of 7,000 queries a month. First response rates improved significantly, freeing the team to focus on proactive, high-impact work.

    That work includes identifying content gaps for education and content marketing, reaching customers before they need to ask for help, and surfacing feature requests and recurring challenges to product teams. Clay proves that when support is truly great, it becomes a competitive edge.

    So how do you build a superior customer experience with an AI Agent? Here are five principles I use when scaling toward mature deployment.

    1) Treat customer experience like a product. Treating support as a product means designing, building, and managing the support experience with the same rigor as your core product. You define goals (faster onboarding, higher CSAT or CX Score, lower churn). You map flows (AI starts the conversation, human handovers, proactive nudges). You instrument the journey (track handoffs, drop-offs, success states). You run tests and ship improvements (tone tweaks, fallback paths, training updates). You own the outcomes (gather feedback, measure performance, use insights to continuously improve the system).

    Neon green hero graphic reading 'The 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report', with subhead 'The AI deployment gap is widening' and a black 'Get the report' button over a bar-chart pattern.
    Leaders are racing ahead with real AI in support. Explore the 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report to see where deployment is stalling, benchmark your team, and get practical steps to scale automation that delights.

    2) Lead with AI, back with humans. AI isn’t replacing the human touch. It’s redefining when, where, and how it’s most valuable. In a scaled model, AI is the first responder and the end point for most conversations. Humans step in where they add the most value—particularly during high-stakes issues—and those handoffs should feel seamless. Meanwhile, your team focuses on improving AI performance and optimizing the end-to-end journey.

    3) Be proactive. Use AI to anticipate needs, guide customers before problems arise, and nudge them toward successful outcomes. This is where customer support AI strategy shines—moving from reactive triage to journey orchestration that protects momentum and builds trust.

    4) Build for trust. Many customers still carry the legacy of clunky chatbots that delivered vague answers and dead ends. You earn trust by showing that your system works. Don’t hide your AI Agent behind layers of “choose an option.” Get customers to the AI quickly, demonstrate real problem-solving, and ensure that when a human is needed, they join with full context to resolve complex issues efficiently.

    5) Make it feel personal. Your AI Agent represents your brand. The way it speaks, follows policies, and responds matters. Use tone control, fallback logic, and language preferences to align the experience to your standards. Consistency builds trust; personality builds connection and loyalty.

    Perfect really is possible. With deep AI implementation, you can scale comprehensive, fast, and personal support across channels—so customers feel supported not just when they reach out, but throughout their journey. That’s the promise of modern AI workflows in support, and it’s what will separate leaders from laggards in the years ahead.


    Inspired by this post on The Intercom Blog.


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  • Go From 3 Customer Interviews to a High-Quality Opportunity Solution Tree—In Minutes

    Go From 3 Customer Interviews to a High-Quality Opportunity Solution Tree—In Minutes

    Most product teams—and especially well-run product trios—know they should be interviewing customers. More teams than ever are actually doing it. That’s the good news.

    The bad news? Many teams still struggle with what comes next. Turning raw recordings into a structured opportunity space that truly guides product discovery can feel overwhelming.

    In my experience, interview synthesis is cognitively demanding work. You have to extract the key moments from each conversation, translate those moments into clear opportunities, and then organize those opportunities into a coherent view of your opportunity space. It’s no surprise I hear teams say, "We need to stop interviewing so we can catch up on what we’ve already learned." Too often, they pause—and never start again.

    Recordings pile up. Maybe there are scattered notes. But nothing gets turned into an opportunity solution tree. The team hasn’t synthesized what they’ve learned, so the research isn’t actionable. That’s the gap I want to help close.

    What if you could go from 3 interviews to a draft OST in minutes?

    My AI goals are straightforward: 1) build tools that help you learn discovery and 2) build tools that help you do discovery. The learning tools are coming through on-demand courses. Today, I’m excited to share the first big step on the "do" side.

    I’m excited to see an expanded partnership with Vistaly—the opportunity solution tree tool many of you already use—to bring AI-powered discovery tools directly into their platform.

    Great synthesis happens in two steps: first, you synthesize each interview separately; then you synthesize across interviews. Most AI tools skip the first step and jump straight to cross-interview analysis—exactly how teams lose the nuance and context that make research actionable.

    This approach does both. You upload three interviews for the same product outcome. The AI extracts the key moments and opportunities from each one separately. Then it synthesizes across those interviews and generates a first draft of your opportunity solution tree for you. Three interviews in. A draft OST out.

    Here’s what this is—and what it isn’t. You’ve probably heard criticism of tools that promise "one-click opportunity solution trees." Those tools ask you to describe your market, click a button, and get a tree. The point of an opportunity solution tree is not to have one—it’s to synthesize what you’re learning from real customers so your team can align on the best path forward. A one-click tree built from made-up data is useless.

    Vistaly 2.0 landing page featuring 'Build what matters,' a blue Enroll in Beta button, and a dark-grid opportunity solution tree connecting an Outcome to Opportunity and Solution nodes.
    Turn interviews into insights in minutes with Vistaly. This hero screen invites you to enroll in beta and showcases an opportunity solution tree that maps outcomes to opportunities and actionable solutions.

    This approach is fundamentally different. It starts with your real customer interviews. The AI does the heavy lifting of extracting key moments and opportunities from those conversations and organizing them into a draft opportunity solution tree. But it’s a draft—you review it, refine it, and reorganize it. You bring your judgment and context to the work.

    My vision for AI-aided cross-interview synthesis is simple: AI identifies common opportunities across interviews, suggests a tree structure, and facilitates the team’s review. Historically, it’s been hard to give AI access to an opportunity solution tree in a way that preserves structure and context. The integration with Vistaly solves that problem by building this capability directly into the tool where your tree already lives.

    In my own experiments using Claude, the AI surfaced opportunities I missed—and I caught things it missed. The highest-quality synthesis came from combining both perspectives. Research (see here and here) backs this up: Experts working with AI outperform both experts working alone and AI working alone. That’s the model we’re building toward—AI generates the draft, you bring the expertise.

    I have mixed feelings about AI doing discovery work for us because there is real value in doing the synthesis yourself. But I also know that a draft OST you actually refine is better than a perfect process you never get to. This is about raising the floor—helping more teams get to a structured opportunity space, even if they aren’t doing every step manually.

    We’re looking for a small group of alpha partners to help shape this product. To apply, sign up for a free Vistaly account and upload three customer interviews for the same outcome or product space.

    We’ll select alpha partners from the applicants. We want a range of interview styles, experience levels, and product spaces. Selected partners will get access to the AI-powered synthesis tools and will work closely with the team to shape the product. Even if you aren’t selected for the alpha, your application puts you at the front of the line when we enter beta.

    A few things to know as you apply: Your three interviews should be for the same outcome, goal, or product space, so the tool can generate a meaningful OST. You don’t need to be a Vistaly user today—the account is free. You don’t need to be an expert interviewer either; we’re looking for a range of experience levels, though we’re particularly interested in story-based customer interviews.

    This is just the beginning. The vision is a full AI-powered discovery suite inside Vistaly—from interview analysis to complete interview snapshots to opportunity solution trees and beyond. We’ll learn alongside our alpha partners and share what we discover as we go.

    If you’ve been looking to bridge the gap between your customer interviews and your opportunity space, this is your chance to help shape how that works. Apply for the alpha today.


    Inspired by this post on Product Talk.


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  • Context Engineering Playbook: 5 Proven Ways to Slash Context Rot and Scale Smarter AI

    Context Engineering Playbook: 5 Proven Ways to Slash Context Rot and Scale Smarter AI

    I've been getting a lot of questions about why I'm diving so deep into Claude Code, so I want to take a step back and provide some context.

    Last March, when I started building my first AI product—the Interview Coach—I felt like I had to figure it all out on my own. I had never built an AI product before, and I didn't have a team I could lean on. It was equal parts energizing and intimidating.

    I had a blast digging in, experimenting, and learning what I needed to learn to ship that first AI product. But I also started to wonder, "How are product teams going to learn this stuff?"

    As an industry, we are being asked to leverage a new technology that is foreign to us. We are all experimenting and learning what's just now possible. It's moving so fast, it's exhausting just following the news, let alone trying to learn and develop new skills.

    My mission has always been to help teams make better product decisions. That still drives me today.

    After releasing the Interview Coach, I asked myself two questions: "How am I going to rapidly develop my skill set?" and "How can I help others do the same?" I landed on a three-part plan: First, I'm going to collect and share stories about how other teams are learning and building AI products—that's why I launched Just Now Possible. Second, I'm going to push the boundaries on how I can use AI in my day-to-day life, and I'm going to write about it. Third, I'm going to keep building AI products—and I'm going to write about that, too.

    The Claude Code series was born out of number two. It’s had an interesting side effect: it’s also helping me build better AI products.

    The more I push the boundaries of what's possible with Claude Code, the more I understand how to build more robust AI products. That’s reinforced my belief that product teams need to get hands-on with this stuff in their day-to-day lives. It’s how we’re going to develop the skillsets we need to build tomorrow’s products.

    In my context rot article—where we learned how to manage the context window in Claude Code—I showed just how much day-to-day practice compounds. Today, I want to show how learning about context window management in our day-to-day lives directly maps to managing the context window in the AI products we might build. My hope is to make it crystal clear how experience in one area develops expertise in the other. Let’s dive in.

    Infographic titled What is Context Engineering? visualizing a context window with arrows and five strategies: compact prompts, external memory, curating turns, repeating info, and sub-agents.
    Discover how product teams engineer context in generative AI: compact prompts, curated turns, external memory, repetition, and sub-agents, all feeding a shared context window to deliver clearer, faster outcomes.

    A quick refresher on context window management. In the context rot article, we learned: "what the context window is and what goes into it"; "how to offload conversational context to the file system"; "about the /compact and /clear tools"; "to repeat critical information as the context window fills up to overcome tokens "lost in the middle" or at the beginning of the input"; and "how to use agents to get access to more context windows."

    It turns out these exact same skills are being used by developers to manage the context window in production products. If you haven't read the context rot article, start there: "Context Rot: Why AI Gets Worse the Longer You Talk (And How to Fix It)."

    What is Context Engineering? Context engineering is the work that we do to manage the context window in the AI products and services that we build. It's how we give the large language model the context it needs to do the job well. It's also how we manage and mitigate context rot in our product and services, so that we can get the highest performance from the underlying model.

    Today, we are going to look at five different strategies that product teams are currently using in their context engineering efforts. You are going to see that each of these strategies ties back to a strategy you might already be using in your day-to-day AI usage (especially if you followed the advice in the context rot article).

    Here's how product teams are putting this into practice right now: designing compact system prompts by breaking big tasks into smaller tasks; building external memory/state structures to keep the context window clean; curating what goes into each turn; repeating critical information as context grows; and using sub-agents to grow the context window.

    I'll connect each tactic back to patterns you're likely already using in your daily AI workflows, especially if you followed the advice in the context rot article. Along the way, I’ll share practical guardrails and instrumentation ideas so you can track quality with eval-driven development, reduce context rot, and scale performance predictably.

    Why this matters for product trios: these strategies clarify the handoffs between prompt engineering, external memory design, and orchestration, which strengthens collaboration across PM, design, and engineering. Whether you’re exploring gen ai prototypes, hardening a retrieval-first pipeline, or evolving toward agentic AI, context engineering is the backbone of reliable, high-performing experiences.

    If you build or lead LLMs for product managers initiatives, consider this your field guide. In upcoming posts, I’ll break down each strategy with concrete examples and templates you can adapt to your stack, so your team can move from experiments to durable, scalable AI workflows with confidence.


    Inspired by this post on Product Talk.


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  • Go Deep or Get Left Behind: How AI Deployment Depth Transforms Customer Service

    Go Deep or Get Left Behind: How AI Deployment Depth Transforms Customer Service

    AI adoption is everywhere. I see more teams every quarter moving from pilots to production—and increasing their budgets accordingly. But the gap between “using AI” and truly transforming with it is widening fast. Launching an AI Agent is easy; building a mature, AI-powered support operation is where the real work—and the real value—lives.

    In the new research, the "2026 Customer Service Transformation Report," the difference comes down to depth of deployment. It’s not enough to dabble. Teams that design their operations around AI are pulling away from those who treat AI like a bolt-on feature.

    This article kicks off part one of my five-part deep dive into the research. I’ll unpack the data, share what I’ve learned leading product and AI strategy, and translate it into practical steps you can apply now. If you’d like to go straight to the source, you can download the report here.

    First, the macro picture: 2,470 global support professionals across industries were surveyed to understand current AI usage, challenges, and the 2026 opportunities. The headline is clear—AI investment is now table stakes. Eighty-two percent of senior leaders say their teams invested in AI in the past year and 87% say they plan to invest in 2026. Those investments are already paying off: Over three-quarters of CS teams (77%) say AI is meeting or exceeding expectations, delivering faster response and resolution times, always-on coverage, cost savings, increased capacity, and multilingual support that scales globally.

    And yet, only 10% of organizations say they have reached a "mature" level of deployment, where AI is fully integrated into operations and working at scale. That’s the tell: most teams are skimming the surface and leaving meaningful performance gains on the table.

    Infographic showing AI deployment stages in customer service: 10% mature deployment, 26% scaling, 35% initial deployment, 26% exploring; note says 3% unsure; circular gauges compare adoption levels.
    Most service teams are still early in AI adoption. Only 10% report mature deployment, while 26% are scaling, 35% are in initial rollout, and 26% remain in exploration, with 3% unsure.

    When I map the data to what I’ve seen in the field, the maturity difference shows up immediately in outcomes. Teams at mature deployment don’t just automate repetitive tasks; they build AI into critical workflows, give it real responsibility, and iterate continuously. Beyond automating the bulk of their manual work, they’re using AI to proactively engage customers and perform tasks on their behalf.

    The results follow. Of the teams that have reached mature deployment, 43% report higher quality and consistency across support—nearly double the rate of those still in the initial deployment stage. That quality shift is how support evolves from a cost center to a value driver. Great experiences don’t just prevent churn; they create advocacy and become a reason customers choose you. The more you trust your AI Agent with meaningful work, the more it creates the conditions for higher-quality, more consistent support.

    One example I point to often: Lightspeed. They operate a complex product across regions and languages, with tens of thousands of monthly requests. When they adopted Fin in early 2023, they needed a solution that could scale with that complexity—and they treated the transition like a first-class change program.

    They leveraged foundational training and built custom, in-house modules aligned to their processes. They supported their team post-launch and worked closely with leadership to align on the goals and benefits of AI. In a large, distributed org, that executive alignment created ownership and momentum. Their VP of Information Systems, Yamine Gluchow, put it perfectly: "It’s not magic. If you invest in understanding, adoption, and great content, AI performance takes off."

    Bar chart on how teams use an AI Agent for customer service, comparing mature vs initial deployments: automate manual work (63% vs 52%), proactive engagement (51% vs 41%), and performing customer tasks (45% vs 28%).
    Mature AI Agent rollouts deliver bigger gains in customer service—outperforming initial deployments in automation, proactive engagement, and task completion (63% vs 52%, 51% vs 41%, 45% vs 28%)—showing how depth drives measurable impact.

    Their outcomes reflect that depth: An 88% involvement rate. 72% of Fin conversations resolved without human intervention. 43,000+ customer requests resolved monthly. Service in 12+ languages across 100+ countries. Stable CSAT—with improvement in some markets.

    What impressed me most was the complexity Fin now resolves. A merchant in France asked about tax invoices—normally a long phone call to check back-end data and explain rules step by step. Instead, Fin handled the conversation in French, provided an accurate end-to-end explanation, and earned positive CSAT. That’s what mature deployment looks like: a system that absorbs complexity and delivers correct, efficient results at scale.

    So how do we build toward that level of maturity? In my experience, this journey requires a mindset shift and operational rigor—not just a bigger AI budget.

    Rethink how you approach support. If you were building from scratch today, you’d design around AI from day one. As Grant Lee, CEO of Gamma, puts it: "If you want to unlock the real value of AI, you have to design for it, not retrofit around it." Treat AI as infrastructure, not a feature. That shift impacts your org design, workflows, and what “good” looks like.

    Neon green hero graphic reading 'The 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report', with subhead 'The AI deployment gap is widening' and a black 'Get the report' button over a bar-chart pattern.
    Leaders are racing ahead with real AI in support. Explore the 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report to see where deployment is stalling, benchmark your team, and get practical steps to scale automation that delights.

    Secure executive sponsorship early. You won’t scale without C-suite backing. AI reshapes how support works, how teams are structured, how performance is measured, and how cost and value flow. Align your CFO on ROI, your CCO on journey design, and your CEO on customer experience as a strategic advantage. Early wins are great—but the compounding gains only come when leadership backs AI as infrastructure, not a one-off cost save.

    Assign clear ownership for AI performance. One common failure mode: no one owns the AI. Stand up an AI operations lead or support ops specialist to review resolution trends and handoffs, tune content and configuration, coordinate on systemic issues, and drive a prioritized improvement roadmap. Without this role, feedback loops break and performance plateaus.

    Treat content as critical infrastructure. Your AI Agent is only as good as the knowledge it can access. Ensure coverage for the topics it must handle, keep information accurate and current, and structure content so it’s easy for AI to consume. Make maintenance part of BAU, not a quarterly fire drill. A clean, governed, retrieval-first pipeline dramatically increases autonomous resolution.

    Build a continuous improvement system. AI performance isn’t static. Train your AI Agent by expanding its knowledge, refining behavior, and connecting new data sources to handle more scenarios autonomously. Validate changes against real scenarios before they ship. Roll out updates in a controlled way across channels and segments. Use performance data to find patterns—frequent handoffs, low-resolution topics—and decide what to improve next. I often point to the Fin Flywheel (Train → Test → Deploy → Analyze) as a practical example of turning performance data into action.

    The big takeaway from the "2026 Customer Service Transformation Report" is encouraging: investment is widespread, and early returns are real. The bigger opportunity is to turn those early wins into durable transformation. Teams leaning into AI as infrastructure—supported by executive alignment, clear ownership, strong content, and a continuous improvement loop—are already separating from the pack.

    Next up in this series, I’ll dig into how leading teams measure success. Beyond simple cost savings, mature deployments tie AI to clear ROI and strategic impact—shifting more work into value-adding, revenue-generating territory. Follow along here, or subscribe on LinkedIn to get the next installment in your feed.


    Inspired by this post on The Intercom Blog.


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