I’ve learned that the most effective partner product marketing is less about decks and more about decisions. When I collaborate with partner product marketing managers, we translate complex capabilities from a unified analytics platform into crisp, outcome-led narratives that customers can act on. This is where product positioning and go-to-market strategy intersect to create momentum for product-led growth.
In my experience, the strongest partner product marketing managers operate like solution orchestrators. They align value propositions across partners, clarify the problem-solution fit, and articulate competitive differentiation without drowning teams in feature lists. By anchoring messaging in clear customer pains and measurable gains, they help everyone—from solutions engineering to sales—tell the same story with confidence.
My playbook starts with outcomes. We define the “why” in terms customers care about, then quantify it with retention analysis, user activation, and time-to-value. That evidence shapes positioning, enables tighter points of parity and differentiation, and ensures our value proposition resonates in market. The result is faster alignment and fewer cycles spent debating messaging without data.
Cross-functional execution makes or breaks the strategy. I partner closely with solutions engineering to validate solution patterns, and with sales to balance sales-led motions alongside product-led growth. Strong stakeholder management keeps discovery loops tight: we capture objections early, refine narratives quickly, and reduce friction across the funnel.
On the tactics side, I rely on A/B testing to de-risk bold messaging changes and to optimize in-app guides and product tours. We set a minimum detectable effect upfront, instrument journeys with Amplitude analytics, and iterate quickly. This gives the team statistical confidence while keeping speed high—especially when refining narratives for complex partner solutions.
Ultimately, great partner product marketing illuminates the shortest path from capability to customer value. When we pair disciplined positioning with data-driven learning, we strengthen our go-to-market strategy and build durable competitive advantage. That’s how we turn strong solutions into market-leading stories that win—and keep—customers.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.
I ask one question before I green‑light any new AI feature: is our analytics truly AI‑ready? If the answer is no, we slow down, because nothing derails an AI roadmap faster than shipping features we can’t measure, iterate, or trust. Over time, I’ve learned that the right analytics foundation is the difference between a flashy demo and a durable, compounding product advantage.
"Product and engineering teams face new challenges when building AI-first products. A modern digital analytics platform offers solutions." I agree—and I’d add that the real win comes when model metrics and product outcomes live in one coherent system, so we can connect every improvement to customer value.
Here’s what “AI‑ready” analytics means in practice for me: a unified event taxonomy tied to clear user and account identities; consistent product analytics (activation, funnels, retention analysis, cohorts); ground‑truth labels and feedback signals for model evaluation; and a single source of truth that blends model telemetry with user behavior. When those pieces click, our AI Strategy turns from guessing to “eval‑driven development.”
Start with data governance and privacy‑by‑design. Define event names, properties, and versioning rules up front. Capture the context that AI needs—inputs, outputs, confidence scores, content types—without storing unnecessary PII. This discipline reduces rework, improves observability, and keeps auditors and customers confident in how we handle data.
Next, operationalize eval‑driven development. I run offline evaluations with representative datasets, then shadow mode in production, and finally controlled rollouts with A/B testing and feature flags. We set a minimum detectable effect so experiments are conclusive, and we include AI risk management metrics—like safety violations, fallback rates, and moderation triggers—alongside core product KPIs such as activation, task success, and time‑to‑value.
On the product analytics side, I rely on a unified analytics platform (e.g., Amplitude analytics or similar) to track adoption of AI features: who sees the feature, who tries it, who repeats it, and who retains because of it. Cohort analyses help me isolate lift among target segments; CRM integration connects usage to revenue; and pathing highlights where users need guidance. This is the engine of product‑led growth for AI capabilities.
Quality and observability complete the loop. I monitor latency, error rates, and cost per successful outcome, but I also watch human‑grounded proxies: thumbs up/down, edits after AI suggestions, and deflection and CSAT for support workflows. These signals feed back into prompt engineering, retrieval quality, and model selection—closing the gap between LLM behavior and customer value.
None of this works without strong cross‑functional rituals. Product trios align on success metrics before we write a line of code; continuous discovery validates user problems; and QBRs versus OKRs are reconciled so we invest in durable capabilities, not just quarterly spikes. When analytics and discovery move in lockstep, we ship fewer speculative features and more compounding improvements.
Finally, choose build versus buy intentionally. I buy a robust, scalable analytics substrate and only build the custom AI evals I need for proprietary use cases. With feature flags in CI/CD and automated schema checks, instrumentation becomes part of deployment frequency—not an afterthought. The result is a reliable runway to scale AI‑first products without losing speed, safety, or clarity.
If you want a quick readiness check: do you have a clean event schema, identity resolution, and governed properties; a measurable definition of activation for each AI feature; offline and online evals connected to business KPIs; guardrails and human feedback in the loop; and dashboards that team leaders actually use? If not, start there. The payoff is faster iteration, lower risk, and a clearer line from AI investment to customer outcomes.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Perspectives.
I’m sharing a focused set of insights on analytics, experimentation, and personalization designed to help teams ship smarter, reduce risk, and accelerate outcomes. Drawing on years of leading product teams, I translate complex data practices into practical playbooks you can apply immediately to improve user activation, conversion, and retention.
My approach starts with a strong measurement foundation. I lean on a unified analytics platform—often powered by tools like Amplitude analytics—to centralize product, marketing, and customer success signals. With clear event taxonomies, consistent governance, and trustworthy dashboards, teams gain a single source of truth to prioritize the right problems and sequence roadmap bets with confidence.
Experimentation turns insight into evidence. I emphasize A/B testing discipline, including minimum detectable effect (MDE), guardrail metrics, and pre-registered hypotheses. This repeatable system lifts decision quality, shortens feedback loops, and aligns cross-functional partners around what actually moves the needle, not what merely sounds promising.
Personalization compounds the value of experimentation by delivering the right value to the right segment at the right moment. Thoughtful in-app guides and product tours—rooted in behavioral signals—nudge users through friction points and increase the likelihood of early wins. The result is a more intuitive path to first value, stronger user activation, and healthier long-term engagement.
Retention is the ultimate scoreboard. I rely on retention analysis, cohorting, and leading-indicator metrics to connect feature usage to durable outcomes. When paired with product-led growth motions, teams can identify activation thresholds, build habit loops, and scale what works without overextending sales or support capacity.
If you’re getting started, begin with a crisp instrumentation plan, shared definitions, and a lightweight review ritual. Use continuous discovery practices, opportunity solution tree mapping, and driver trees to tie data signals to real user problems. From there, iterate: test small, learn fast, and scale what is proven. Over time, this system becomes a flywheel for product strategy—fewer debates, more evidence, better products.
In this series, I distill the frameworks, templates, and real-world lessons that have consistently improved outcomes for product teams: how to structure experiment backlogs, how to read funnel breakpoints, how to detect false positives quickly, and how to operationalize analytics for day-to-day decisions. Expect practical guidance you can copy, adapt, and run with immediately.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Perspectives.
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.
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.
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).
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.
For years, I’ve watched high-performing product teams run into the same wall: the gap between insight and action. Dashboards multiply, yet decisions stall. That final mile—where we interpret trends, prioritize tradeoffs, and ship changes—remains the last bottleneck. It’s not a data problem; it’s a bandwidth and focus problem.
Amplitude's AI Analytics Platform takes the next step: agents that investigate, monitor, and act so your team can build what actually matters.
From my seat leading product at HighLevel, I see “agentic AI” as a structural upgrade to the product operating system. Instead of waiting on human cycles to discover anomalies, craft hypotheses, and trigger the next experiment, Agent Analytics can continuously investigate user behavior, monitor mission-critical metrics, and initiate actions—closing the loop from observation to outcome. That shift transforms analytics from a passive reference layer into an active, decision-making teammate.
Practically, this matters because empowered product teams win on speed and focus, not on the volume of reports. When agents surface the most material opportunities—say, a sudden drop in activation for a high-value cohort or a retention dip tied to a recent release—we compress time-to-insight and, more importantly, time-to-action. The result is fewer context switches, fewer meetings, and more cycles invested in building meaningful value.
The most compelling use cases are those that compound: continuous discovery that highlights friction in onboarding flows, proactive retention analysis on at-risk segments, automated experiment prioritization aligned to outcomes vs output OKRs, and closed-loop alerts that trigger workflows in your CRM or in-app guides to accelerate product-led growth. With a unified analytics platform feeding these agents, we can move from reactive analytics to anticipatory product strategy.
Of course, leverage requires guardrails. I anchor adoption in three pillars: clear decision rights for agents (what they can autonomously act on vs. recommend), transparency in reasoning (so PMs can audit how conclusions were reached), and explicit alignment to key outcomes (activation, retention, expansion). Done right, this is not a replacement for product judgment—it’s an amplifier for it.
If I were rolling this out today, I’d set a success dashboard that tracks: time-to-insight, time-to-action, percentage of initiatives initiated by agents, impact on North Star metrics, and the reduction in manual analysis hours. I’d also implement lightweight prompts and playbooks—LLMs for product managers—that standardize how we ask better questions and interpret agent outputs.
The promise here is simple but profound: eliminate the last bottleneck by giving your teams a partner that never sleeps, never tires, and never loses the plot. When agents investigate, monitor, and act, we spend less time arguing about the data and more time building the right things, faster.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.
I rely on Amplitude analytics and Figma Make to turn real user insights into high-fidelity prototypes in hours, not weeks. This pairing compresses our continuous discovery loop and helps my team prioritize what truly moves the needle for customers and the business.
Design smarter with Amplitude and Figma Make. Use AI and product analytics together to prototype, test, and learn faster.
Here’s how I put that into practice: I start with product analytics to isolate a measurable opportunity—often around user activation, conversion drop‑offs, or retention analysis. Amplitude cohorts and funnels surface where friction hides; I translate those signals into design prompts and flows in Figma Make, so we can visualize and validate potential solutions before a single line of production code is written.
Once a promising direction emerges, I convene the product trio—design, engineering, and product—around a clear outcome metric, not output. We build a lightweight driver tree, align on a hypothesis, and define the minimum detectable effect (MDE) so our A/B testing has enough statistical power to be decision‑worthy. From there, we create a small set of Figma Make variations that reflect distinct value hypotheses, not cosmetic tweaks.
On the experimentation front, I gate risky changes behind feature flags and ship via our CI/CD pipeline to limit blast radius and accelerate feedback. I monitor the experiment with a unified analytics platform mindset: the same definitions and segments in Amplitude power both pre‑launch discovery and post‑launch evaluation. That continuity lets us compare prototype expectations against production reality with far fewer translation errors.
A few principles keep this workflow sharp and responsible: I use privacy-by-design patterns, apply data governance guardrails to keep datasets consent‑aligned, and set AI risk management standards so generated designs respect accessibility and brand constraints. Critically, I avoid vanity metrics—I measure learning speed, decision quality, and downstream impact on activation or retention, which are what sustain product-led growth.
If you’re looking for a playbook, try this cadence: 1) define the customer outcome and success metric; 2) map a simple driver tree to narrow the solution space; 3) explore multiple flows in Figma Make; 4) validate quickly with concept tests and usability checks; 5) run A/B testing with a clearly defined MDE; 6) ship iteratively behind feature flags; 7) close the loop in Amplitude with cohort‑level retention analysis; 8) refine copy and UX writing to reinforce the core value proposition. Repeat until the signal is undeniable.
Blending Amplitude analytics with Figma Make has become my fastest path from insight to impact. It keeps my team focused on learning that compounds, features that matter, and outcomes customers can feel—so we truly make what matters.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.
What happens when you treat an AI agent not as a chatbot, but as a full teammate on your sales team – one that can jump on video calls, demo your product, make phone calls, and follow up over days?
I recently dug into this question with the team behind ShowMe, an AI-native startup building digital sales reps for inbound teams. Founded in April 2025, ShowMe has engineered a multi‑agent system that combines conversation agents for live voice and video interactions, evaluator agents that score every call for quality and sentiment, and creator agents that ingest customer documentation to build tailored playbooks. A workflow layer orchestrates the entire lead‑to‑close journey across days, not minutes—exactly the kind of agentic AI approach I expect to see become standard in revenue workflows.
What stood out to me first was the origin story: a glaring conversion gap on a previous website, and the realization that a purpose‑built AI could fill it. The initial MVP was refreshingly pragmatic—start with a voice agent, pair it with product videos, and back it with a simple RAG knowledge base. That retrieval‑first pipeline let the team ship quickly, validate real user behavior, and then scale sophistication where it mattered.
Then came a pivotal affordance shift: adding a realistic avatar via HeyGen. It wasn’t just eye candy; it changed how prospects engaged. The video-call UX established trust and made the AI’s capabilities legible at a glance. Prospects behaved as if they were with a human rep—interrupting, probing, and asking for demos—because the surface area invited that behavior.
On the architecture side, the team decomposed a single sales conversation into multiple specialized sub‑agents—greeting, qualifying, pitching—to manage latency, memory constraints, and model limitations. Deterministic workflows handle the happy paths reliably, while a smart orchestrator is emerging to break out of rigid paths when context demands it. Confidence scoring and frustration detection kick in for real‑time human handoff decisions, a must for revenue‑critical moments where a missed nuance can cost pipeline.
Training the system to sell like your team is where it gets powerful. ShowMe ingests sales transcripts and training materials to teach company‑specific sales skills, then uses creator agents to assemble tailored playbooks. Conversation agents stay focused on live interactions, while evaluator agents continuously score calls for quality and sentiment. The result: repeatable, compliant, and brand‑consistent selling—without flattening personalization.
Quality isn’t an afterthought—it’s operationalized. Early deployments run with customer-driven evaluation loops where 100% of conversations are reviewed, tapering to about 5% over time as confidence increases. Feedback becomes automated tests to prevent prompt regression, and production quality is proven with POCs, A/B rollouts, dashboards, and CRM logging. This is eval-driven development applied to go‑to‑market: measurable, auditable, and continuously improving.
I also appreciate how they treat the agent as a coworker, not a widget. Onboarding happens via Slack, weekly reporting aligns with sales leadership rhythms, and tight CRM integration keeps data flowing both ways. That mindset unlocks adoption because it fits how sales teams actually operate—and it creates real Agent Analytics you can manage.
From a product perspective, several pragmatic details matter. Real‑time voice and avatar demos rely on latency tricks and a library of video clips to keep interactions snappy. The conversation agent evolved from a basic Q&A bot into guided sales discovery, balancing personalization with the ever-present risks of hallucination. Guardrails, human‑in‑the‑loop, and clearly defined handoff rules are non‑negotiables in high‑stakes sales workflows.
Looking ahead, the roadmap makes sense: move toward self‑serve PLG setup, add smarter orchestration that adapts beyond deterministic flows, and expand into adjacent roles like customer success. For product leaders building in gen ai, the pattern here is instructive: start with inbound value, design AI workflows that align to proven sales motions, and use rigorous evals to earn the right to automate more.
If you want to go deeper into the build, the live demos, and the full multi‑agent orchestration, listen to this episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts. For more on the stack, explore ShowMe and the avatar platform HeyGen.
Over the past few years, I’ve led cross-functional teams to deploy agentic AI in production, and I’ve learned that success rarely hinges on the model alone. It comes from methodically designing the right workflows, instrumenting every step, and building a feedback loop that compounds. Learn how companies like Replit are consolidating workflows, creating one-person departments, and building systems for scale with Amplitude.
When I talk about AI agents, I’m describing software that behaves like a focused teammate—owning a clear job to be done end-to-end. In practice, that means consolidating fragmented tasks into a single accountable “one-person department,” then giving it the context, tools, and analytics to perform reliably. This is how agentic AI moves beyond demos into durable business impact.
I start with outcomes, not algorithms. I map a driver tree from business goals (e.g., lower response time, higher activation, better retention) to the specific moments an agent can influence. This outcome-first alignment keeps scope tight, informs guardrails, and grounds the value proposition in measurable change instead of vanity metrics.
Next, I define the workflow the agent will fully own. I look for high-volume, rules-adjacent processes—think lead qualification, support triage, or billing inquiries—where clear decision criteria already exist but human time is the bottleneck. I document triggers, inputs, decision points, and handoffs, then design the ideal-state flow the agent will run autonomously, with transparent escalation paths to humans.
On architecture, I favor a retrieval-first pipeline to keep responses accurate and current. I scope the knowledge base, implement context window management, and standardize tools the agent can call (search, CRM actions, ticket updates). For teams new to this, I coach “LLMs for product managers” fundamentals so we make sensible trade-offs between speed and reliability rather than chasing model-of-the-week headlines.
Instrumentation is where the system becomes self-improving. I use Amplitude analytics and an Agent Analytics schema to track intent detection, tool usage, resolution rate, time-to-resolution, deflection, and escalation causes. A unified analytics platform lets me connect agent outcomes to core product metrics—activation, retention, and conversion—so we can see the real revenue and experience impact, not just local efficiency gains.
To validate impact, I run A/B testing when traffic allows, setting a minimum detectable effect (MDE) upfront to avoid inconclusive reads. In lower-volume scenarios, I lean on eval-driven development: curated test sets for edge cases, scenario-based regression suites, and error taxonomies that accelerate iteration. Feature flags let us stage capabilities safely (shadow mode, assistive, autonomous) while we monitor deltas before full rollout.
Reliability and trust are designed in from the start. I apply AI risk management practices—privacy-by-design, data governance, and policy-aligned prompt templates—paired with observability to trace decisions. Clear escalation policies, incident management runbooks, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints ensure the agent fails safe, not silently.
Shipping cadence matters. I use CI/CD to increase deployment frequency, keep prompts and tools versioned, and gate risky changes with targeted rollouts. As patterns stabilize, we scale horizontally to new use cases, sharing core capabilities (retrieval, analytics, guardrails) as a platform. This is how “one-person departments” multiply without multiplying overhead.
Change management closes the loop. I partner with product trios and frontline teams to co-design prompts, set acceptance criteria, and define what “good” looks like in plain language. In-app guides and product tours introduce the agent’s role and limits, and structured feedback channels feed directly into our discovery and iteration rhythm.
The throughline of this playbook is simple: treat agents like real teammates with a job description, operating procedures, and performance reviews. With disciplined workflow design, a retrieval-first pipeline, and outcome-level instrumentation in Amplitude, agentic AI stops being a science project and starts compounding into durable product-led growth.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Perspectives.
I write from a place many product leaders know well—the moment when the data you need to make decisions simply doesn’t exist, and you have to build the capability from the ground up. That firsthand experience with gaps in analytics shaped how I think about product strategy, product discovery, and the relentless pursuit of product-market fit lessons.
In my work, I lean on continuous discovery to surface the most meaningful problems, then translate those insights into outcomes vs output OKRs that keep teams focused on impact. When we anchor roadmaps to real user behavior and business results, we avoid vanity metrics and create a durable plan that compounds learning over time.
Execution matters just as much as insight. I rely on rigorous A/B testing, clear minimum detectable effect (MDE) thresholds, and retention analysis to separate signal from noise. This discipline ensures that every iteration—whether it’s a small UX nudge or a bold bet—moves us closer to measurable value for customers and the business.
None of this works without empowered product teams. I build around product trios that partner tightly across design, engineering, and product, and I foster a product-led growth mindset so we earn activation, engagement, and expansion through the experience itself. The goal is to create a system where learning is fast, ownership is clear, and the user’s job-to-be-done stays front and center.
On the tooling side, I favor a unified analytics platform so insights are consistent from discovery to deployment. Whether I’m instrumenting funnels with Amplitude analytics or stitching together qualitative and quantitative inputs, the principle is the same: give teams trustworthy, real-time visibility so they can make better decisions, faster.
If you’re looking to operationalize these practices, you’ll find practical playbooks, decision frameworks, and real-world examples here—built for leaders who want clarity, speed, and confidence in how they discover, ship, and scale products.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.
Over the last year, I’ve had the same conversation with a lot of support leaders.
They’ve deployed AI and are seeing initial efficiency gains, but want to push beyond these early results and achieve meaningful transformation.
When AI is first introduced, the gains show up quickly. Teams resolve higher volumes of queries, free up capacity, and deliver faster responses. But the real opportunity for impact extends well beyond those initial wins. As AI becomes more deeply integrated into support operations, taking on harder, more complex work, those results compound, new ways to create and measure value open up, and the economics of support change entirely. That shift is where I spend most of my time with leaders—turning early efficiency into durable business value.
This sits at the heart of “The 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report.” In this reflection, I explore how deeper integration compounds impact and why that makes business value easier to articulate across the organization—especially to finance and product peers who need to see outcomes, not just output.
The teams going deeper are seeing higher returns. The research shows that 62% of support teams have seen their customer service metrics improve since implementing AI, with early wins showing up most clearly in speed and efficiency. But for teams that have reached mature deployment (where AI is fully integrated into operations) that number jumps to 87%.
As AI programs advance, measurement confidence surges. This chart shows how ROI tracking rises from 35% in exploring to 70% in mature deployments—evidence of a widening execution gap in customer service.
The same pattern holds for the ability to measure ROI. Among teams in early exploration, just 35% say they can measure their return on AI investment, but for teams at the mature deployment stage, that rises to 70%. In my experience, this is the moment the conversation shifts from “is AI working?” to “how much leverage are we creating?”
As AI becomes more embedded in support workflows, what teams choose to measure starts to change. In the early stages of deployment, ROI is typically understood through improved customer response times, lower cost to serve, and freeing up capacity. Teams focus on how much time AI creates and whether it’s relieving pressure on the support organization. These signals help validate that the system is working, but they say little about how that capacity is ultimately used.
As deployments mature, measurement starts to reflect a different intent. Instead of stopping at time saved, teams look at where that capacity is reinvested—into higher value customer work and revenue-generating activities. ROI becomes less about relief and more about leverage. I encourage teams to set targets for capacity redeployment and tie them directly to activation, retention, and expansion outcomes.
The report data shows this clearly. Across all maturity stages, the most commonly cited measure of ROI is "time freed up that the support team can use to focus on value-adding activities for customers." But at mature deployment, that signal intensifies, with 73% of teams citing it, compared to 56% at early exploration.
Mature AI deployments reveal clearer ROI: teams report more time freed for value-adding customer work (73% vs 59%) and more hours redirected to revenue-generating tasks (56% vs 34%) than initial rollouts.
What’s also interesting is that 56% of mature teams say freed capacity is being directed toward revenue-generating activities, up from 34% at initial deployment. That’s a powerful indicator that AI is shifting from a cost narrative to a growth narrative.
The result is a shift in economic intent: from measuring what AI saves to demonstrating how the capacity it creates is reinvested to drive growth. As a product leader, I anchor this conversation in outcome-based metrics and clear counterfactuals: what would it have cost to deliver the same experience without AI?
As AI takes on more work, the question moves from “does it save money?” to “how does it change the economics of support?” Legacy support economics were built for linear growth: more customer tickets meant more headcount, more outsourcing, and more software costs. Success was measured through containment—the number of queries that didn’t reach human agents. These models worked when volume and effort were tightly linked, but AI doesn’t scale linearly, and it needs to be evaluated differently.
To sustain AI investment and expand its impact, teams need to move beyond cost-cutting narratives and build a clearer case for business value. When done right, AI goes far beyond improving support efficiency. It rewires the financial model, breaking the link between support costs and revenue growth, and turning support into a contributor to customer activation, retention, and lifetime value. This means treating your AI Agent as a new workforce capability that changes how your support function creates and captures value. Here’s what value looks like in an AI-first model:
Deeper AI integration decouples growth from headcount. This split chart shows support volume surging while team size plateaus, revealing how automation unlocks scale, reduces costs, and makes ROI easier to prove.
Human productivity: Your team focuses on more strategic areas, not the queue.
System improvement: Every resolved query makes the system smarter.
Revenue influence: Support becomes a lever for activation, retention, and growth.
Organizational agility: You scale service without scaling headcount.
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.
How does this look in practice? Intercom offers a compelling example with Fin. What started as a focused effort to improve their customer support experience has become one of the clearest illustrations of what happens when AI is fully embraced across an organization.
Since 2022, Fin has helped Intercom absorb more than a 300% increase in customer demand while improving the consistency of delivery—including supporting new routes into support for trial customers and website visitors. Today, Fin is involved in 97% of their customers' conversations. Of those, it resolves 83.5% end-to-end, putting their overall automation rate at 81%.
That depth of deployment allowed Intercom to scale service without scaling headcount. Without Fin, they would have needed at least 100 additional support teammates to meet rising demand and service standards.
As Fin took on the majority of day-to-day volume, the human support team shifted toward consultative work—helping customers adopt Fin more deeply, succeed faster, and unlock more value from the platform. Intercom now tracks metrics like “direct revenue generated” and “expansion revenue influenced” to understand the impact of these consultative support activities. This repositioned support from a cost center to an active contributor to long-term growth.
The throughline from The 2026 Customer Service Transformation Report is that deployment depth makes a significant difference. Teams that are investing in deeply integrating AI are reshaping how support scales and contributes to growth. Value becomes clearer as AI takes on more work, and support leaders can articulate that value to the rest of the business.
The gap between these teams and those still in the early stages is widening. A select group of pioneers are setting a new bar for what AI-powered customer service can deliver, and understanding what they’re doing differently is the first step toward closing that gap. If you want to dive deeper into the data and frameworks, you can download the report here: https://www.intercom.com/customer-transformation-report?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=internal&utm_campaign=20260128-report-owned-2026cstransformationreport&utm_content=chapterseries_2
I look for analytics upgrades that meaningfully compress time-to-insight for product teams. The newest expansion of Amplitude AI Visibility stands out because it improves how we explore user behavior, automate insight creation, and translate data into action across product-led growth motions.
Explore the most recent updates to Amplitude AI Visibility, including content generation, AI chat-driven segmentation, better UI, and improved reliability.
Here’s how I’m thinking about the impact. Content generation can turn raw events into ready-to-share narratives—experiment summaries for A/B testing, cohort deep-dives for retention analysis, and executive briefs that tie outcomes to roadmap decisions. For leaders and ICs alike, this trims the manual lift in Amplitude analytics while keeping the human in the loop to verify context and nuance.
AI chat-driven segmentation is another meaningful unlock. Instead of clicking through complex filters, I can describe the cohort I want in natural language and iterate quickly. That speeds up continuous segmentation work—spotting activation bottlenecks, isolating churn precursors, or defining cohorts for product-led growth experiments—and keeps the team focused on hypotheses and decisions, not interface friction. With LLMs for product managers, the key is pairing this speed with clear guardrails and validation steps.
The updated UI matters more than aesthetic polish. A clearer, more consistent experience reduces cognitive load, improves adoption across cross-functional partners, and reinforces a unified analytics platform approach. Improved reliability, paired with strong observability, increases trust in the stack—critical when insights drive roadmap priorities and high-visibility launches.
Operationally, I’d roll this out with a simple playbook: identify 2–3 high-value use cases (e.g., activation funnel analysis, churn cohort exploration, experiment reporting), define success metrics (time-to-insight, stakeholder adoption, decision velocity), and establish basic AI risk management and data governance guardrails (prompt templates, access policies, and review steps). The goal is to turn AI workflows into a durable capability rather than a one-off novelty.
Bottom line: these enhancements remove friction between questions and answers. If your team relies on Amplitude analytics, the combination of content generation, AI chat-driven segmentation, a cleaner UI, and stronger reliability should accelerate discovery cycles and help you translate insight into action with greater confidence.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.
I continually study how high-velocity teams turn AI ambition into shipped product, and Amplitude’s approach stands out. "Leo Jiang is the Head of Engineering, AI Products at Amplitude, focused on building new AI and marketing products. He has helped build Ask Amplitude, Agents, and AI Visibility." From a product management leadership lens, that portfolio signals a clear AI strategy: enable insight (Ask Amplitude), drive action (Agents), and ensure trust and observability (AI Visibility).
What I appreciate most is the sequencing: start with user-facing value, build agentic AI capabilities where tasks repeat and outcomes can be evaluated, and layer AI workflows with robust governance. For PMs and LLMs for product managers, the implication is to define success via eval-driven development—quantitative rubrics, offline test sets, and real-time feedback loops—before scaling automation. This also hints at an emerging discipline of Agent Analytics: instrument prompts, tool calls, and outcome quality so we can tune performance like we tune a funnel.
Ask Amplitude gives a relatable example: natural-language questions lower the activation barrier for product and growth teams inside an Amplitude analytics environment. When agents turn answers into next-best actions, product-led growth becomes measurable—from hypothesis to change to impact—inside a unified decision loop. That tight loop is where product strategy, design, and reliability meet to create compounding value.
Operationally, I organize a product trio around each capability and pair it with forward deployed engineers to accelerate discovery with customers. I also invest in privacy-by-design and data governance early, ensuring marketing use cases respect compliance while keeping iteration speed high. The goal is a repeatable path from prototype to scale that preserves momentum without compromising safety.
My takeaway for peers: pick one high-frequency workflow, define clear agent boundaries, ship a narrow slice, and measure relentlessly. Use retrieval-first pipeline patterns for grounding, add human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and close the loop with qualitative insights from in-app guides. When that works, expand capabilities—not just features—and let outcomes vs output OKRs steer prioritization.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.
