Pulse 2026 - Day 2: Context Wins the Enterprise AI Race, Not the Best Model ft. Arvind Jain (Glean)

Please welcome to the stage Gainsight chief revenue officer Maril Lee Bear.

Hello Pulse community. Welcome back to day two. It felt like this expedition really came alive yesterday and I think it's safe to say this community knows how to explore and celebrate. Congrats to everybody who clearly made it out of the hidden ruins that our events team created at the venue last night. Now, as I think back to yesterday, what stood out to me were the conversations people were having everywhere. Everywhere I turned, members of this community were asking the same version of the same question. How do we keep growing customer value when the pressure on retention keeps rising? Yesterday, Chuck introduced retention as a service and the AI powered capabilities that go along with it. Pre-built agents inside the platform. Agentic capabilities that let you build your own vision inside Gainsight products, extending the value of Gainsight out to LLMs and tools that your team is already using. And lastly, Atlas AI native services where you can hire Gainsight to deliver the renewals outcome on your longtail customer base. Now, I'm not up here to pitch you on the platform. That'll come later. I am here as a CRO who owns the retention number and leads CS just like many of you. And I can tell you that the pressure to retain and to deliver and adopt AI, it's very real. I know you all feel it too and the data backs it up. Bain has been writing about GRR pressure across SaaS. Headcount is shrinking, procurement is pushing back, and expansion requires clearer ROI proof now more than ever. McKinsey has also shown how deeply retention connects to company value. A few months ago, it released a study of 100 B2B SaaS companies. Those with best-in-class retention trade at 24 times company revenue. Those with lower NRR trade at only five times revenue. The difference is retention. And that's exactly what's at stake. Inside Gainsight, we are responding like many of you. We've started using those three agent paths ourselves. We're using what's already available in the platform. We're building and extending where it makes sense and we need something more specific. And we're evaluating how AI native services can help reshape our approach to renewals. So today you are going to see what that AI strategy with Gainsight looks like in real workflows. You'll hear from post sales leaders at Gainsight who are closest to this work every day. They're going to show you how it's taken shape within the Gainsight platform as real workflows, real capabilities, and real outcomes that help your teams respond to the pressure and put retention back in reach. So with that, I'm going to hand it over now to Gainsight's chief customer officer, Brent Crimkey, so you can see what's possible in practice.

Good morning. As Merily said yesterday, we talked a lot about the challenges that we're all facing as customer success leaders in the room. And I speak to a lot of you every single day. And I know we're all getting the same questions from our board, our colleagues, our suite. It's questions like what are we doing with the insights we're getting? Are we getting enough insights? Of course, AI and agents, we're getting these questions of are all these things we're talking about actually having an impact on GRR, NRR, and efficiency. The other thing that we're all facing is the answer to these questions not very long ago are now very irrelevant and are creating more and more challenges. We know that this map that we talked about yesterday is more critical than ever and we've got to get the answers not just for our customers but for ourselves and the leaders that we work with across our organizations. Yesterday you heard us talk about how we're going to bring together both building and buying into a single path. And so today I'm incredibly excited to walk you through exactly what this looks like. So there's three main things I'm going to talk about. One, Merily mentioned pre-built agents all out of the box. Second is how are we building on top of Gainsight intelligence with tools that you're already using today like Claude, Salesforce, other LLM of choice. And then third, how are you building now directly inside of Gainsight with Gainsight Agent Studio. Today again we're going to get hands-on with all three of these. So where I want to start is within your customer success teams today, what they can use directly out of the box. So for this demo, as we do, we're going to use Sally our CSM. She uses Gainsight every day. For all of you in the room that have been using it every day, don't worry. The UI isn't changing. The critical components that you've built out are still going to be there. But what's no longer on that is what it's going to take to make it work. Instead, it's working for you because it's now powered by pre-built agents that are already on, already running, and already surfacing exactly what matters for all of you. This is what Sally, our CSM, now sees when she logs into Gainsight's view and gain directly in her account page. AI generated sentiment, stakeholder relationship strength, and AI generated milestones. All out of the box, integrated AI signals pulled directly from Staircase AI. It's giving Sally both the relationship and account level insights she used to have to hunt for. Now, let's go one level deeper. And one of the most common pain points I know we all continue to hear about, which is that dreaded handoff from the sales team into customer success. The reality is Sally used to spend days trying to go through sales tools, notes, begging, pleading to really put together what exactly did the customer buy, what are the outcomes they're looking to drive, who the stakeholders are, and where the landmines are that she may need to anticipate. Now all these insights, the goals, the outcomes that the customer is trying to drive, they're already there. Now Sally can have a meaningful conversation on day one instead of month two. This is just the beginning of what pre-built agents unlock for CSMs like Sally. AI agents like the handoff analyst, the risk analyst, and the expansion agents are already live today for all Gainsight customers, all running the moment you and your team logs in. Once these goals are on the table, the success plan will now start to build itself around them. AI generated success plans pull from the account insights and similar success plans that are tailored to each one of Sally's customers. They're actually built to work. So now Sally as the CSM, all she has to own is the delivery. All of this is the first way that Gainsight is now delivering on the map that you heard about yesterday.

So now what? Let's talk about when Sally's teammates need to really work behind the platform because here's the reality. Sally lives in Gainsight, but there's a lot of people that she works with like Jake, her account executive. He doesn't. He lives and works in Salesforce and we all know how much we have to beg them to check certain tabs, go into certain areas. And the reality is we've stopped asking because we truly believe at Gainsight we should work wherever you and your team do. So now what you're looking at is Salesforce accounts, Gainsight embedded directly within that Salesforce account page. Now a lot of you are probably thinking, 'Okay, Brent, this isn't new. A lot of you already have everything set up directly like this in your own platform. Jake can already see the same health scores, same expansion signals that Gainsight creates, all directly within Salesforce. What's new though is now what Jake can do with this with Agent Force MCP connector directly connected to Gainsight. He can act on all of his deeply integrated customer data exactly where he lives, which is in Salesforce. So an expansion opportunity that an expansion analyst at Gainsight has built or identified directly turns this into a Salesforce opportunity almost instantly. Context is already filled out, all the fields that Jake is populating and probably isn't going to do. It's already done. Same intelligence your CS team runs on, zero workflow change for the team that you're dependent on across your organization and where they live, which is in Salesforce. Now, it's not just the CRM that can now build on the deep context and the expertise at which Gainsight is delivering. We're bringing that same underlying infrastructure to the AI tools as well. I know we've all heard about MCP over the last few days, but here's why it matters. Before MCP, your teams were still using Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, but the reality was one, they were getting generic answers and those answers were staying within their login, their chat windows, etc. Now with MCP already released and live for both Gainsight Customer Success as well as Staircase, when Sally goes in and asks about a customer in her LLM, she gets an answer that's pulled directly from Gainsight with real data, real context. So when Sally is asking a question like what top risk accounts should I be aware of across my book, she gets the right answers where she's already working in Claude. As a CS leader, this has changed how I operate my day. My team is annoyed because it's all I talk about. But where they're not annoyed is I no longer have to ask them for prep. Every morning I can go in, I get a debrief. I understand exactly what's going on. It gives me the context and the confidence every single morning to know exactly what's going on. Now what we're going to do is you're going to see how Claude can also start to give Sally the answers to the risk and key call outs exactly where she needs to have it. The way we like to think about it is Claude is bringing this processing power. Gainsight is what is answering the questions underneath. Now to take this a step further, it doesn't stop at the data. Sally not only is asking questions and getting those answers, now she can take action, creating calls to action on her highest risk accounts all from Claude without having to go back into Gainsight.

So now to shift from MCP, now I want to go a little bit deeper and you all heard us talk yesterday about CLI. For any of you that don't know what this is referencing, it's command line interface and I like to think of this as for your technical admins or your agents. It's a direct line directly into Gainsight with no additional UI required. So the examples that we just talked about in regards to MCP, they're great for everyone including CSMs like Sally. CLI is both for agents themselves, for your more technical users on your team, for your admins who really need to build exactly what they need and they need to build it fast. We know how important speed is right now in this new environment. So, here's a real example for a CS admin like Olivia. Most admins like Olivia, they spend their time setting up and managing digital touch points. And for any of you that are familiar, Journey Orchestrator within the platform. If you aren't familiar, it creates custom journeys. So, this could be everything from calls to action, automated emails, in-app engagements, and so much more. It's incredibly powerful, but the reality is it does take time to build and you've got complexity, different segmentation models, different engagement models, that complexity can start to build. With CLI, Olivia just describes her situation and the program builds itself in minutes and not days. Additionally, then the different variations for her segmentation model, her engagement model, it's built as just as easy. So you just saw Claude doing its thing to build this out line by line. Claude is doing all the work for you. You get to cut straight to the output which is the program already built for you directly inside of Gainsight.

Everything you've seen so far, it works in Claude with ChatGPT with Copilot. Whatever LLM is your choice within your business. Most of you in this room already have access to these incredibly powerful AI tools. What you just saw shows what's possible when you connect those tools to the broader tech stack across your business and you start to build on top of Gainsight's customer context. But there's one bigger question and that is what happens when you want to build what you want to build isn't just a generic app. We all are familiar again with things like Claude, CoWork, Cursor, Replit, Lovable. These are great to build anything but a CSM or a customer success admin like Olivia, they don't need to build anything. They need something that already understands success plans, health scores, calls to action. They need something that's built on customer success and not just AI. And so that's the question that Gainsight Agent Studio powered by Claude is answering. Gainsight Agent Studio is where your teams can build customer success and Gainsight workflows, the ones specific to their account, their data, their day. And because it lives in Gainsight, it already knows everything it needs to. The right APIs are already pre-wired, permissions, governance, security models, it's all already inherited. So here's what this looks like in practice. Night before a busy call, CSM Sally asks Agent Studio to prep her. It reads everything. It's got her calendar, account health, historical context from timeline, calls to action. It starts to give Sally a prioritized understanding and overview of exactly what was asked. And it even creates a call to action for her based off of that summary. But then it asks, would you like me to do this for you automatically every night or every morning? One yes, and Sally now has built a skill that can run automatically right there in her conversation. No admin setup, no separate UI. It runs every single night now. Sally's briefs are waiting for her every morning. But then the same is true after a call. As we know, no call goes as expected. So Sally has a call with Abbott. And she's then not sure where do I start based off of the call that I was just on. So she tells Agent Studio, it reviews the call, surfaces what matters, walks her through it one step at a time. Now it starts to mark the onboarding milestone complete, flags an adoption risk from the reorg that the customer had mentioned to her. It also logs the verified outcome that they shared and then it routes all of the follow-up comments directly back to the right place. And so now what it's doing is it's asking Sally to approve everything that it created. So now she can choose to make this as well another repeatable skill that runs after every single one of her customer calls. So, Agent Studio isn't just taking tasks off of Sally's plate. It can also start to ask it to build entirely new dashboards, UI elements that fit her needs. So, as you can see, things such as key insights reports with her daily priorities, anything at risk, everything that might have slipped through the cracks. Now, for the CSM, it is one click away. The way that I like to think about this is we built Agent Studio on 15 years of Gainsight's institutional knowledge. It's every pattern that we've seen across thousands of customer success teams all baked in from the start. But we also know that no platform can anticipate every single workflow, every customer situation, all the institutional knowledge that's in this room, all the different ways that you all operate. So with Agent Studio, we've pre-wired everything we know, and we're handing the keys to you all to build the rest. So these are just a few ideas of where you can start. What we're hoping for is that you walk out of Pulse this week with a few hundred more. The reality is we know the customer success category is shifting. What you saw today is three ways of how Gainsight is truly delivering on the shift right now. It's pre-built agents. It's ready the moment you walk out of this room. It's building on the intelligence of Gainsight with tools like Salesforce or whatever AI tool your organization is using. And finally, it's now a place to build exactly what your team needs right at Gainsight safely, securely, all without leaving your platform. With all of this, your team is now more efficient, more predictable, healthier, and your GRR is stronger than ever. This is not just adding AI features. This is truly a different architecture, and it's here.

The last thing is and what's even better is this is not just about Gainsight Customer Success and Staircase to show you where these paths are also leading us with Skill Jar, with Community, and our Product Experience. I'm incredibly excited to welcome to the stage Samantha Murray.

Thank you. Oh, yesterday you heard Chuck and our leaders talk about the choice to be a critic or to be an explorer who charts their own path and goes on to build great things. Now, all great explorers have one thing in common. They don't set out empty-handed. They come prepared with a toolkit built for the journey ahead. So, let's talk about the toolkit that we've built for digital customer success teams. There are two paths we talked about yesterday. Building and buying. Let's talk about building. First, meet Emma. She's a digital marketing manager at Abbott. She runs email campaigns for Abbott. And Email Monkey is her tool of choice. And this is the Email Monkey customer hub where Emma goes for everything and anything Email Monkey. It has Q&A, tutorials, courses, release notes, events, and so much more. This hub has one single login, one customer profile, one seamless navigation, and a unified search. Everything is personalized to Emma. Now, this unified experience where customers can seamlessly move between educational resources and community conversations is live for all of our Skill Jar and CC customers today. Everything you see here comes out of the box from Gainsight. But what if you need a custom widget that doesn't exist in our widget library? You used to need a developer and that developer had to use an HTML editor with no version control, no AI tools, and no collaboration to deliver that custom experience. That's all changed with the launch of Developer Studio, available in Customer Communities today and coming to Skill Jar this fall. Developer Studio lets anyone vibe code the community of their dreams. Any widget you can imagine, you can build it and ship it to your community. And if your community team does happen to have developer support, they can finally build, deploy, and version directly in and deploy custom widgets directly in CC using GitHub. So, now let me introduce you to Diego. He's head of digital customer success at Email Monkey. Diego oversees the digital experience for 10,000 Email Monkey customers, academy, community, in-app experiences, newsletters, advocacy programs, literally all of it. And Email Monkey is constantly running all sorts of events, webinars, meetups, dinners, and different teams across the organization run these events. Marketing, customer success, sales, and even product, which means that Diego gets messages like these every single week. So, after this latest message from Ravi, Diego decides he's going to solve this problem. He's envisioning a map right inside his community where customers can find events near them. Diego fires up Claude. He's already loaded it, connected it to a GitHub template preloaded from Gainsight, preloaded with everything that Claude needs to know about building CC widgets. He asks for an event map widget. Claude builds it and pushes it to the Email Monkey community back end. So, let's check out what Claude's built and watch Diego drop it into the Email Monkey community. Diego finds his custom widget right alongside Gainsight's out of the box widgets. There it is. Events near you under my widgets. He publishes it and just like that, his vision is live in the Email Monkey community from idea to shipped in a single afternoon. From here, his team can configure it, edit it, and drop it anywhere else in the community hub that they may want it. Now, we've already seen customers building some really cool widgets from event countdowns, advocacy scorecards, and even template galleries. And if we know this community well, we know that you're going to design things that we haven't even considered yet. We can't wait to see what you all build. But as cool as this is, Diego's day job isn't building snazzy widgets. He has 10,000 customers to take care of. Most days he lives in a sea of browser tabs. But these days, he's been living inside of Claude. So today, we are excited to announce MCP servers for the entire digital customer hub, Skill Jar, Customer Communities, and Product Experience, all in open beta. As you heard earlier, Model Context Protocol is a way to connect your favorite AI tools to your Gainsight products. The CS MCP that Brent shared earlier brings account level intelligence into your AI tools. Our digital customer hub MCPs bring user level data and intelligence into your AI tools so that you can build incredible digital experiences that actually move the needle on customer health. Skill Jar knows every lesson and every learner. Community holds years of conversations and feedback. PX sees every single click that your customers take inside your product. Pull all of that together into a conversation with Claude or ChatGPT and you've got the entire picture of your customers in one place. Think of how powerful that is. Now, before I show you what this actually looks like, you're going to want to bookmark this page using the QR code on the screen. It's your inspiration library where you can get ideas for all of the different ways that you can use our MCPs. Today, I'm going to show you a few ways that MCP is changing Diego's day. Email Monkey's chief product officer, Alex, just messaged Diego. He shares that Email Monkey is launching a new feature, AI email templates in only 4 days. Way faster than planned. This probably sounds pretty familiar to you guys, right? He asks Diego how they can get every customer adopting this new feature in 60 days or less. That means building training, identifying the right customers, and enrolling them. Normally, that's a 3-week sprint. Today with Claude and Skill Jar connected, it's just a few prompts. Diego asks Claude to build a course plan and shares some source material that other teams have already created, like product docs, release notes, and a video tutorial. Claude gets to work and drafts an outline for Diego to review, including level appropriate interactive lessons, quizzes, and more. Diego approves it. Claude builds the entire course. And after reviewing the content, Diego asks Claude to publish it to the Email Monkey Academy. And there it is, the How to Use AI Email Templates course live in the Email Monkey Academy. Now, imagine that two weeks have gone by. The AI email templates feature is live. The course is published. And Diego's team has activated in-app engagements and a whole stack of adoption campaigns. So Diego really wants to know, is anyone actually using my new feature? Are all of my team's efforts working? With Claude and PX connected, he can get an expert level answer to his questions in seconds. No more digging through dashboards. He asks Claude, 'How many people have adopted AI email templates in the last two weeks?' Instantly, Claude pulls the entire picture together from PX. 700 accounts have fully adopted the feature. 2100 have tried but didn't make it through. He discovers that the main point of friction is setting up a brand voice. But what really stands out here and is exciting is that 70% of accounts that have adopted the new AI email templates feature had someone complete the AI email templates course. Confirmation that education is moving the needle. Diego thinks he has something concrete to bring to the product team now, but he really wants the full picture. So he turns to the community and to Claude to find out what his customers are actually saying. Diego asks, 'What's the sentiment on AI email templates in the community? Give me top themes, ideas, product gaps, and build me a report.' Claude synthesizes the information from real community conversations, and provides four key themes, a product gap worth flagging, and even drafted answers to customers' top questions. All packaged into a report that his product team can act on in the morning. Now, you might be wondering how Diego became such an expert vibe coder and such a deep MCP and Claude user. He learned all of this in Anthropic Academy. They have a suite of free courses available rich with interactive exercises, videos, and hands-on learning, which of course runs on Skill Jar, but who's counting? So, think about what we've seen Diego do so far. He shipped a custom widget. He launched an adoption course. And he pulled live insights from PX and from the community for his product team. A year ago, that would have taken at least a month, if not more. Today, it's one person and one conversation with Claude. But this didn't happen overnight for Diego. He's an explorer. He's not waiting for permission or the perfect playbook. He's picking up new tools, forging his own path, and reinventing what his role looks like along the way. And that can be all of you, too. But not every team wants to build. Some teams just want agents that work right out of the box in the Gainsight tools that they use every day. So, let's take a look at some of our recently released pre-built agents. For Diego, like any community manager, moderation is part of the job. Keeping the community healthy and thriving never stops. With our moderation AI agent available today in Gainsight CC, Diego can focus on engaging his community members while the agent upholds his code of conduct. Obvious bad actors are removed automatically. Anything that needs a judgment call gets routed to his admin console for a quick human review. His moderation time gets cut in half. We also recently introduced Skill Jar's AI tutor, now in open beta. Think of this agent as a study buddy for all of your learners inside your academy. When someone gets stuck mid-course, AI tutor is right there in the lesson, available to answer questions grounded in your course content and your knowledge base. The learner doesn't have to leave the course. They can just keep learning and progressing. Let's take a look at this. So, Emma is in Diego's AI email templates course and wants some best practices on how to craft welcome emails and the AI tutor is right there for her. So, AI tutor helps learners while they're inside a course. But what about when your customers get stuck inside your product in the middle of their flow of work? Most of you already have a really great support agent, whether that's Forethought, Finn, or Decagon, trained on your knowledge base and handling thousands of conversations a week. And many of you would love to bring that support experience everywhere your customers already are. So that's exactly what we've built. We are excited to announce a Forethought integration with CC, Skill Jar, and PX. Now, this is currently in a closed beta, but if you'd like to join our wait list, you can sign up using the QR code on the screen. Your support agents have already been trained on your knowledge, your learning, and your community content. So, it only makes sense to bring that experience into your product, into your academy, and into your community, too. By integrating Forethought directly into your digital customer hub search experience, your customers get a richer, more conversational way to find answers to their questions and get unblocked in a moment of need. Yesterday, you heard Colin from Zendesk talk about how they're bringing AI powered conversational support directly into the Zendesk community. So, if you'd like to check out this experience for yourself, you can go to the Zendesk community or to our own Gainsight community to see this support agent live in action. Now, let's see what this looks like inside the Email Monkey app. Emma is inside the Email Monkey app and she's trying to use the new AI email templates feature. She needs help setting up a brand voice, which we learned earlier is a common place that customers tend to get stuck. Previously, she would have had to search for answers in the help center outside of her flow of work. Today, she simply opens the in-app hub right inside the Email Monkey product and types her question. 'My company doesn't have brand guidelines. How do I set up a brand voice?' Forethought powers the digital customer hub search experience and answers right inside the product, providing her multiple options to work through her problem. The best part about this is that Diego didn't have to build any of it. He simply flipped on the Forethought integration and it's now working everywhere his customers are. So, while Diego is a builder at heart, the pre-built agents from Gainsight really allow him to hit the ground running. And here at Gainsight, we're of course using these agents ourselves and seeing some pretty incredible results. The moderation AI agent has been really helpful in reducing spam and our Forethought support agent has already seen an 83% ticket deflection rate. Every one of you has a Diego on your team. Maybe it's you. Someone who's been asked to drive adoption for a late breaking feature launch. Someone answering the same question over and over across 10,000 customers. Someone who needs answers, not another complicated dashboard. They've been figuring it out on their own, stitching things together for years, doing more with less. These product innovations that we're delivering allow you to focus on what you do best, engaging your customers and building unforgettable experiences that drive retention and growth. Now go build something great.

Please welcome to the stage Maril Bear and Josh Shakar.

All right, it is now time for one of my favorite moments of Pulse, the annual game changer awards. Every great adventure has its own trailblazers, those that chart the path forward and inspire everyone to follow. And this morning, we're recognizing eight customers who have done just that with Gainsight. First up, CS Transformation of the Year. A year ago, Payscale CS team was reactive. They were chasing renewals. They were putting out fires. But they decided that wasn't good enough. So, they rebuilt the entire platform and function from the ground up, resulting in a predictive revenue focused growth engine. The outcome, a five-point increase in retention in just one year. Please welcome to the stage Michael Mday, VP of Customer Success and Renewals, and Lindsey O, VP of Customer Strategy at Payscale. Next up, we have our Retention Champion, CCC Intelligent Solutions. CCC asked a simple question. What if we stopped measuring our CSMs on how busy they are and started measuring whether customers are really feeling the value? So they built a storytelling framework, engagement scoring across the full go to market, and a business continuity plan and process that keeps the right conversations happening at the right time. That's a team that turned retention into discipline. Please welcome Tim Mu, Head of Digital Customer Success at CCC. All right, we now have our Adoption Accelerator award and that award goes to Synidoso. Here's the number that stopped me. Accounts with a certified Synidoso admin spend 127% more than those without. So Synidoso went all in. They built seven strategic use cases within Gainsight CE. Certification became the fastest path to value and the accounts that engaged with Synidoso, a 98% net dollar retention rate. So please welcome Danielle Evans, Director of Go to Market and Customer Enablement at Synidoso. All right, the Digital Architect award goes to Cloudera. Cloudera didn't just use Gainsight, they built on top of it. They launched TAM Agent, an AI assistant purpose-built for their CSMs. 6 months after the launch, CSM covered accounts grew ARR 30% and NRR increased to 113%. Please welcome Scott Maher, Senior Director of Customer Success at Cloudera. The Growth Engine award goes to Netscope. Netscope migrated their entire community to Gainsight Customer Communities with zero downtime. They then fed that community knowledge straight into their own AI and the result was a 40% increase in community engagement. Please welcome Jessica Kubaki, Global Senior Manager, Scaled Customer Success at Netscope. The Intelligent Innovator award goes to PartSource. This team built something most CS orgs are still just dreaming about, an AI powered intelligence system inside Gainsight that unifies spend, operational results, and feature adoption into a single health view. It detects risk automatically. It diagnoses the root cause and then recommends the next move. The first year on Gainsight, their retention hit 99.6%. Please welcome Alana Weinbomb, Head of Client Experience Operations at PartSource. The Rising Star award goes to Brad Soa at DailyPay. In year one with Gainsight they did a full rollout of forecasting, NPS, Staircase across CS and they rebuilt their health scoring model. By the end of the year churn improved seven percentage points and they hit 100% of their upsell target. Congratulations to Brad, Senior Director of Customer Success Ops at DailyPay. And finally, we have the Hyperscaler award goes to Anthropic, the AI safety and research company behind Claude. With Skill Jar, they built certification level onboarding at massive scale. They went from 30,000 monthly active learners last year to over 1 million today. That's a 30x increase. Please join me in congratulating Zoe Ledwig and the Anthropic Education team. Zoe can't be with us today, but we will proudly accept this award on her behalf. So, a huge congratulations to our 2026 game changers. We thank you for everything that you do for this community. One more big round of applause, please.

Okay. And the recognition continues. The game changers we just celebrated represent the boldest customer transformations of the year, but they're part of something bigger. Today, we recognize our platinum game stars. These customers have earned the program's highest honor, and a few of them are actually going double and triple platinum. Please welcome Aaron White, Dne Johnson, Danny Pancrant, Keith Mattis, Bradley Bashaw, and Heather Hansen. All year long, our Gain Stars customer recognition program shines a light on the customers who continually share their expertise and act as champions of Gainsight. Whether they're sharing best practices, lending their voice on webinars and reference calls, or guiding peers across our community, these stars have set the standard for what being a Gainsight customer means.

What what customer advocacy looks like at its absolute best. If you want to join the adventure, just scan the QR code on the screen to join the Gain Stars program. And we'd love to celebrate you next. Please give one more round of applause to our 2026 Platinum Game Stars. Good job, guys. I'm stepping into fade. There is no time to waste. I've got that lightning inside me. This is how legends are made. Unchurned is the podcast where we go deep with the builders, the operators, the executives who are reimagining retention in the age of AI. Today we dropped our 187th episode featuring Fred Red Fred Reicheld, creator of the NPS. New episodes drop every Wednesday and I would personally love for you all to follow the show on wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you want the deeper stuff, the stories that don't fit in a podcast, we have a Substack. You can subscribe right over there. Now, on to today's guest. He spent a decade at Google and built search, maps, YouTube. He literally built the infrastructure that billions of people use every day. Then he co-founded Rubrik, a data privacy and security company that went public in 2024. And while Rubrik was blitz scaling, he looked around at his own enterprise and saw a problem. So, a quick show of hands here. Who's had that moment of work where you know the answer to a customer's question, you just don't know which tool to find that answer in? Anybody? So, our guest built Glean to fix that. And now only five years later, Glean has surpassed 200 million in ARR and Gainsight is proud to call them a product partner. Please help me in welcoming to the stage founder and CEO of Glean, Arvind Jain. Arvind, thank you so much for being here. We're so excited to have you on stage and have you on Unchurned. Um, I want to kick things off here. I want to rewind the clock all the way back. I want to know, I mean you're a technologist to the absolute highest degree. You're a distinguished engineer, former distinguished engineer of Google. Before that, before everything, tell us about when Arvind fell in love with computers.

Who was better at Pac-Man? You or your brother?

Yes. Good. Yes. Good. For me it was Commodore 64. Do you remember the old Commodore computer? That's right. And it was the Rampage game where I hear some of applause there. Right. You got like the beasts that are climbing and somehow they're consuming, they're eating the bricks on the buildings. I don't know how that worked, but I think our PC was 286. What's that? PC 286. Oh, okay. Yeah. Do you have a favorite video game now? Are you still a gamer?

You don't have quite the time on your hands these days.

Yeah. Okay. So, we flash forward to the from the 80s and now we're in 2003. And you remember where you were in 2003 where you just had joined this smallish company called Google. At the time Google was a 20 billion approximately market cap company. It's still substantial. Google's now 4.5 trillion. So that's a mere 225x of what they were when you joined. So you're still in the early days of Google. And like I'd mentioned, I mean, you built the infrastructure for so much of this. You were a distinguished engineer. You rose the ranks there. Um, and so I guess you know then you left Google. Um, you had accomplished so much there. You started Rubrik in 2014. Rubrik went public in 2024. You guys grew at a tremendous clip. And as you were what I would call or what Reed Hoffman would call blitz scaling at Rubrik. Um, you noticed something. You noticed a challenge. Tell us about that.

So here's a problem, there's no solution out there. Did you know that there was a willingness to pay, that you had a market for this at the time?