“Imagine an intellect that knows, at a specific moment, all the forces that set nature in motion and the positions of all items of which nature is composed. For such an intellect, nothing would be uncertain; the future and the past would be present to its eyes.” ~ Pierre-Simon Laplace This is the fear. That AI will become sufficiently capable, and eventually complete. More data. Better models. Tighter predictions. Finally, AI begins to approximate the demon. Laplace’s demon

When I think about the leaders and colleagues who shaped my early career, a smile forms across my face. I look back on those years quite fondly. Life felt simpler then, when we didn’t all take ourselves so seriously. But I digress, the people who had the most impact weren't part of a formal mentorship program. They weren’t delivering carefully packaged corporate wisdom or walking me through a playbook. Instead, they gave me something far more valuable. They gave me room to gr

Customer Success is full of leaders without titles. They are the practitioners customers turn to when things matter, the ones internal teams consult when stakes rise, and the ones who hold context others do not yet see. They rarely sit at the top of the org chart, yet they often sit at the center of the relationship. And still, many hesitate to fully claim that position. This is largely because Customer Success has always carried unusual contradictions: responsibility without

The Customer Who Loved the Product but Didn’t Trust the Vendor Customers can value a product deeply and still distrust the vendor behind it. This paradox sits at the center of many stalled enterprise relationships. It reflects how customers actually experience vendors: not as individual business units, but as a single cumulative relationship. Customers don’t experience Product separately from Support. They don’t distinguish Cloud reliability from Engineering decisions. And th

As AI accelerates work, the risk isn’t that Customer Success becomes automated — it’s that it becomes mechanical. CSI, approached as a discipline, requires a way to slow thinking, interpret signals, and protect judgment. SPIN is the cognitive loop that operationalizes that discipline. We’re taught to believe that every human life carries inherent worth. That potential is assumed, waiting patiently to be expressed. Experience tells a different story. Most people move through t

AI is rapidly expanding what Customer Success teams can see and automate. The deeper shift now emerging is cognitive: how practitioners interpret signals, question assumptions, and act under uncertainty. This transition toward Customer Success Intelligence (CSI) as a discipline is explored in SPIN in Motion: A Handbook for Modern Customer Success Intelligence . The first wave of AI in Customer Success promised efficiency. The next wave demands cognition from us. This is the l

AI is not eliminating Customer Success. It is changing how the discipline thinks, interprets, and acts. This shift — from dashboard management toward judgment-amplified practice — is central to SPIN in Motion: A Handbook for Modern Customer Success Intelligence . In the era of AI transformation, a recurring concern is that AI will replace humans. It’s a legitimate fear: whether machines will ultimately outperform people in both speed and output. I remember a time when paid pa

Customer Success has never been static. It has evolved alongside shifts in how software is built, sold, and experienced. As the discipline enters an AI-enabled era, that evolution is accelerating again — a central theme explored in SPIN in Motion: A Handbook for Modern Customer Success Intelligence . A group of businesspeople sit at The Shore Club in Ottawa, Ontario, unwinding and talking shop: how to open doors, win, and retain business. A waitress, recently stripped of her