A year ago, I wouldn't have been comfortable talking openly about AI. Not because I didn't believe in it, but because I was in the middle of a very real internal argument with my own leadership about why we needed to move faster. 

My team was eager. They wanted in. But LastPass is a security company, which means the wild-west nature of AI adoption didn’t make everyone in the room feel totally at ease.

But here we are. And what's happened over the past year has genuinely changed the way I think about the future of customer success (CS).

So let me share what I've learned, what's worked, what's harder than it looks, and where I think this is all heading.

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The evolution of customer success

My career in customer success started back in the consulting days, when everything was on-premise and "driving value" meant throwing smart people at a project, spending millions, and then figuring out at the end whether it actually worked. That was CS 1.0, if you want to call it that.

Digital transformation changed everything. It gave us scale, automation, and better engagement models. That was CS 2.0. But we're now firmly in what I'd call CS 3.0: scaling customer success through AI.

The shift matters because the pressures on CS teams have never been more intense. If I asked a room full of CS leaders to raise their hands if they'd been asked to do more with less in the last 12 months, every single hand would go up. Budgets are tight. Growth trajectories are changing. The rule of 40 puts pressure on every function, and CS is not exempt.

If you haven't already unlocked the revenue element of customer success, it's even harder to justify what you need. Linear headcount growth tied to account growth is dying fast, and the model of adding one more person for every 30 new accounts has fundamentally changed.

The new revenue benchmark for customer success teams

There's a rule of thumb that's circulated for years in TSIA circles: 10% of revenue as the benchmark for CS investment. With AI in the picture, I've seen that number increasingly talked about as closer to 7%.

I know what you're thinking when you see that number: does that mean layoffs?

Absolutely not. This shouldn't be a cost-cutting exercise. What it means is that the growth of your revenue should outpace the growth of your headcount. That's the trick. You're running leaner by growing smarter, not by cutting people.

At LastPass, we're currently running at about 7.5% and working toward 6.5%. Nobody’s losing their job to get there.

That said, you do sometimes need to shift investments. If you don't already know what percentage of revenue your CS cost base represents, partner with your finance team and find out. Understand where you're over-indexed. The data will tell you a story.

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What "doing more with less" actually looks like in practice

We have over 100,000 business customers and millions of consumers. Throwing humans at every problem simply isn't an option.

In fact, when one of my team leaders came to me asking for more budget to better engage customers beyond the churn-risk segment, my answer was direct: before I consider increasing your budget, you need to prove to me you’ve fully exhausted what AI can do with your existing resources.

Here's what happened next:

  • They went back to Gainsight and pulled all of the calls to action their pooled resources had been executing
  • They ran an analysis on where time was actually being spent
  • They found that roughly 25% of their activity was low-value work that wasn't translating to real dollars

That was the "aha" moment I’d been hoping for. They reallocated those resources, and within a week, they'd recovered 50% more unintentional churn than before. We went from recovering around $33,000 in a week to $110,000, and that was just the beginning.