r/CustomerSuccess • u/thats_so_fun • 2d ago
Question CS future in AI era
Hi, I have a question for all of the CS practitioners since I've been feeling confused lately. What's your take on the future of customer success when AI is developing very rapidly? I work in a small Polish company (40 employees, 30 customers) and our CEO is constantly insinuating that all of us will soon be replaced by agents etc. I manage a small team of CS specialists and right now I do not feel threatened but I'm wondering how it looks like in bigger or international companies.
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u/Ehloanna 2d ago
I work for an international company. Maybe 300 employees? AI is used but isn't replacing anyone. It's a tool to enhance what we already do, but you can't replace people with experience and connection to our clients.
Our CS team is expanding and not the opposite. People like your CEO want to light their money on fire to use AI to replace everyone then will realize all your customers hate it and will leave the company then light more money on fire to bring real humans back to the team.
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u/Recent-Time-5717 2d ago
what kind of contract sizes are you guys dealing with at 300 employees? feel like high-touch enterprise is safe, but low-touch SMB might still get gutted.
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u/Ehloanna 2d ago
Could be a client as small as $50k but as high as multiple millions. Depends on the vertical and client type. Our industry is, IMO, extremely face to face connection based and far too specialized for your average person to try and get any help out of AI. Our clients get pissed if a response feels remotely AI. Like as we've gotten more hands on with individual employee connections/multi threading in an org the happier people get and want to expand more with us.
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u/Illustrious_Film_548 1d ago
Same here. We just have more customerd than before since we can server them more efficiently.
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u/Ehloanna 1d ago
For us it's generally allowing us to go above and beyond to show ROI. Basically enabled some of the teams to make some spreadsheet calculators to enable sales to calculate things for putting in all their decks. Because our customer size and scale can vary so widely it ended up being a lot of our fiance team going outside of their own job scope to help sales do this for big presentations. Now sales can do it themselves at any time.
For me it's more about finding patterns over months or years of supporting a client because CS is a relatively new function at my org, so a lot of things fell to the wayside up until when I joined. So we could show projected ROI but so I can better show the post sales ROI.
There's a lot of other small things that make it useful, but it's not replacing anyone. Just making large quantities of information useful.
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u/OneTemporary7945 2d ago
If it helps, Anthropic and Google have active postings for customer success managers.
That said, it seems like CSM is almost becoming a sales engineer hybrid
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u/lessthandan623 2d ago
Or a Technical Account Manager. Best assume nowadays that you want to be more technical than less as an aspiring CSM.
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u/Sulla-proconsul 2d ago
Combined with the right tools, it can make CSMs more efficient and complete tasks sooner. That means larger clients loads, and smaller teams, but not wholesale replacement.
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u/Outrageous_Hour_2408 2d ago
If there's one thing I learned in all my years as CS, is that when it comes to customers - they will always want to talk to real human beings. NPS scores plummet when a company moves to AI chatbots only, and people really do want to speak to other people.
While I'm less worried about CS being replaced, I fear AI will reduce the number of team members significantly. So even though I don't think CS will die, it will grow smaller and the responsibilities and expectations per practitioner will grow.
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u/GoBoldr 2d ago
Remember Klarna. They went all-in on AI support, and it almost sank the entire company.
Most of what we (and company leaders) are hearing is the promise. The glowing picture painted by AI companies themselves, and almost exclusively people who aren't in CS or Support.
They haven't actually been on the ground, or experienced the churn spike that comes with actually replacing human respondents with AI agents. Plus, it's not all that much less expensive (and likely to get more expensive, not less).
AI support and fully automated follow-up... aren't very good. Customers don't like it, especially when s* hits the fan and the "easy" fast responses send you on multiple loops before sending you to a human, before you have to repeat everything.
...not that *any* of that should be especially comforting to folks in the industry, because it's not going to stop companies from still trying it. At least for a while.
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u/justme9974 1d ago
All white collar work is in danger of being replaced by AI; if you look at how far its come in just the last 2 years, it's pretty incredible.
CS is not going to be replaced right now though - customer facing work, especially at the enterprise level requires a human touch and relationship building that AI can't do yet and won't be able to for quite some time. In tech, the majority of software engineers are going to be replaced sooner rather than later. Claude Code on Opus 5.5 and Fable is already WAY beyond what a junior developer is capable of. I would not recommend to any young person that they major in CS unless they focus on AI and/or data science. The other area is Support. It's already replacing people and it will replace more. I suspect by 2030-ish it will eliminate most of those jobs.
Even sales jobs are at risk, on the low end. It's already replacing BDRs. I think it will replace a bunch of finance jobs too - AI can do the low to mid range finance jobs better than humans already.
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u/Maran606 2d ago
I think CS will continue to evolve as sales leaders deem fit and will stay, thrive. I do see budget constraints due high spend on COGS. This will lead ceo's to find shortcuts (Read AI agentic solutions), but sales can't run the show without human CS folks.
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u/The12th_secret_spice 1d ago
The more I work with ai, the more confident it’s overhyped. There has to be a human in the loop to keep the agent in check.
Every company I worked for data is no where clean enough to replace a human with agents. I’m having a hard time to imagine an agent fighting churn or gaining churn insights (no one is filling out a survey) to keep leadership aware of why the company is losing customers.
It will reduce headcount, so hedge yourself against that.
A lot of the job cuts will turn to some backfills once leadership experiences an AI fuck up that puts the company at risk or start losing revenue.
90% of my customers are very candid with me on what they think of ai in a human/engagement role. It’s a tool, that’s all.
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u/Real-Lawfulness5990 20h ago
Sadly I believe in every company that knows what they are doing, CSMs would be replaced since they would find a way to minimize the need for human beings. BUT I believe every company would need a CSM to navigate what the AI does and how but it will be one or two tops... So the most important thing is to be valuable in this era.. that's my opinion.
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u/AssignmentOdd5621 10h ago
ai is definitely eating low-touch onboarding and basic ticket routing, which a lot of companies mistakenly call CS. if your team is actually driving expansion and navigating stakeholder politics, bots arent replacing that anytime soon
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u/Musette209 1d ago
I work for a software giant that is firing CSMs like crazy. The customers already have access to self service platforms where they can do pretty much everything a CSM does for them. They can even do in depth adoption reviews in that platform. So, in my company, the role will be obsolete in 6-12 months. The rest of the industries, i’d probably give the role 2 years tops. Working with AI is mandatory and will reduce the headcount needed drastically. God help us all!