Picture it: New York City, September 2025 — NYC Customer Success Week.

A room of over 700 customer success (CS) practitioners gathered around a shared belief: CS isn’t fading into irrelevance — it’s stepping into its prime. The energy was palpable, and the message throughout the day was clear: AI isn’t here to replace CS teams — it’s here to elevate them. As Liz Starling, head of CS at Anthropic, put it, “Customer success isn’t becoming obsolete; it’s becoming more essential.”

CS is doing more than simply evolving; it’s undergoing a full identity shift. With a new charter, the function finally moves beyond the old mandate of “make customers happy” and takes on real revenue responsibility. That means driving measurable outcomes for customers and proving strategic value.

The conversations at the event echoed this sentiment through four key themes:

  • AI agents are the new CS teammates. The rise of AI is reshaping how CS teams operate. AI agents don’t just surface insights — they help execute workflows. They summarize meetings, monitor adoption, and flag risk signals, all in real time. This frees up customer success managers (CSMs) to focus on supporting customers with strategic guidance instead of tactical firefighting.
  • Value is the new currency. Kaveh Rostampor, CEO of Planhat, captured the shift perfectly in his opening keynote: “80% of leaders believe companies should sell outcomes, not products.” That isn’t just a mindset change; it’s a business model transformation. CS is now the steward of value realization. Whether it’s onboarding, adoption, or expansion, every touchpoint must connect back to measurable outcomes.
  • Outcomes win out over feel-good metrics. CS leaders can no longer rely on anecdotal evidence or Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS). If you can’t tie your team’s work to what the CEO and CFO care about — revenue and profitability — your function is at risk. Leaders must speak the language of revenue and show how CS contributes to retention, growth, and margin.
  • Consumption models raise the stakes. As more companies shift to consumption-based models, the stakes for CS increase. Onboarding becomes even more critical, as it’s a trigger for revenue recognition — it marks the moment when customers begin deriving value and generating usage data that can be billed. AI agents accelerate this by guiding users through digital touchpoints, while CSMs step in for those high-impact moments to drive outcomes, acting more like “forward-deployed engineers” — a concept pioneered by software company Palantir. The result is scalable personalization and faster time to value.

NYC Customer Success Week wasn’t just a showcase of AI-powered innovation — it reflected the urgency and opportunity facing CS leaders today. CS is gaining momentum. With AI as a strategic partner and a renewed charter guiding the way, CS is finally stepping into the role it was always destined to play: a driver of outcomes, growth, and strategic impact.