Last week I ran at an AI showcase - think we had like 550 people sign up, and over 150 people attended live.

Not a vendor demo. Not a "here's what's coming" keynote.

Real CS leaders.
Real tools.
Real things they built themselves — or on behalf of their teams.

And I'll be honest: it recalibrated my sense of where we are.

(and reignited my passion for community - might want to peek at the bottom of this email)

Here’s a couple of things people built

A VP of CS built a feature request intelligence layer.

Her team takes hundreds of customer calls. Feature requests were scattered across notes, Slack, Salesforce — nowhere and everywhere at once.

So she built an application using Claude Code.

It listens through call transcripts, identifies every feature request, and surfaces them in a single view — with attributable ARR attached to each request, exact customer quotes, links back to the source calls, and the ability to draft outreach directly to the customers who asked for that specific thing.

Think about what that changes for your product relationship.

No more "customers want X" in a vacuum. Now it's: these 14 customers, representing $2.1M ARR, said this exact thing, and here's a draft to let them know we heard them.

A CS leader wired AI directly into their CSM workflow.

Their CSMs were drowning in the space between calls and Salesforce.

Call ends. Now what? Log notes. Figure out next steps. Draft the follow-up email. Update the account. It was all manual, all friction, all time not spent with customers.

They built a workflow — inside their existing CS platform — with embedded AI steps.

It pulls the transcript. Extracts specific next actions. Logs them as tasks on the account record, with call context and due dates. Then automatically drafts the customer follow-up email.

The CSM still sends it. Still owns the relationship. But the gap between "great call" and "account is updated, and customer has a follow-up" went from an hour to a few minutes.

A CS leader built a product marketing skill for the whole team.

Upload a URL. Drop in a document. Point it at any customer-facing material.

The tool runs through a specific enablement checklist — gaps in messaging, missing proof points, positioning clarity — and outputs a branded asset you can actually hand to a customer.

This one matters because it's not just about efficiency. It's about consistency. Every CSM, every segment, every region — working from the same quality bar.

No more "great deck, but only Sarah knows how to build it."

A Head of CS put customer reference management on rails.

Sales reps asking CS for references is one of those perennial friction points.

"Who do we have in this vertical?" "Can I use this customer for a call?" "Do they have the right story?"

They built an internal application — again with Claude Code — that lets reps search for references using specific criteria, pulling context from both the CRM and CS tooling to surface the right customers, with the right story, at the right moment.

The CS team stops being a bottleneck. Sales gets better references. And no customer gets over-indexed because no one was tracking the asks.

None of these were built by engineering teams.

They were built by CS leaders — people who deeply understand the problem, had access to the right tools, and decided to build instead of wait.

That's the shift. The moat is no longer "who has the best vendor." It's who understands their workflow well enough to build on top of it.

We've been talking about this on the podcast for months. EP010 was literally titled "You Can't AI Your Way Out of Bad Data." EP015 was "Why CS Teams Are Building Their Own Stack." What I saw last week was those conversations made real.

We're launching something later this week.

Uncommon by ChiefCustomerOfficer.io is our paid community — and we're building the entire experience ourselves.

It’s going to be different than anything you’ve seen before.

Not a Slack group. Not a course platform. A custom-built environment designed specifically for senior CS leaders who want to think, build, and lead differently.

The name is intentional.

The CS leaders doing the most interesting work right now are the ones willing to depart from the conventional playbook. They're building tools instead of buying them. Rethinking the CSM role instead of defending it. Measuring things that matter instead of things that are easy.

That's who this is for.

More details dropping this week. If you want to be among the first in, sign up here.