Ten Questions Shaping the Next Customer Organization

# Executive Leadership

# AI Adoption

# Customer Value

Reflections from Gartner CSS on people, accountability, and customer value.

Omid Razavi

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AI is giving customer leaders more options and harder decisions about people, accountability, and customer value.

Back from the Gartner for Customer Service & Support Conference 2026 in Denver. Thank you to Gartner for organizing it at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center. The mountain views and welcoming Grand Lodge gave it a distinctly Colorado feel, with comfortable places to continue conversations between sessions.

Gartner CSS 2026 in Denver and conversations with the SuccessLab community. Source: Omid Razavi.

I enjoyed reconnecting with colleagues and meeting new CSS leaders in 1:1 conversations, peer meetups, roundtables, and at the reception. The keynotes were engaging and gave us plenty to discuss afterward.

Ten favorite topics that make Gartner CSS worth returning to:

Unifying support, success, and services around customer outcomes

Serving customers who bring their own AI agents

Evaluating conversational AI as chatbots evolve into agents

Making the financial case for customer value

Redesigning the customer organization for AI

Measuring customer value beyond productivity

Scaling growth and retention across the long tail

Moving agentic AI into everyday operations

Deciding what AI can do and who stays accountable

Building the workforce for what comes after Tier 1 automation

I appreciated the depth of Gartner’s research and the perspectives its analysts brought to the discussions. At this pace of change, survey findings can lag behind what teams are experiencing, and predictions need frequent revisiting. I’m putting more weight on hearing what leaders and teams are doing now, what’s working, what hasn’t worked, and what they’re adjusting in practice.

I also valued the candid conversations with CSS leaders from AppFolio, Aptean, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, Hitachi Vantara, HP, Intel, Klaviyo, NetApp, Nutanix, Qlik, Red Hat, Rubrik, SAP, Sophos, T-Mobile, Verint, Vertex, and many others.

We also organized a SuccessLab dinner with CSS leaders across software, cybersecurity, and technology infrastructure. Thank you to Terence Chesire and his team at ServiceNow for hosting us. Great company and an honest exchange of experiences.