Ashley Stallings at Salsify made a call most CS leaders won't: when their Gainsight renewal came up, they didn't shop for a replacement. They built one.

In two months, her team migrated off Gainsight and into an internal platform called VIP (Value Intelligence Platform), built on Replit. It runs a Salsify-built LLM that pulls product usage, industry data, case studies, and pitch context into a single account view for every CSM.
This is what a well-governed, engineering-backed AI build actually looks like in production -- including the parts that didn't go smoothly.

Topics covered:

Why Salsify replaced Gainsight in two months and what forced the decision
How VIP was built on Replit and what it actually does for CSMs
The internal governance model: how AI projects get submitted, reviewed, and prioritized
Build vs. buy: the real argument CSP vendors make and why it's a false choice
What "handing it to a qualified team" actually means -- CICD, VPNs, data access controls
Health score problems: why they rebuilt from scratch and moved to segment and industry-specific scoring
Variance data as the new leading indicator -- top movers, not static red/yellow/green
The CSM cockpit vision: telling reps where to focus instead of letting them default to whoever's loudest
What they lost during the migration and how they're getting it back
The hackathon that produced a cohort-based outreach tool -- built by CSMs, not engineers

customer success, AI customer success, Gainsight alternative, build vs buy, CSP replacement, Salsify, post-sales AI, customer success platform, CS operations, AI in SaaS, HubSpot customer success, health score, CSM tools, post-sales operations, Infinite Renewals

Jeff Kushmerek is the founder of Infinite Renewals and the author of Retention Starts in Implementation.

🎙️ AI Customer Success Brief is sponsored by Infinite Renewals.
📩 Find Jeff on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffkushmerek
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