AI for CS Leaders Spotlight: Beth Huckerby’s Take: AI Won’t Replace CS. It Creates Space to Think.

Hey everybody, Angeline here. This episode is part of our AI for CS Leaders Spotlight where we share real stories from the participants of my AI for CS Leaders Executive Bootcamp. We just wrapped the first cohort in February and I’m excited because these conversations are going to give you a behind the scenes look at what participants actually built, what shifted for them and what they’re taking back into their roles. So my guest today is Beth Huckabee, a seasoned customer success leader. We’re going to talk about why she joined, what stood out most, the small wins that change how she thinks about AI and what she’s implying next. Beth, welcome and thanks for taking the time to join me today. Thanks, Angeline. Happy to be here. To kick things off, can you give us a quick intro? Like what’s your role today? What does your CS org look like? Sure, sure, sounds good. Well, I am a customer success leader and I’ve worked in the industry for over 15 years, so quite a while.

And across quite a few different industries as well across IT, telecoms and health and wellbeing. I’m currently now in the health and wellbeing space. I’m working as a CSM and quite a large, we’re an evolving organization right now, so a large customer success and sales operation. Yeah, in the health sector. Okay, let’s talk about what made you join the AI for CS Leaders Executive Bootcamp in the first place. Absolutely. Well, really, one of the core things for me about being a customer success professional is building strong relationships that center and trust. And to do this well, I really make it a priority to continuously educate myself with tools and frameworks that improve my ability to focus in three areas actually. Having meaningful conversations, identifying value opportunities and simplifying complex business problems. So really, I’m always looking for a course that kind of knocks off those three things.

And when I read the outline of your course, the program supported all three of these things. So really, that’s why I joined it. And I can go into what it provided on that. It really did provide that frame and practical examples to draw on to help me tell that clear story, you know, which earned buy in. And it showed me how to break down and solve business problems and how to demonstrate impact. And really importantly, while keeping our eyes on not creating unnecessary risks or make work projects. I really appreciated how your program moved us through this this these kind of evaluations. I love that. Thank you so much for all the kind words. I love that you really took a lot or took away a lot from the sessions that we’ve had. What I actually love about this cohort was everybody was there because they want to learn it was a lot of a lot of you guys were there because you wanted to continuously develop an AI.

We all know is that one big buzzword in customer success for the past year, where, you know, there’s not a lot of playbooks yet. And yet everybody is expected to do it. So I think I love the commitment to just continuous learning and growth across the participants. I’m curious, actually, was there anything particular that was happening in your world that made that made AI feel like it’s very important now? Yes. Well, for one thing, you know, just leaning into what you just said, AI, everybody’s talking about AI, you know, not sort of thing. And and even when I was looking at the program, I was thinking, how do you even get started? So, A, that. But personally, like my personal goals and values really come down to lifting others up. And I try to create a space. And this is where the AI comes in. I always like to when I’m working with people create a space for them to be practice, to practice and be creative and experiment.

And because when we have that space, it really becomes easy to build on each other’s ideas and expertise and experience. So having a simple, clear plan helps really guide that thinking. It supports ideation, design thinking and process first, which really gives us a place to gather, review and measure teams great ideas and do that before we even think about bringing AI into the mix. And your program really helped me set up that foundation. I genuinely believe a little bit of structure, maybe a lot of structure, not only boosts that engagement, the engagement that that really needs to be involved when it comes to AI, but it naturally shifts our behaviors in that right direction and helps our team see exactly where. And this is a piece that’s really important to me, and I believe should be in a business. It helps the team see exactly where their contribution, even if it’s a small AI prompt.

If it’s a small use of AI that they use, or if we built an automation across the organization, it helps people see exactly where their contributions led to great business outcomes. I love how you’re encouraging, experimenting within your team, right? Especially with AI, really, the goal is just to get started. It could be a one small thing, like you mentioned, a small prompt, but that’s just really where it starts. Now, let’s deep dive a little bit into your experience and the program. But before we jump in, I’d like to give a quick context for the listeners and how the program works, right? So as you remember, Beth, each Monday, I dropped a new module on the learning portal. Typically, it’s about an hour in length, and it’s designed to walk you through some of my frameworks. There is an accompanying exercise to complete so that you’re not just consuming content, you’re really building something and applying what you’ve learned in the modules.

And every Thursday, we meet via the live leadership application call where all the participants, it’s an open working session where participants can bring their questions, maybe get coached through blockers and just discuss as a group what you are going through in your own organization. How did that format work for you? What did you like about it? Was that very effective for you as a learner? Yeah, actually, it was really good. I found it was like the course was excellent. It was a comprehensive framework and answered a lot of the questions I had, which, again, was mostly around how do I even get started organizing AI? I quickly realized all of the bits and pieces that were involved, and it helped walk me through in a concise way how to do that, rather than having just this big, big idea and all of these things flying at me. It was like, okay, start from the start and concisely just walk through.

And the other unexpected thing was you really gave us like the nuances, like things that might happen in day to day life that we might expect, you know, you just really helped us through those things. And then also examples, like real life examples. I love that. Was there anything that stood out for you specifically across the program? Could be maybe a lesson, a framework, an exercise, one aha moment that you’ve had during our sessions? Well, there were so many. I liked the container piece. I think that’s just really where my head is at right now, like, so that having a concise plan, having a strategy to evaluate the capability. So it was like that access across six levers, like look at your strategy, look at your data, look at your technology, talent, operating models, and then of course, adoption and scaling. That it doesn’t have to happen all at once, like you can start from the beginning, but have a concise plan to the end, you know, when you’re ready.

So those were kind of some of the things that I took away. Also, actually, even the plain fact that AI, I really wanted to answer the question, AI doesn’t replace human work. And especially in customer success, like that’s a question that comes up a lot. Like, I’m afraid of that. I don’t want it to replace my job, that sort of thing. And it just reinforced that bit, that rather than replacing human work, it creates that space for deeper critical thinking and review. And that was something that’s really important to me. And I think, like, just running through the course, it reiterated that, it highlighted that, it gave me the confidence to understand that is, in fact, a true statement. And then even working with our cohort, with our colleagues, they felt the same way. So that was a big aha moment for me. I love that. I love that. I think it’s worth mentioning, right, that inherent fear when there’s something new that comes, especially technology, it’s never really going to replace the human work, like the strategic work that’s expected from CSMs.

Maybe somewhere down the road, I don’t know, hundreds of years from now, I don’t know how things will look like, but definitely not in the near future. I was wondering as well, what were you, how do you think about AI? And maybe that’s maybe one of the things that shifted for you, right? What were you thinking about AI and customer success before? And it was shifted after going through the program. This may sound really simple, but I thought that our role isn’t to solve AI technically, that we’re strategic thinkers, we’re big picture thinkers. We have experts on our team that can do that. And really, it’s that we have our hands on day to day business, and we’re the ones that can really form what we apply AI to. It’s our role as CS leaders who come to the table with the ideas from a consumer success perspective. Absolutely. I think that’s the new responsibility that we have now as customer success leaders, right?

And honestly, that’s what I wanted to resolve in creating the program. We know, or maybe we don’t know, especially because you just know that there’s this new technology, maybe because we’re not generally or inherently very technically inclined as customer success leaders. We’re people oriented, right? We’re about relationships and customers and so on. But then there’s this new technology that now we have to navigate around. There is a tendency for us to obviously give it to the experts, which we also alluded to. It’s fine. We don’t have to figure this out all by ourselves. However, the strategy where it applies, this is where your leadership comes into play. Now, is there anything that you’ve built so far? I know we’ve had a lot of exercises. And I remember us going through some examples of how you’re thinking through your workflows and processes and applying AI in it. Is there anything that you’ve built right now or feel confident doing because of the program?

Yeah, well, it is that framework. So that’s where I started. I started with the framework and taking some like a problem that we are currently looking on and something that we’re hoping to improve. And I started just running it through your framework. So that’s what I’m working on right now. And I’m excited to bring it back to the team, like to roll it out and just start creating that space for us to start that idea post ideation process. I love that. Yes, I believe there’s a lot of in my program, a lot of the frameworks around systems design thinking and how we said that really before you even think about AI, let’s talk about your current processes and workflows and make it AI ready. There’s a lot of work that needs to happen before you even embed the technology. And before you even think about all of these tools available, let’s just start with problem or challenge we’re trying to solve, right?

And then do we have the right processes in place before we inject all of these technology into play? All right. Who is, I guess this is more for future participants who may be interested in the program. Who do you think is this program a fit for and why and what would you tell someone who might be on the fence about joining? That’s such a great question. Honestly, there’s so much into the in the program that could really help support anyone, but it’s really that person that’s a big picture thinker. You know, the program is for that running through all levels of maturity of AI. So if you’re interested in that end to end where it’s not just the simple starting spot, it’s how can we evolve this? How can we evolve it over time? How do we make the decision to go or no go to start something or not start something? But it doesn’t just stop there. It allows that space, that place for it to sit until maybe all of the other levers are in place and ready.

So you can make those decisions on whether to move it to the next stage of AI maturity or not. So it’s for someone that’s looking to structure that in a concise way and to have that ability to strategically think about what are the things we’re doing right now. Where can we apply AI? Where does it need to happen today and where does it need to happen into the future? All right. Well, Beth, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate you sharing your experience and being willing to make it real for our listeners, right? I know it takes effort to reflect on what you learned and talk about it out loud and you did it in such a generous way. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Now, for anyone listening, if this episode sparked ideas for you, here’s your next step. Get on the VIP wait list for the next round of AI for CS Leaders Executive Bootcamp. I’m planning to open the program again in July and the wait list is where you’ll get first access when doors open.

I’ll drop the link in the show notes and if you want more episodes like this, follow the podcast so you don’t miss the next spotlight conversation. See you in the next one.