TECHtonic: Trends in Technology and Services

Hosted by Technology & Services Industry Association

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Episodes

140

Latest episode

Oct 2026

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EN-US

About the show

Join host Thomas Lah as he discusses shifts in the ever-changing technology industry with tech executives, researchers, and thought leaders who share their experience and provide their perspective and data on what companies should do to stay relevant, be profitable, and succeed.

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60 recent

July 26, 2024Episode 81507262440 min

TSIA Takes: Gainsight on How to Redefine Customer Success

On this episode of TECHtonic, Thomas asks hard questions about the shifting landscape of customer success with Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight. Inspired by a provocative chapter in Frank Slootman's "Amp It Up" that questions the necessity of customer success, Thomas and Nick explore the current debates and future directions of this critical business function. Nick shares his insights on why customer success is more vital than ever, especially as technology companies face increasing pressure to prove their business value. From the historical context of customer success a decade ago to today's innovative strategies, Nick discusses the integration of AI, the importance of verticalization, and the evolving roles within customer success organizations. Listeners will gain valuable perspectives on how to leverage AI for better customer experiences, early warning systems, and productivity enhancements. Nick and Thomas also tackle the challenge of balancing cost efficiency with maintaining the core capabilities of customer success teams and the necessity of adopting a beginner’s mind in the face of seismic industry shifts. Tune in to receive actionable advice and discover how you can stay ahead in the debate on the value of customer success and prepare your organization for the future.

July 12, 2024Episode 8007122446 min

TSIA Takes: Salesforce and the Customer Success + Support Services Experiment

Join us for the first episode of TSIA Takes, a limited TECHtonic podcast series. During this series, Thomas Lah dives deep into the pivotal question: What is the value of customer success? This pressing question has turned the customer success organization upside down as it navigates what the future of its business looks like. In this episode, Thomas is joined by Jim Roth, President of Customer Success at Salesforce, who discusses Saleforce’s pioneering approach to integrating customer success, support, and training into a seamless, unified experience. They explore the dynamic roles within Salesforce, emphasizing the importance of customer success managers (CSMs) as orchestrators who ensure comprehensive customer support. Jim shares how Salesforce's strategy of merging support, training, and success roles leads to a more streamlined and compelling customer experience. This allows Salesforce to leverage data to drive customer health, adoption, and education and create a unified customer success score that guides its strategies. They also discuss the financial models behind customer success, debating the merits of monetizing versus offering services as part of the overall customer experience. Jim provides a compelling argument for why tech companies should consider customer success a critical investment rather than a cost center. Whether you're a tech industry veteran or new, this episode offers insights to elevate your understanding of customer success. Take advantage of this first episode of our TSIA takes special podcast series, which challenges conventional wisdom and provides a fresh perspective on making your customer success business model successful.

November 3, 2023Episode 202363514 min

Bonus Episode AI Capabilities Integrations: Stay Ahead of the Curve

With a wealth of practical expertise between them, TSIA's Thomas Lah and George Humphrey, Distinguished VP & Managing Director of Offering and Delivery Research, delve into the transformative impact of AI on technology business models. They focus on three pivotal dimensions: Data-Driven Decision-Making Efficiency and Cost Reduction Enhanced Customer Experience Emphasizing the urgency for companies to effectively organize around AI, they discuss the risks of stagnation in the face of rapid technological advancements. They stress the need for proactive strategies and highlight the potential dangers of irrelevance and diminished competitiveness for companies that fail to strategically embrace AI-driven transformations. Take the first step on the Enterprise AI in Technology and Service Operations Research Journey by completing the TSIA Quick Poll: Organizing for AI Success , enabling leaders to remain at the forefront of how AI is reshaping the technology industry. Gain valuable insights, stay informed, and be part of the transformative conversation that is shaping the landscape of technology businesses worldwide.

October 16, 2026Episode 13742 min

137. What Seat Are You Paying For?

What does it take to turn AI from an exciting innovation into a business model that actually delivers value? On this episode of TECHtonic, Thomas Lah walks through TSIA’s AI pricing ladder with Alon Talmor, founder and CEO of Mosaic AI, to unpack how companies can move beyond traditional seat-based pricing and start monetizing the work AI gets done. After selling his first startup to Salesforce and earning a PhD in natural language processing, Alon saw an opportunity to use AI to fundamentally transform technical support and how engineers tackle complex challenges. Alon shares how Mosaic AI takes a different approach to AI adoption, starting with an in-depth look at how support engineers work to identify the highest-impact automation opportunities. Thomas then connects this approach to a bigger question facing technology companies: How do you price AI based on the value it creates? Together, they discuss why understanding the work, defining success with customers, and measuring the right productivity metrics are critical to building an AI business model that works. But pricing is only part of the equation. They also tackle what it takes to drive adoption, bring experienced engineers along on the AI journey, and rethink the economics of software in a world where AI does more of the work. From outcome-based pricing to the future of technical support, this conversation challenges some long-standing assumptions about how technology companies sell and deliver value. The big takeaway? If AI is changing how work gets done, it’s time to rethink how you charge for it.

October 2, 2026Episode 13639 min

136. Proving the Promise Through Customer Value Management

Technology providers have mastered the art of selling value, but too often struggle to prove it after the deal is signed. In this episode of TSIA’s TECHtonic, Thomas Lah sits down with Steve Zimba, founder of Nulia, and Sue Nabeth Moore, founder of Success Chain, to explore how their teams have come together to build Tivium, a platform designed to bridge the gap between technology adoption and measurable business outcomes. Through their work on value realization, they reveal why product usage alone isn't enough, how activity and performance measurements can connect everyday workflows to business results, and why understanding both realized and perceived value is critical to customer retention and growth. Steve and Sue share how Tivium helps providers track progress, identify customers who may be falling short of expected results, and use those insights to strengthen retention and drive expansion. As AI raises customer expectations for tangible returns on technology investments, the ability to consistently deliver on value promises is becoming a business imperative. The episode challenges providers to rethink the role of customer success, embrace monetizable value-added services, and close the loop between what they build, what they sell, and the outcomes customers actually achieve.

September 18, 2026Episode 13538 min

135. AI on Autopilot: Where Humans Still Belong in the Cockpit

AI is creating a new question for managed services: what happens when the work itself becomes software-driven? On this episode of TSIA’s TECHtonic, Thomas Lah talks with Scott McIsaac, CEO of Helios Core, about the shift from labor-driven IT support to AI-driven operations. Scott brings two decades of managed services experience to the conversation, including leadership roles at Secure-24 and NTT, and shares how customer demand led to the creation of Mira Resolve, an AI-powered platform he describes as an autopilot for IT. The conversation looks at what happens when AI starts doing the work traditionally handled by IT support teams, including how agents can operate across an environment while bringing humans in for the moments that matter. Thomas and Scott also dig into the knowledge-management problem underneath AI adoption, the challenges of pricing AI-driven work, and why buying AI technology alone does not create efficiency. The bigger question is how services organizations adapt their technology, knowledge, and business models when labor is no longer the primary unit of work.

September 4, 2026Episode 13440 min

134. Rewriting the Rules of SaaS Value

AI is forcing technology companies to rethink what customers are actually paying for, and how they prove the value they deliver. On this episode of TSIA’s TECHtonic, Thomas Lah sits down with Michael Speranza, CEO of Kantata, to explore how AI is reshaping the economics of SaaS, professional services, and enterprise technology. As software becomes easier to build and AI accelerates automation, the code itself is becoming less defensible. The real value is shifting toward industry expertise, data, context, and the ability to turn insights into measurable business outcomes. Thomas and Michael unpack why simple AI automation is quickly becoming table stakes, while predictive and agentic capabilities are opening the door to a new level of value creation. They also examine the growing pressure to move beyond seat-based and time-and-materials pricing toward consumption- and outcome-based models—and why both technology providers and their customers are still figuring out what that transition should look like. The conversation also explores the rise of the hybrid workforce, the changing role of technology services, the importance of reducing time to value, and why the future of enterprise software may not be a choice between standardization and customization, but a new model that combines the two. For technology and services leaders navigating AI, the message is clear: the question is no longer simply what your technology can do. It’s what becomes possible for your customer because of it, and whether you can prove it.

August 21, 2026Episode 13333 min

133. Beyond the Blunt Instrument: Why “It Hallucinated” Isn't an Answer

What happens when an AI agent fails, and how can enterprises prove they saw it coming? On this episode of TSIA’s TECHtonic, Thomas Lah takes on one of the most important questions facing organizations moving AI from experimentation into the enterprise: How do you prove that AI is actually delivering the outcomes you promised? Drawing on TSIA’s Five Proofs of Outcome-Based Revenue, Thomas and guest Sekhar Sarukkai unpack why proof of performance and telemetry are becoming essential to proving business value. Sarukkai, a serial entrepreneur who previously founded Skyhigh Networks and Securent, now leads Chatsee.ai, which recently raised $6.5 million to build what he calls a failure intelligence layer for AI agents. The conversation takes a revealing look at what really goes wrong when AI agents enter the real world. After analyzing 10,000 enterprise agent failures, Chatsee identified 157 distinct failure categories, and found that hallucinations account for less than 10% of actual failures. Instead, enterprises are facing bigger and often invisible challenges around resolution, escalation, silent execution, and the growing gap between pre-deployment controls and runtime governance. Thomas and Sekhar also unpack the hidden economics of AI failure, including how a seemingly minor error can quietly spread through downstream systems for weeks. Sekhar introduces a framework for measuring direct loss, propagation, detection delay, and reversibility, while making the case for shared accountability across enterprises, AI platforms, and integrators. If your organization is serious about moving AI agents into production, and proving the value they deliver, this is a conversation you’ll want to hear.

August 7, 2026Episode 13248 min

132. Rerouting Around the Accident to Build a New Revenue Model

Thomas Lah opens the episode by describing TSIA's model-driven revenue engine framework: using AI to monitor every customer touchpoint in real time instead of running revenue off CRM fields and pipeline reviews. His guest, Stephen Messer, has spent three decades living that shift firsthand. Messer co-founded LinkShare in the 1990s, and later co-founded Collective[i], the AI sales intelligence network the Wall Street Journal has compared to Waze for sales. Messer argues that most AI investment in sales, from chatbot-assisted CRM entry to faster email drafting, is being layered onto a system that was never built around the buyer. He explains how Collective[i] models buying committees, introduces sequencing, and maps the hidden relationships driving each deal. The conversation also challenges one of sales' longest-standing practices: forecasting. Messer argues that traditional forecast calls are little more than weekly guesswork that consumes valuable selling time without improving accuracy. In its place, he outlines an AI-first approach that provides a dynamic, daily view of deal health, highlighting what's changed, why it changed, and where sales teams should focus next. Like a navigation app that constantly recalculates the fastest route, AI helps revenue leaders adapt to changing buyer behavior as it happens.

May 29, 2026Episode 13143 min

127. Your Customers Have Been Telling a Story. AI Can Finally Read It.

Your CRM knows what happened. It doesn’t know why—or what’s about to happen next. That gap is costing revenue teams millions in preventable churn, missed expansion, and deals that slip away long before anyone saw it coming. In this episode of TECHtonic, TSIA Executive Director Thomas Lah sits down with Alok Shukla, CEO and co-founder of Funnel Story, to explore a new category of technology: the AI-powered revenue intelligence layer. Unlike traditional CRM dashboards that report on structured activity data in a single point in time, Funnel Story’s patented composite model combines structured data (usage, revenue, activity), unstructured conversational data (calls, emails, notes), and third-party market signals—then reverse-engineers your full historical timeline to train itself from day one. Median deployment time: less than a day. Alok introduces the concept of “needle movers”—AI-detected early warning patterns that surface months before churn or expansion become visible to any human. He shares a compelling real-world example where signals from three different organizational levels (an executive conversation, a support ticket, and a CSM interaction) were silently pointing to competitive risk—patterns that only emerged because of historical churn analysis. Without the intelligence layer connecting those dots, the account would have been marked “healthy” right up until it churned. Drawing on his 20+ years in cybersecurity (McAfee, Intel Security, Imperva), Alok makes a powerful analogy: the Security Operations Center went from 80% people / 20% tech to nearly the inverse over 20 years—and that transformation is now coming for revenue and CS organizations. The leaders who will thrive are those who start thinking now about what it means to manage a fleet of agents rather than a team of reps.

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