Sales and Marketing Innovators

Customer retention is under siege. Expectations have exploded, switching costs have evaporated, and AI has permanently rewritten the rules of engagement. Your customers now have more power, more information, and more alternatives than ever, often before your CSM even knows there is a problem. In this environment, Customer Success isn’t a “nice to have,” a post-sales function, or a renewal safety net. It is the single most important driver of revenue protection and revenue expansion. Miss the signals, ignore the trust gaps, or treat CS like a support desk, and your growth engine collapses.

Here’s the brutal truth: most churn isn’t caused by Customer Success at all. It is caused by broken onboarding, weak product quality, engineering shortcuts, sales overpromising, or operational failures that simmer silently until customers quietly disengage. Companies don’t lose customers overnight. They lose them in the blind spots between teams, where trust erodes but by bit.

And then comes AI, the accelerant, the disruptor, and the great revealer. AI is empowering CSMs to scale, automate, and diagnose with unprecedented accuracy, but it is also empowering customers to troubleshoot your product, compare you to competitors, and uncover your weaknesses instantly.

This SAMI session is a jolt to the system: no fluff, no platitudes, just a clear blueprint for leaders who want to protect revenue, deepen customer loyalty, and convert Customer Success into the most strategic growth engine in the business.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why retention is under attack and how AI is changing customer expectations, behavior, and buying power.
• The hidden causes of churn that have nothing to do with Customer Success but show up as CS problems.
• How to detect trust erosion early, long before it appears in NPS, CSAT, or renewal conversations.
• How AI augments CSMs, accelerates onboarding, and strengthens post-sales execution without losing the human element.
• How customers are already using AI to evaluate you, compare competitors, self-diagnose issues, and uncover your weaknesses.
• A step-by-step view of the Customer Success Maturity Model and how to move your organization up the curve.
• How to build an AI-enabled post-sales engine that protects revenue, fuels expansion, and becomes a true competitive differentiator.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Eric Peterson is a nationally recognized expert in Customer Success, post-sales operations, and transforming B2B organizations into high-retention, high-growth machines. With more than 25 years leading Customer Success, Support, Onboarding, and Professional Services at companies including Microsoft, Oracle Health Sciences, Curaspan, naviHealth, Censinet, and Anju Software, Eric has built a reputation for diagnosing the root causes of churn, stabilizing complex customer environments, and rebuilding post-sales functions into strategic growth engines.

As a fractional CX executive, Eric partners with CEOs and PE-backed organizations to rapidly uncover where customer trust is breaking down and to design modern, scalable CS operations that restore retention and unlock expansion revenue. His frameworks — including his Customer Success Maturity Model — bring clarity to organizations struggling with product friction, sales over-promising, onboarding gaps, support breakdowns, and siloed internal teams.

Buyer personas are broken — we’ve all known it for years. They’re usually created in a workshop, polished in a deck, and then forgotten the minute the quarter gets chaotic. Meanwhile, AI is quietly rewriting the rules. Synthetic buyers, which are AI-generated buyer models that behave like real people, are changing how companies test messaging, allocate budget, and make decisions long before the stakes get expensive.

In this SAMI session, we’re tearing down the myth of the “representative persona” and replacing it with actionable models that respond to your messaging in real time. You’ll see how leaders are using synthetic audiences to pressure-test campaigns, predict reactions, experiment with segmentation, and bridge the gap between marketing experiments and sales outcomes. Real B2B and B2C examples will be shared.

You’ll walk away with:

• How to integrate synthetic buyers into growth workflows
• Where the technology is overhyped — and where it’s becoming a competitive edge
• Concrete steps you can take to explore using synthetic buyers for your sales and marketing use cases.
• If the old playbook was “know your audience,” the new playbook is to build them, model them, test them — before your competition does.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Dr. Luca Fiaschi is a seasoned AI and data leader with more than 15 years of experience helping high-growth tech companies turn data into real business impact. He’s built and scaled data teams from scratch to more than 100 people and has led AI-driven growth at companies like Mistplay and HelloFresh, where his work powered personalization, experimentation, and smarter marketing decisions tied directly to revenue. As former Chief Data & AI Officer at Mistplay and VP of Data Science at HelloFresh, Luca helped optimize hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing spend through advanced testing and analytics. He’s also held leadership roles at Alibaba, Stitch Fix, and Rocket Internet, and holds a PhD in Computer Science—bringing a rare mix of strategic, commercial, and hands-on AI experience to the conversation.