The Internet Built the Highway and AI Put a Race Car in Everyone’s Garage

The Internet Built the Highway and AI Put a Race Car in Everyone’s Garage

For years, we called the internet the Information Superhighway.

It was a pretty good description. Suddenly, information could move around the world faster than ever before.

Then Google gave us something like information GPS. We no longer had to know where the information was. Search helped us find it.

Cloud computing built much of the infrastructure underneath it. Smartphones put access in almost everyone's pocket.

Now AI has given us something different.

It doesn't just move information or help us find it. AI can analyze information, connect ideas, recognize patterns, make recommendations, and help us decide what to do next.

The Internet built the highway and AI put a race car in everyone's garage. But giving someone a race car doesn't make them a race car driver. That distinction is becoming increasingly important in Customer Success. Imagine AI analyzes a portfolio of 100 customers and identifies one account with a 78 percent probability of churn. That's incredibly useful information. But what should the CSM do with it?

An inexperienced response might be to immediately contact the customer, offer a discount, schedule a renewal conversation, or launch a standard retention playbook. An experienced CSM may look deeper. Maybe usage declined because an implementation was never completed. Maybe the customer's champion left the company. Maybe recurring Support issues have created frustration. Maybe their business changed. Maybe usage is actually lower because the technology made their process more efficient.

The churn signal might be correct while the obvious response is completely wrong. That is where judgment matters. AI can give you an answer. Judgment tells you whether it's the right answer for the situation. A race car driver doesn't simply press the accelerator because horsepower is available. The driver considers the track, competitors, tires, weather, braking points, and what is happening several turns ahead.

Experienced CSMs do something similar. We accumulate context. We remember how customers reacted during previous challenges. We recognize when a frustrated comment is normal and when it signals something deeper. We understand internal politics, personalities, business pressures, and the difference between what a customer says and what they may actually need.

AI has accumulated enormous amounts of knowledge. The CSM has accumulated experience with people, businesses, and situations. The opportunity is combining the two. That is why I believe the future AI Operator in Customer Success will need more than prompting skills. Knowing how to ask AI a good question is valuable, but knowing whether to trust the response, challenge it, investigate further, or ignore it may be even more valuable.

AI literacy teaches us how the machine works. AI judgment teaches us when to accelerate, when to brake, and when the recommended route doesn't make sense. This also changes how I think about experience in the AI era. Technology may make information easier to access, but it does not erase the value of everything a CSM has learned from years of customer conversations, difficult renewals, implementations, escalations, successes, mistakes, and changing business conditions.

In fact, AI may make that experience more useful. The machine can process more information than any CSM ever could. The CSM can provide something the machine may not have: the context surrounding this customer, this relationship, and this moment.

The fastest car doesn't automatically win the race, but someone still has to drive it and knowing when not to hit the accelerator may be just as important as knowing how fast AI can go.