Most companies are rushing to layer AI onto customer operations without fixing what sits underneath. Deb Ashton of Certinia says that's the wrong order. When sales, delivery, finance, and customer success work from separate systems with different views of the same customer, AI doesn't close those gaps; it amplifies them. Clients feel the disconnect as friction: repeating themselves across departments, getting inconsistent answers, and slowly losing trust.

What You Will Learn

• Why adding AI to customer support fails when your sales, finance, and delivery systems do not share customer data, and what customers experience when they do not
• The three layers of trust that determine whether clients renew, and which one AI cannot replace
• Where AI actually protects revenue in your business versus where it erodes customer relationships
• The difference between "human in the loop" and "human on the loop," and when to use each one with AI workflows
• Why metrics like NPS and renewal rates hide the real problem with your AI implementation until the customer has already left
• How to identify which administrative work should be automated and which customer-facing decisions need human judgment before execution
• What to do when your customer success manager cannot answer basic questions about a contract, and why that moment determines whether you keep or lose the customer

This episode is brought to you in partnership with Certinia.

Certinia is a professional services platform built natively on Salesforce that connects the full services lifecycle — sales, delivery, financials, forecasting, staffing, and project management — on a single data layer, so every team works from the same view of the customer, and AI can act with certainty. Learn more at Certinia.com.

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