Jay and Jeff debrief last week's AI Show & Tell — 150 customer leaders watching four real builds in production. A custom CS platform in Claude Code. A sales reference agent. Renewal workflows that adapt to customer health.

Plus the launch of Uncommon, a new community for AI-forward customer leaders: https://www.chiefcustomerofficer.io/uncommon

Join us live for AI Demo Day on May 27 at 2pm ET: https://luma.com/i3kbo9m2

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Build, don't buy: A CS leader stood up her own CS platform in Claude Code in two weeks. Her token costs are already lower than the SaaS subscriptions she replaced.
• The data layer is the moat: Whether you centralize via a data lake or wire connectors through MCP, your data architecture is the foundation everything else stands on.
• Every department needs a builder: Instead of departmental software, every team needs an ops person — or a manager — who can build with AI.
• From soft to hard agents: Most early use cases just surface information. The real lift comes from agents that draft, schedule, and act on your behalf.
• Renewal workflows that adapt: A 90-day renewal flow that reshuffles tasks based on customer health markers beats any generic checklist.
• Skills belong at the team level: Stop emailing markdown files around. Treat skills like internal products with owners, evals, and version control.
• Company-as-code: Balboa OS lives in markdown, distributed via GitHub to OneDrive to every team member's machine. Update once, push to all.
• Humans are still a moat: Automate the prep, but human relationships and judgment are not getting commoditized any time soon.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 - Welcome and morning chaos
• 02:32 - Why we ran an AI Show & Tell
• 04:30 - A custom CS platform built in Claude Code
• 08:20 - Data security, privacy, and the engineering layer
• 12:50 - Every department needs an ops person who can build
• 14:52 - The data layer as the real foundation
• 16:50 - An AI-powered sales reference agent
• 19:17 - Jeff's Fathom-to-PlanHat task automation
• 23:54 - A renewal workflow that adapts to health markers
• 27:27 - Skills, coaching, and enterprise-wide sharing
• 30:14 - Balboa OS: turning your company into code
• 33:20 - Why evals matter as models change
• 35:00 - Launching Uncommon for AI-forward CS leaders
• 42:10 - Why "Uncommon"? Bold decisions create the advantage

About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it.

Your Hosts:

• Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io
• Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

Jay and Jeff swap real examples of building custom AI tools instead of buying software — a $1K brand video that beat $750K agency quotes, a content planner built in 35 minutes, and a renewal digest that surfaces customer context weekly with zero manual effort. Plus: why the CS platform category is stalling, and the difference between a service blueprint and a customer journey.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• AI collapses the agency middle layer: A CEO got $500K–$750K quotes for a brand video, spent $1K in AI credits instead, and got 70% of what he wanted in a weekend. The agencies only offered 10–20% discounts when asked to use AI themselves.

• Fewer people = faster output: The Mythical Man-Month principle applied to AI: every person you add to a project adds communication overhead. The real superpower of these tools is reducing the number of people in the middle of a problem.

• Build your content system, not just content: Jeff built an AI-powered content planner in 35 minutes — 9 posts/week, post-type by day, 40-idea backlog, status tracking, and a draft button that fires his LinkedIn writing skill. MVP in a morning.

• CS cockpit over CS platform: The question isn't which CS tool to buy — it's whether you can build exactly what your team needs. Jeff's team built a weekly renewal digest from support tickets, emails, Slack, and call recordings in one day.

• The CS platform category is stalling: The layer of workflows that's truly common across software companies is thinner than vendors want to admit. Domain-specific, product-specific nuance is where the real work lives — and that can't be bought off the shelf.

• Service blueprint vs. customer journey: Service blueprint = what you need to do to interact with a company. Customer journey = how customers mature and get value. CEOs want to hear about the journey. CSMs need to stop confusing the two.

CHAPTERS

• 00:01 - Raleigh, end of quarter, baby incoming
• 02:43 - $750K agency quote vs. $1K AI video build
• 05:15 - Building exactly what you need: Jay's HubSpot pipeline dashboard
• 07:28 - The Mythical Man-Month and reducing communication layers with AI
• 09:15 - Paying for expertise, not pixel-pushing
• 10:24 - Jeff's AI content planner: built in 35 minutes on Cowork
• 15:56 - How the draft button and LinkedIn skill work together
• 17:46 - Hosting the planner: Cowork vs. Claude Code
• 21:12 - The CS cockpit idea: custom workflow hub for CSM teams
• 24:50 - Junction's interactive onboarding demo environment
• 25:53 - Why the CS platform category is stalling
• 31:41 - Service blueprint vs. customer journey
• 33:28 - Team AI day: CS team builds a weekly renewal digest
• 35:51 - "You just described Staircase AI" — and built it in a day
• 37:44 - Why PlanHat over HubSpot
• 40:59 - Slack account pulse bot: ping for an AI-written account summary

Your Hosts:

• Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io
• Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

Is the CSM role actually dead? Jay and Jeff unpack Chad Hornfeld's viral Avoca post on replacing CSMs with Technical Account Managers and forward-deployed engineers — and what it means for how Jeff is hiring at Junction right now. Plus: Jay's weekend-built HubSpot dashboard, why Claude is winning B2B, and rebuilding onboarding around the patient journey.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The CSM role is splitting in two: The emerging model pairs a Technical Account Manager with a forward-deployed engineer. Commercial motion moves elsewhere — deep technical fluency and account growth are hard to do well in one seat.
• Hire for technical aptitude, not claims: Jeff is screening CSM candidates on what they've actually built with AI and whether they've read Junction's public API docs before the interview. Reciting the tagline is the wrong answer.
• Onboarding should follow the customer's journey, not the product: Junction is flipping onboarding around the patient journey — mapping when customers should hit specific endpoints to prevent misconfigurations that quietly generate support tickets downstream.
• Internal apps are replacing dashboards: Jay built a live, two-way HubSpot pipeline dashboard in a weekend with Claude Code — no incremental HubSpot spend, no BI tool. The open question: how do you deploy these safely across a team?
• Security is still engineering: Roughly 45% of code written by Claude ships with significant security vulnerabilities. A central "AI center of excellence" isn't optional — it's how you put guardrails on what everyone is suddenly building.
• Claude is winning B2B: Clear naming (Chat, Cowork, Code) maps to different user types, and early investment in Claude Code made it the default for technical work. OpenAI is optimized for B2C scale and running on investment, not flywheel.
• Jevons Paradox vs. doomerism: Telephone operators vanished — but long-distance unlocked a much bigger economy. Expect AI to open product and engineering roles in non-technical industries that never justified them before.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 - Kickoff and a Friday AI hackathon
• 03:10 - Building a HubSpot dashboard in Claude Code
• 09:19 - BI tools, security, and Centers of Excellence
• 12:55 - Why Claude is eating the B2B market
• 20:41 - Killing the CSM: Chad Hornfeld, TAMs, and FDEs
• 23:18 - Hiring technically-minded CSMs at Junction
• 26:00 - Solutions engineer vs forward-deployed engineer
• 27:35 - Rebuilding onboarding around a patient journey
• 35:04 - Monthly hackathons and AI show-and-tells

About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it.

Your Hosts:

• Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io
• Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io