CELab: The Customer Education Lab

Customer education doesn’t have a confidence problem. It has a visibility problem wearing a confidence problem’s clothes. Thought Industries’ 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report found that 99% of leaders are confident their program influences business outcomes and 72% say they have the data to prove it — yet education is still one of the first functions on the block when budgets tighten. Both of those things can’t be true. In this episode, Dave puts that tension to Irana Wasti, CEO of Thought Industries, a product leader who spent twenty-plus years at IBM, Intuit, GoDaddy, Typeform, and BILL before stepping into the learning category a year ago — and who calls customer education “the best hidden secret” in every company she’s met.

Irana’s outsider lens is the whole point. She explains why the customer journey looks so much bigger from the education seat than it ever did from the product seat, why declining academy logins are an opportunity rather than a loss, and why the fix isn’t a better dashboard — it’s getting your best content out of the gated portal and into every place your prospects and customers actually ask questions, from ChatGPT and Claude to in-product chat and the help center. You’ll hear how Thought Industries’ Omnichannel Learning and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) work, why “two-second answers or a PhD” is the new customer expectation, and what changes on the vendor’s side of the table. If you sit in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is your case for a bigger seat; if you’re in Enablement, Marketing, Support, or L&D, it’s the argument for one shared source of truth instead of five teams educating in silos.

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Connect with Irana Wasti on LinkedIn, explore Thought Industries’ AI Wave — Omnichannel Learning and Conversational AI Learning — at thoughtindustries.com, and watch for the 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Thought Industries.

At most B2B SaaS companies, the customer comes last. Product announces, internal enablement scrambles, marketing drafts, documentation piles on — and the customer-facing material gets slapped together at the end by whoever’s left. Anna-Lena Kress, Senior Learning Experience Designer at quantilope, decided that order was exactly backwards. She pitched leadership on building the polished, customer-facing asset first and letting marketing and internal training derive from it — and got an immediate yes. The result: a help center rebuild scoped at six months shipped in two, a team that trained itself just by using the customer content, and a one-person education function that now runs like a system instead of a cleanup crew.

In this episode, Anna-Lena walks through the three pillars that made it work — Customer Education First (create once, publish everywhere), Capture at the Source (SMEs recording asynchronously in Camtasia Online instead of being interviewed), and Amplify with AI (Clueso for step-by-step articles, Claude for finished Zendesk HTML). Then the conversation turns to attention itself: how her family farm’s social channel went from 1,000 followers in March to 50,000 by recording day with strictly educational soil-health videos, and what hook–arc–payoff can teach Customer Education about getting people through the front door. If you’re in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is the playbook for going first. If you’re in Enablement, Marketing, L&D, or Support, it’s a look at what you get when the customer asset already exists on day one.

Highlights from this episode:

• “Who actually sends our content to the customer? Our team.” — Why Anna-Lena treats internal colleagues as her first customer, and how that reframes the whole launch sequence.
• The waiter effect — When the team trains on customer-facing material, they recommend it like a server who’s already tasted tonight’s special. Confident referrals, zero extra enablement lift.
• The “it’s not baked yet” objection, answered — Last-minute product tweaks are cheaper to patch on a finished customer asset than to rebuild from internal drafts. The fear is legit; the conclusion is backwards.
• Six months to two — 100+ help center articles rebuilt by one person: SMEs record in Camtasia Online, Clueso turns video into screenshots and steps, Claude assembles the final Zendesk HTML — and the leftover video library later powered an unplanned course update.
• Fix the front door, not just the interior — We obsess over the inside of our academies while the entrance is off its hinges. Why 30-second, one-lesson, myth-buster videos are a scroll-stopping way in — and how Dave’s viral Atlassian short-form program got killed anyway.

Connect with Anna-Lena Kress on LinkedIn, explore the quantilope Academy to see the modular, customer-first model in action, and find her farm, Better Together Acres, on Facebook for the soil-health videos that stopped the scroll.

Every Customer Education team eventually hits the same wall: you build something genuinely good, and it quietly dies behind a portal your customers never log into. We call that an engagement problem. It isn't. It's a distribution problem — and most of us are still solving it one channel at a time. In this crossover episode, Dave replays a July 2026 webinar recorded with Casey Trujillo of BrainStorm, a digital transformation coach who has spent 20+ years helping Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies get their people to actually use the software they bought. The topic is content syndication, and the argument is blunt: "come to my site, create an account, take my course" is a losing pattern, and everybody in the chain knows it.

The through-line is build once, distribute many — build a genericized version of the material once, then split it two ways: one copy inside for enablement, one copy outside for customers, delivered where they already work and shaped to the slice of your product they actually own. Casey and Dave walk the two-sided standoff that keeps this from happening — vendors terrified of losing control of their content, customers exhausted by asking permission for every change — and land on the mechanism that resolves both at once. You'll leave with a way to think about shared reporting, a churn signal you're probably already ignoring, and a low-risk experiment you can run with a single existing customer this quarter. Primary audience here is Customer Education and Customer Success, but if you sit in Enablement, L&D, Support, or Marketing and you build content for people who don't work for you, this is your problem too.

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Most companies handed the internal AI rollout to whoever sits closest to revenue — Sales Enablement or RevOps — and adoption promptly stalled at the login screen. In this episode, Dave reunites with his old Gainsight colleague Eve Kedar, EdD — Revenue Execution Architect at EK Consulting, author of Build a KickA$$ Sales Team, and creator of the Four Faces of AI Resistance — to make the case most org charts get wrong: the team that should own internal AI adoption is the one nobody put in the room. Customer Education.

Eve brings a combination almost nobody else in this conversation has: a doctorate in Education and Leadership for Change plus 15+ years inside revenue teams at Apple, Seagate, PayPal, Cisco, Gainsight, and copy.ai. Whether you sit in Customer Education, Customer Success, L&D, Enablement, Marketing, or Support — if your job is helping people genuinely change how they work, this episode hands you a diagnostic for the resistance you’re up against and two plays you can run on Monday, no platform purchase required.

Highlights from this episode:

• The Four Faces of AI Resistance — status fear, displacement fear, change aversion, and rollout fatigue — and why naming which face you’re looking at tells you exactly which intervention to run.
• Why not Enablement or RevOps? Neither function is chartered to own learning — and real “adoption” means use-in-workflow, not logins.
• Attendance is a vanity metric. If all you can show is headcount and quiz clicks, your team may be next to get cut — bring KPI movement instead.
• The master glossary play: become the anchor for canonical learning with two-minute mini-trainings — without critiquing Enablement’s content and losing them forever.
• The cheapest AI enablement in the world: prompt-based roleplay with Claude or ChatGPT — twenty minutes per rep, no purchase order.

Learn more: get the Four Faces of AI Resistance framework — plus Eve’s speaking and workshops — at evekedar.com, explore EK Consulting’s revenue-execution work at ekconsulting.io, read her book Build a KickA$$ Sales Team, and ask her about the AI roleplay prompt workbook. And connect with Eve on LinkedIn!

In this kickoff to Season 8 of the CELab podcast, host Dave Derington sits down with Anya Eydman to explore a provocative idea: our biggest AI problem in Customer Education isn’t a skills gap or a technology gap - it’s a belief gap. Anya draws on her background in corporate finance, small business and startup operations, coaching, municipal and nonprofit work, and energy/civic tech to show how AI is becoming a new learning style and a genuine learning partner, not just another productivity tool. Anya connects the dots between AI, underserved communities, workforce shifts, and what it means to design learning experiences that people actually want to engage with.

Across the conversation, they unpack the role of prompt engineering as a core literacy, not just a niche technical skill, and examine how AI can level the playing field while also exposing new inequities. Anya shares how she’s using AI with interns, cities, and universities (including a forthcoming “AI Without Hype” course at Vassar College) to build trust infrastructure, redesign workflows, and bring more people into complex conversations about energy, affordability, and technology. If you’re in Customer Education or Customer Success and wrestling with how AI changes your strategy, your stakeholders, and your learners, this episode will challenge how you think about outcomes, belief systems, and what “meeting learners where they are” really means in 2026.

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In this episode of the Customer Education Lab, Georg Gottschalk, VP of Global Education at Acumatica, to unpack what it really takes to build a skill infrastructure around a highly complex ERP platform. Georg traces his journey from early work with SAP and manufacturing optimization, through leadership roles at IBM, Salesforce, and MuleSoft, to his current mandate: Enabling a fast-growing, partner-led ecosystem in the small and mid-sized business ERP space. Georg shares why ERP is one of the ultimate “stress tests” for Customer Education and why the old excuse of “our product is too complex for AI” no longer holds up.

The conversation dives deep into AI-assisted learning, micro-vertical partner strategies, and what it means to certify companies instead of just individuals. Georg explains how Acumatica leverages tools like LearnExperts’ LEAi to transform rich but dense documentation into fun, engaging, and increasingly personalized education at scale—without tripling headcount. You’ll hear how his team thinks about partner enablement, customer onboarding that massively exceeded adoption targets, weaving education into the product workflow, and even “teaching machines” by producing content optimized for LLMs. If you work in Customer Education or Customer Success and are wrestling with complexity, scale, or AI, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

In this episode of CELab, Dave Derington sits down with Tim Devine, who built Optro's (formerly AuditBoard) live training program from a solo effort in 2021 into a three-person team running roughly 250 custom training engagements a year. Tim's thesis is deceptively simple and a little provocative: you don't need to hire subject-matter experts to deliver expert training. You need people who are experts in the product and the path — and the discipline to stay there.

We all know the "one legendary expert who doesn't scale" problem, right? Tim approach is to hire trainers with no auditing background, coach them to "learn the language and trust the audience to fill the gaps," and keep a customer subject-matter expert on deck to field methodology questions. Guardrails — a prescriptive course catalog, recommended agendas, and tightly structured virtual sessions — aren't limitations; they're what make scale possible.

The conversation digs into Optro's "do-it-with-me" methodology, where a temporary sandbox is mirrored from the customer's own UAT data so learners click along live instead of watching a demo — a direct answer to the live-attendance problem. Tim also opens up the tech stack: Amplitude to correlate learning objectives with product outcomes, Gainsight health scores, and Skilljar as the LMS — plus a 13% renewal-rate lift that reframes training as revenue protection rather than a cost center.

On AI, Tim shares two practical wins: auto-scoping tailored learning paths from sales-and-implementation handoff data, and using Zoom's auto-chapters to make session recordings instantly navigable. Honest, tactical, and full of things you can steal on Monday.

In this episode of the Customer Education Lab, Adam Avramescu sits down with Kelly Mullaney, Head of AI Guild at Juniper Square, to unpack how AI is actually changing Customer Education. Kelly traces his journey from tax tech writer at Microsoft, to leading Customer Education at Envestnet, to building AI Guild—an internal enablement function focused on helping teams 10x their productivity with AI. Along the way, he shares concrete builds: an AI‑driven help center that watches code commits and auto‑drafts release notes and docs, a 37‑agent competitive intelligence system feeding Slack, and experiments in “vibe‑coded” e‑learning that challenge what LMSs and SCORM should look like in an AI‑first world.

Adam and Kelly go deep on the questions every Customer Education and Customer Success leader is wrestling with: Will AI kill our jobs, or amplify our impact? When does it make sense to build with AI versus buy another SaaS tool? How can small, scrappy teams of one keep up when engineering output increases 10x? You’ll hear a practical breakdown of the Anthropic stack (Claude Chat, Code Desktop, Cowork, Design, Managed Agents), a simple “80% AI / 20% human‑in‑the‑loop” mental model, and a candid look at the future of help centers, LMSs, and documentation. If you’re trying to move past the hype and see what AI‑enabled customer education really looks like, this episode is for you.

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In this episode of the Customer Education Lab we sit down with longtime friend and customer education leader Lila Krutel at Skilljar by Gainsight to unpack how MCP (Model Context Protocol) and modern AI tools like Claude are reshaping the role of Customer Education in B2B SaaS. Together they explore how MCP acts like “arms” for your AI assistant—connecting it to systems like your LMS and Customer Success Platform so you can finally query, explore, and analyze your own data without waiting in the CS Ops queue.  

Lila shares concrete, in-the-trenches stories from Gainsight, including how she used Gainsight’s CS MCP plus Claude to identify customers with unused training passes, analyze the business impact of admin certification, and start connecting education programs to ARR and retention - all without writing SQL or begging for a special report. If you’ve ever felt blocked by data access, stuck waiting on BI dashboards, or unsure how to “prove” the value of education, this conversation will show you the art of the possible and give you practical ways to start experimenting—safely, skeptically, and out loud—with AI in your own CE or CS org.

In this episode of the Customer Education Lab, we sit down with Jess Katz, Senior Customer Education Manager at Forter, to unpack how she built an AI‑powered customer education function as a team of one. Jess walks us through her journey from joining Forter with a blank slate and an aggressive launch timeline, to orchestrating a “swarm” of more than 20 specialized AI agents that now support everything from research and course design to writing, video scripts, and brand voice.

You’ll hear how Jess leveraged an internal AI hackathon to create her first product‑ and brand‑trained agent, then scaled that approach into a full “agentic learning” stack using tools like Claude, Gemini, Glean, and video platforms such as Clueso—plus a next‑gen AI‑native LMS. She explains her step‑by‑step method for designing agents, reverse‑engineering “what good looks like,” and acting as the strategic director of a hybrid team of humans and AI. If you care about Customer Education, Customer Success, or doing more with less through AI, this episode is a practical, down‑to‑earth blueprint for where our field is heading.

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