Amir Hartman has had a storied career, working at many companies, including some of his own. I’m particularly interested in discussing his time at Oracle, when he was responsible for customer value and customer success. This was during a period of transition, as Oracle shifted from an on-premises software company to a SaaS provider. I’m curious to understand Hartman’s perspective on the differences between customer value and customer success, and how Oracle navigated that shift in focus. Additionally, as an expert in this domain, I’d like to get his insights on how he might approach customer success and value differently today, given the advancements in technology and evolving customer expectations.

This sets up the key topics to be covered in the interview – Hartman’s experience at Oracle during the transition to SaaS, the distinction between customer value and customer success, and how his approach might differ today. It provides context and frames the discussion in a clear and engaging way.

Richard Owen
I’ve known Amir Hartman since his days as the founder at Mainstay, which was an outstanding boutique consulting firm, but how the years do seem to fly by. Since then, he had taken responsibility for Oracle’s cloud based customers as the managing director of customer success for cloud and AI enabled value, with responsibility for figuring out exactly how to create value for those customers that are subscribing to all of those technology products.

Subsequent to that, he went all in, you might say, on AI technologies. So quite naturally, we talk a lot about artificial intelligence, especially some recent research that he and his colleagues have been doing around AI scaling and some of the things they’ve learned about what makes AI scale, or not as it turns out, within organizations.

But we do take the chance to revisit some of the key lessons from his time at Oracle and how customer success has evolved. Safe to say, we perhaps both agree that it’s in need of considerable change to make it an effective function. But his perspective is pretty much on point, I think, for anyone who’s thinking of investing in a customer success function or trying to get good value out of it, or for that matter, using AI technologies to enhance customer experience or customer success.

I do hope you enjoy our conversation.

I’m Richard Owen. Amir Hartman, thank you very much for joining us and welcome to the Iconoclast.

Amir Hartman
Thanks, Richard. Pleasure to be here.

Richard Owen
So let’s dive right in by talking a bit about your time at Oracle. I know you’ve had a storied career. You’ve worked at many companies, including some of your own. But I still want to go right back to that, which was, I think, at a time when you were responsible for customer value and customer success. First of all, I’m just interested in why those two are worth breaking out as ideas, and wondering whether or not customer value and customer success are really two different things.

But that was an interesting time there. And Oracle, which is a company that obviously has a huge organization, traditionally an on-prem software company transitioning to SaaS. What was customer value and customer success at Oracle?

Amir Hartman
That’s a good question. You know, at the time, it was intended to help the customer implement and go live. That was one primary function. You know, the customer value piece and the post sales customer success came a bit later. And obviously, it was a realization that with cloud and SaaS, it’s a heck of a lot easier to switch and you pay as you go. So you had better ensure that they’re extracting value out of what they just purchased. I think that the emphasis on value came a little bit later. It originally started as. “Let’s make sure that they’re up and implemented, and go live, and then stabilized” as the primary function. And frankly, it morphed over time, every few years.

As with many larger organizations, every few years it had a different structure. In the beginning, certainly, you had an implementation success team and a customer success team. And that morphed over time. And it’s still morphing every couple of years. And again, part of it is a cultural thing. I think Oracle likes to change things up every few years and reorganize.

So it’s gone through a recent reorganization where they’ve consolidated support, education, and Oracle University under global customer success. But the value piece, to me, was to emphasize that at the end of the day, what really matters is, is the customer extracting tangible value? Is that moving the needle for them in a way that matters to the customer?

And so that has a tendency, frankly, to get lost, especially with SaaS providers. You’re so focused on heads down and making sure the customer goes live, and you get very, very tactical. Then to move from that tactical piece to the more strategic piece is a really tricky tightrope to walk. And a lot of companies struggle with it.

Richard Owen
Yeah. I think it’s funny you say that because I think it’s very true of SaaS companies that have had a habit of thinking just in terms of live implementation and “we switch it on”, right? And look, the, reality is their investors, the VCs and the Pes, like the idea of switching it on and walking away and collecting subscriptions. So, that’s almost been the indoctrination. It’s like, why, why are you worried about what they’re doing with it? Just focus on getting it live.

Amir Hartman
Absolutely.

Richard Owen
Oracle coming from a huge tradition of on-prem software, culturally, that had to be a big shift to start thinking in terms of continuous value realization.

Amir Hartman
Absolutely, and frankly, in my last couple of years at Oracle that was really the intent, can we create? There was so much of an emphasis on digital CX with I guess the unsaid vision of can we put CS out of work? That was really the driving vision. So absolutely, I completely agree and I think that’s still there, not that it’s not important, but there are ways to get things done. There are ways to provide the customer what it truly needs. But when you think about it, let’s take a step back. If you think about it, and this is from my experience, but I know that there was a recent Bain survey that was done. Customers really are looking for a couple of big things, big ticket items. looking for help me make sure I go live and implement this effectively, and then stabilize it.

They definitely want help there. And then there’s, make sure I’m getting my money’s worth. Make sure I’m getting value for what I paid for. If you look at the CS activities that are normally done and you sort of line them up in terms of, you know, here are the 20, 30 activities that are done in CS or customer CS manager does, there’s a lot of non-value-add activities, things that we only think are important. Take for example, the dreaded customer success plan. Every organization has a CS plan, customer success plan or a success plan. If you ask customers if they see that as being value, the majority will tell you no. They don’t, it’s a waste of time. It’s a sort of talking points that the provider likes to put on the table. The QBR, the dreaded QBR again is another one. That’s a big question mark. So yeah, I think it’s a healthy thing to ask is, can we put ourselves out of business? What is it that we can deliver that’s truly of value to the customer? and what things can we do away with or really rethink?

Richard Owen
Well, I’d argue that part of it is being more thoughtful about what gets sold, right? Let’s start with that. Being more thoughtful about whether the products actually meet the requirements of customers as opposed to needing to be stretched and beaten up so that they can actually do something. Then to some extent, you’re taking the weight out of the downstream. And then being much more customer knowledgeable about how you target customers with the resources and help they need to be successful as opposed to being sort of this peanut butter spread idea. Okay, we’ll just allocate people across people. I could talk about this a long time, but I’d love us to switch topics for a second. You recently, I know…

Amir Hartman
I will say, let me just interject here, because you brought something up that I think is really important. And it’s amazing to me, to your point about kind of easing up and giving the customer what it wants on one hand, and then having the CS folks, and even sales folks really, allocate attention to truly manage understanding what the customer needs.

It is amazing to me. I had to train probably about 500 customer success managers on how to engage with customers and different sort of personas. You don’t want to have a discussion with a CFO the same way you do with a CIO, for example. It is amazing to me how simple some things are that we don’t do to get visibility and understand the customer.

So for example, let’s just say you’re dealing with a publicly traded customer. There is so much information out there that can be useful to a customer success manager, let alone a salesperson in terms of, what they’re experiencing, what their competition’s like, what their financials are like. And think about now, now with AI, you can simply load up, for example, a 10-K or 10-Q into an AI model and have it spit back to you, depending on how effective you are at prompting and asking it, some very insightful information about the customer and how to have a dialogue with the customer that’s going to resonate. These are things that are so simple to do, yet are not necessarily being done. They’re certainly not being done commonplace. I’m sure there are leading companies that do this.

Richard Owen
Well, I think we’re trying to do almost remedial processes and we’re losing sight of, you know, we want to build sort of ritual and process of, I’m calling the customer X number of times. I’m asking them the same thing X number times, of as opposed to strategize, which is much harder. And, you know, all I can say is, look, if you can get AI synthesis of 10-Qs, then thank God, because actually reading those things is absolutely impossible. They’re miserable documents to read.

Amir Hartman
Yeah, that’s right.

Richard Owen
So on the AI topic, I know that recently you and your partners in the Experience Alliance published a study, some research around current state of the use of AI in CX. I think it was quite a comprehensive study, 171 companies. So I’d love to have you talk about what the top-level findings were from the study.

Amir Hartman
Yeah, it’s an ongoing study, but we published recently just kind of interim results. And I’d say probably the few things that stand out are certainly, I think, things that we probably know already. The sentiment for AI is quite positive. So you’re getting over 80, 85 % of senior CX leaders are very positive with respect to the potential of AI to transform their company, to transform the industry. That was one obvious one. The interesting insights beyond that are when you start looking, and I’d say the vast majority of them, about 80 plus percent are experimenting. So that was one.
The interesting insight beyond that was, if you ask the question, how many companies are actually deploying AI at scale? That’s a very different question. There we got a much lower percent. There we got about 15 % or less. That was a big finding. I think the other finding was around what I would call AI literacy. And that was actually a surprising finding, and a bit troubling. So the finding was, again, on one hand we have 85 percent very strong sentiment for A.I. and on the other hand, less than 25 % actually have a programmatic AI literacy program in their organization. That to me was very surprising and frustrating at the same time. It’s almost to me a leadership failure, I have to say. It’s an ethical problem, in my opinion. On the hand, you’ve got leadership excited about the potential of AI, yet less than 25 % of them are actually empowering or upskilling their people with respect to AI. That to me was quite surprising and troubling. So I think those are probably the biggest findings.

Certainly the other finding, I think despite the experimentation, I call it, sort of pilot paralysis, right? Everybody’s experimenting in a pilot mode. but, they’re, kind of stuck in that pilot mode, right? There, there, there, there’s challenges extracting yourself from pilot saying yay or nay and truly deploying it at scale. I think that’s, those are some, some of the top line findings.

Richard Owen
I’d like to think we’d learned from the errors in the past and our expectations are adjusted to the problem with those old implementations wasn’t so much they were slow to pay back, but they cost too much relative to the potential payback, which seems to be happening again with AI. You can absolutely make an argument that it needs more time. And we know we’re in the first innings here. But I think Sequoia’s point is, do we run up such a debt in the first inning that it’s simply inconceivable this makes sense, given the amount of capital put into it, to ever sort of pay back? You can discount these things at some point. Which could be just the most analytic way of looking at any hype cycle. It was probably true when it came to the web. It was probably true when it came to, you know, RDBMS technologies in the 1990s, where just the hype cycle means a huge amount of capital chasing disappointing returns.

Amir Hartman
Absolutely, absolutely. And certainly for the language models for sure. I think for your enterprise customer, that’s where I think the leadership challenge is in my opinion, is how do we avoid wait and see? I’m not a big advocate of wait and see.

Richard Owen
Yeah, why do you think there was so much wait and see? You pointed that out in the study.

Amir Hartman
I think part of it was certain industries kind of lend themselves to it. I think there’s definitely to your point, there’s been some reports around what’s the payback, the sort of question mark around payback. So pulling back the reins a little bit. But I think for enterprise leaders, the challenge is this balancing act, this walking the tightrope between how do I experiment and learn? Because we’re all learning, and not invest so much that I’m being dilutive with respect to all the AI activities, right? So there’s a need to learn and experiment and see what really sticks and moves the needle. That to me is the tightrope where leaders kind of earn their keep, which is how do I walk that tightrope? Because it’s not simple.

To say, I’m going to see how things play out and wait, for example, for all the enterprise SaaS providers to embed AI in their solutions, which they all are, and really seeing what sticks. I’m not sure that’s the best approach. Certainly, again, the Oracles and the Salesforces, they’re all embedding AI in their solutions.

Richard Owen
Or at least claiming to, or they’ll rebrand all the products AI.

Amir Hartman
Right, right. So that’s why I think that’s where the leader earns their keep, being able to walk that tightrope, because obviously you can’t just go all in and say we’re AI first and we’re gonna everything, every function where everything has to have an AI strategy. I think that’s the thoughtful thing to do but to be blindly doing it is perhaps a bit a bit too aggressive. And then taking that sort of back, I’m going to wait and see how this thing plays out, I think is very dangerous.

Richard Owen
Now, I love your framing of that. Look, the idea that ultimately leadership’s job is to figure out how to work that tightrope, right? And the two failing strategies are on one hand, always be a laggard, wait until everything’s proven, the late adopters, unless you’re in an industry where you have massive natural advantage for some reason, or your competition is even worse, and you think you can get away with that. But most of the turnover in the S&P 500 and companies that get put out of business are the ones that missed the wave, and either they made the wrong choices or they made no choice. At the end of the day, making no choice almost guarantees failure.

On the flip side, to your point, getting so far out in front of these things seems foolhardy and expensive. And in fact, doesn’t necessarily teach you much because you’re simply wasting opportunity, you’re misallocating resources. So the way you framed it, was that where the leadership earns its keep is striking that balance. Wouldn’t you argue that’s been the case for digital transformation initiatives, moving companies onto the web? You know, every innovation and technology requires this leadership equation to be figured out and executed and separates the winners and losers.

Amir Hartman
Absolutely. Yeah, totally agree. It’s fascinating to watch. I think definitely the space is very exciting. It grows very rapidly, even for us. I find just myself trying to keep up with things, with new emerging capabilities, it’s not easy. And there’s so much out there. That’s the trouble.

Richard Owen
I think we can agree this is the fastest wave as well. Don’t you think, you know, we’re not spring chickens here, so we can say we’ve seen a couple of these waves, but this one feels… the pace is incredible. And I think credit is due to Microsoft and Google and Amazon and these companies. They have moved incredibly fast in innovating.

You always expect the startups to pile in and do new things, but the large enterprise players have done an amazing job this time. And that’s meant that it takes your breath away how fast things have moved. I think those large companies learned a different lesson from the past. They learned that they can’t wait and fall behind and that they need to get in front of it. And they’ve not been afraid of putting capital into it.

Amir Hartman
Absolutely. Oracle is a great example. You certainly say that they were a little bit slow on the cloud side. But I think their approach to AI is quite a good approach. I mean, they’re placing a number of bets, both on the infrastructure side and the application side. So yeah, I totally agree they definitely learned the lesson. It’s very quite impressive to watch these larger established players move so quickly.

Richard Owen
I mean, that’s probably a great place for us to end. We could talk about this a lot longer, both these topics. I think covering the origin of customer success is an interesting topic in its own right. And what’s been going on in AI is fascinating. So maybe we need to have a round two, because either one of those two, I think, would be worthy of a deeper conversation. Thank you very, very much. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed talking to you about this. And we really appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you, Amir.

Amir Hartman
Agreed, agreed, absolutely. Thanks, Richard. We’ll see you soon.