Moment 2026: Kickoff: The Moment of Inflection in Post-Sales
Posted Oct 26, 2026 | Views 5
# CS Week 2026
# Moment 2026
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Speakers
John Gleeson
FOUNDER & GENERAL PARTNER @ SUCCESS VENTURE PARTNERS
Junan Pang
VP CUSTOMER SOLUTIONS & SUCCESS @ FIN
I've been fortunate to have a broad range of experience in Solutions and Customer Success, from Professional Services to CSM (Digital, Scaled, and High-Touch). Along the way, I've helped to scale CS organizations at companies like Optimizely and Slack with revenue ranging from $20M to $120M+ and $400M to $1B+.
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Monica Perez
HEAD OF CUSTOMER SUCCESS @ LOVABLE
SUMMARY
If you've wondered what AI means for your career in customer success, start here. The hosts of the Customer Success Meetup open Moment 2026 with an optimistic argument: as intelligence gets cheaper, customer context rises in value, and the bottleneck has moved from building AI to making it work for real customers. John Gleeson makes the case, then Junan Pang (Fin) and Monica Perez (Lovable) share what that shift looks like inside their own companies. It sets up everything the rest of the day explores.
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CONTENT & TRANSCRIPT
Moment 2026: Kickoff: The Moment of Inflection in Post-Sales
Why the skills CS has spent decades building are becoming the most valuable in tech, and why this is the profession's Moment.
Speakers: John Gleeson, Founder & General Partner, Success Venture Partners; Junan Pang, Solutions, Deployments & Success, Fin; Monica Perez, Customer Success, Lovable
Session Content: John traces CS back to the move to subscriptions, when customers had to use software and get value from it. SaaS was predictable; AI isn't, so the product is only as good as the context you give it and the judgment you apply to what comes back. In SaaS, CS helped the customer use the product; in AI, CS helps the product actually do the work. With much of the technology's potential still untapped, the rest is deployment into real workflows, data and people. That is why labs are hiring forward deployed engineers and startups say their first hire will be a deployment person. The "soft skills" of understanding customers, earning trust, exercising judgment and driving change are now among the hardest and most valuable skills in tech, whatever the new titles (Agent Success Architect, AI Deployment Manager, Outcomes Engineer, FDE).
Junan explains how Fin rebuilt itself as AI-native with outcome-based pricing. Pre-sales, deployment and success now sit in one team (SDS), roughly the same size as sales, on a shared agentic layer with no handoffs. Go-live is only about a third of the journey, and everyone needs technical skill, relationships, change management and commercial acumen. Monica describes letting go of the old playbook at Lovable. With features shipping up to ten times a day, onboarding means building alongside customers. Success is measured by indispensability (load-bearing apps deployed), not adoption, and the CSM's job is to raise customers' ambition as a transformation partner. Her challenge to the audience: keep an open mind, unlearn, and help write the next playbook rather than defend the old one.
Session Slides:
