How to Use AI for QBRs: Prompts and Steps for CSMs

Ask any CSM how long QBR prep takes, and the answer is rarely encouraging. 

A single account might require pulling health scores from one platform, usage data from another, support ticket summaries from a third, and email history from a fourth, and then stitching it all together into a slide deck and talking points by hand. 

If you only manage a handful of accounts, that might not sound like a big deal. But if you are responsible for 30, 50, or even 100 accounts, then those quarterly reviews add up fast.

Fortunately, CSMs today have AI-powered tools to help them prepare for and run QBRs. But you’ll need more than ChatGPT to create slides. In this guide, we’ll give you a blueprint for leveraging AI to prepare for and run effective QBRs that leave your customers feeling valued while adding hours back to your week. 

The Hidden Costs of Manual QBR Prep

It’s not just the time spent preparing for and running QBRs. It’s the consistency required when you manage CS at scale. 

When prep quality depends on a CSM's bandwidth that week, some accounts get thorough reviews, while others get last-minute scrambles. And trust us, your customers will notice when they get the latter.

A good QBR should take customers through the following:

• A clear picture of what has been achieved in the past quarter
• A compelling success story 
• Customer feedback
• A plan for the next quarter

When you run scaled customer success, it’s impossible to do so consistently alongside your other responsibilities. 

Manual prep also puts you in a reactive rather than proactive position. You’ll end up surfacing the data you know to look for, and miss the signals you didn’t think of or have time to check. That blip in usage, the lack of adoption of a new feature, or the frustrated exchange with support can easily slip through the cracks if everything falls on your shoulders. 

Every hour you spend compiling spreadsheets is an hour not spent on customer relationships, strategic planning, or proactive outreach. But that’s where AI can help.

How AI is Transforming Customer Success

While “time savings” is often the first benefit touted by using AI, it’s far from the only one. 

Yes, AI speeds up your workflows by giving you shortcuts or completely automating tasks, but we find that CSMs also benefit from AI in the following ways:

• Eliminates manual data gathering: Instead of logging into five platforms and copying data into a spreadsheet, you can prompt an AI tool to pull and synthesize account data across sources in seconds. When customer success platforms with built-in AI are connected to your CRM, product analytics, and support systems, you get the full picture for any account in seconds.
• Surfaces health and risk signals: AI finds data across your account and identifies patterns you might otherwise miss. Usage anomalies, shifts in support ticket frequency, changes in stakeholder engagement, and sentiment trends in communications can all feed into automated health scores and churn signals.
• Enables personalization at scale: A well-prepared QBR feels tailor-made for that specific customer, but achieving that level of personalization manually across a full portfolio is practically impossible. With AI, generating customized talking points, agenda structures, and recommendations for each account requires minimal incremental effort. 

And once all this prep work is done, you can invest your time in building relationships with your accounts and thinking strategically. The meeting itself will become more valuable because you’ll walk in with headspace for conversation rather than a head full of numbers you’re trying to remember.

How to Use AI in Your QBR Process

Pulling data, spotting churn risks, that’s all there is to AI-powered QBR prep, right?

Not entirely. We recommend working through the following steps to integrate and leverage QBR in your meeting prep and follow-up:

• Gather organizational context
• Collect customer performance and sentiment data
• Identify patterns and themes
• Build a partnership plan

Gather Organizational Context

Good QBR prep starts with the full strategic context and game plan for your accounts. Your first step is to pull in any relevant qualitative and quantitative information for the account. These are the overarching themes that sit in the background of your conversations:

• Leadership or ownership changes, restructures, or shifting priorities mentioned in calls/emails.
• Business goals or pressures described.
• Internal changes relevant to the account (product roadmap, support, staffing).

Sample Prompt

Summarize any organizational or strategic changes – mentioned in recent meetings, calls, or emails – that could impact the customer’s priorities or our partnership focus this quarter.

Remember: the more data you can gather and provide, the better the output will be. This is where a Customer Success Platform (CSP) can help, as it pulls CRM records, product usage data, and support history into one place for deeper analysis.

Collect Customer Performance and Sentiment Data

Once you’ve gathered all of your background context, it’s time to run a sentiment analysis on your account. Think of this as qualitative data; with the right AI tools, you can pull insights in record time for a pulse check on any account.

Watch out for the following:

• Customer statements about performance.
• References to success stories or frustration points.
• CSM notes on perceived ROI, outcomes, or narrative the customer is building internally.
• Any qualitative mentions of product or channel performance trends.
• Positive feedback, praise, or excitement about results, relationships, or roadmap.
• Tone and responsiveness in communications.
• References to renewal confidence, budget discussions, or overall engagement levels.

Sample Prompts

• From recent calls and emails, what does the customer’s language suggest about their perception of {Your Product’s} impact on their performance or ROI?
• Summarize the customer’s tone and attitude toward {Your Company} this quarter, including signs of confidence, hesitation, or friction.

Identify Patterns and Themes

Beyond sentiment, you can also use AI to identify patterns or trends ahead of your call. This can be useful for getting ahead of churn risks (assuming you have identified leading indicators of churn) and expansion opportunities.

To do this effectively, make sure to include:

• Topics that recur across conversations.
• Observations about how the customer frames success.
• Notable quotes or recurring phrases that capture their mindset.

Sample Prompt

What key themes or strategic insights emerge from the notes and transcripts that could shape our narrative in the upcoming QBR?

Build a Partnership Plan

This is where AI really starts to make an impact. The three steps above could easily take you hours, but with the right blend of AI and customer data, you can cut them down to minutes.

Now, it’s time to get strategic and shift your focus from reactive (what has my customer done in the past 3-6 months) to proactive (where do I want this account to be in 3-6 months).

Take time to think through and pull in the following data:

• 3–4 focus areas based on conversation themes.
• Any actions or next steps committed to in emails or calls.
• Risks to track (budget freeze, staff turnover, slow responses).
• Suggested discussion topics for QBR (value story, roadmap alignment, ROI proof points).

Sample Prompt

Based on recent discussions and relationship signals, what joint priorities and measurable actions should we focus on next quarter to demonstrate value and strengthen the partnership?

AI-Powered Tools to Automate QBRs

The AI tools available to customer success teams fall into two broad categories:

• Generative AI chat tools
• AI-powered Customer Success Platforms

 Each has different strengths depending on how it fits into your workflow. As you’ll see, the right answer for most teams is a combination of both.

General AI Assistants like ChatGPT and Claude

Who doesn’t love AI-powered chat tools these days? 

ChatGPT and Claude are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) that ingest content from across the web, including websites, videos, and even Reddit threads, and generate content most likely to match your prompt. Both offer the ability to paste in data, ask questions, and generate content in seconds, and with tools like Claude Cowork, you can even access files on your computer.

Their limitation for QBR prep is that they have no direct access to your customer data: you have to bring the context to them. So, when you type a generic prompt like “help me make a slide for an upcoming QBR meeting,” the output will be equally generic. What you and the LLMs need is context: context about the customer, the situation, and what you are looking for. 

That means copying in usage reports, CRM notes, and support summaries before each session. It can take time, but the effort put in is worth it. Check out our CSM prompt guide for a full walkthrough, including sample prompts.

Customer Success Platforms with Built-In AI

LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are a great starting point, but they have their limits.

For one, these tools require you to copy and paste all relevant customer, product, and revenue data into them, which can work if you are just getting started, but it’s difficult to do at scale. Fortunately, there are AI-powered platforms dedicated to the specific needs of Customer Success.

Some of the top Customer Success Platforms we recommend are:

• Vitally - great for fast-moving and innovative teams.
• ChurnZero - a solid legacy player in the CS space.
• Planhat - a flexible platform with great data warehousing capabilities.
• Gainsight - an enterprise-centric option if you have advanced needs.

Between these four, we recommend Vitally for innovative Customer Success teams that value integrating their data on a single platform and designing their processes their way, without sacrificing ease of use. 

Vitally empowers CS teams to embed AI in their processes, from meeting prep to call follow up, you can use Vitally to:

• Record and summarize calls
• Generate tasks and next steps
• Write emails
• Ask questions about an account
• Create and monitor custom health scores
• Spot trends and patterns in your data

And so much more. With Vitally AI, QBR prep becomes less about finding the data and more about deciding what to do with it.

Common Mistakes to Watch Out For

AI may feel like magic, but it’s anything but. 

Never forget that AI tools are limited by the context you provide them and are not perfect. We recommend watching out for the following critical mistakes:

• Feeding incomplete or outdated data
• Over-relying on them without oversight
• Using generic prompts

Feeding AI Incomplete or Outdated Data

AI outputs are only as reliable as the data you provide. 

If you paste in a usage report from two months ago, prompt AI with CRM notes that haven’t been updated since the last call, or exclude support ticket history entirely, the analysis will reflect those gaps. Before running any AI-assisted prep, audit your inputs: are they current, complete, and representative of the account’s actual situation?

Over-Relying on AI Without Human Review

AI-generated QBR prep is a starting point, not a finished product. 

It doesn’t know about the side conversation you had with a champion last week, the organizational change that’s affecting the account’s priorities, or your product roadmap and the different features that will interest your accounts. Every AI output requires CSM review before it reaches a customer. 

Remember: The goal is to make human judgment faster and better-informed, not to bypass it.

Using Generic Prompts That Produce Generic Outputs

A prompt like “summarize this account” will produce a summary, but it won’t produce insight. 

And you need insights heading into a QBR.

Effective QBR prompts specify the account’s strategic context, define the output format, and direct the AI toward the specific questions that matter for that meeting. Invest time in building a library of high-quality prompt templates, or use an AI-powered Customer Success Platform like Vitally to bring all of your data under one roof for deeper analysis.

Download the AI Prompt Book for CSMs

With the right blend of AI, you can automate QBR prep, pivoting your focus toward more strategic conversations with your customers. 

That means a lot less time sifting through and reacting to your data, and a lot more time steering accounts towards renewals and expansion. 

But AI can be used for so much more than QBR prep. We compiled a list of our favorite prompts to automate your CS workflows, from spotting churn risks to meeting follow-up. Save your favorite prompts, create a custom GPT, and see how much time you can save across all of your accounts.

Get your free copy.