How to Use AI in Your Renewal Management Process: A Guide for CS Teams

Today, your customers treat renewals as fresh evaluations rather than as a continuation of service. 

Especially in B2B software, companies that may have renewed without blinking in the past are now actually reading contracts and asking for ROI breakdowns. You can add the weird economy, budget constraints, or champions leaving to the mix as well. 

At the same time, CSM teams are increasingly responsible for revenue, putting your renewal record squarely in one of the most pivotal roles you can play for your company. How are modern CSM teams supposed to handle the load with less time and resources than ever?

AI – but not the way you’d think. 

In this guide, we’ll give you a practical breakdown on how to incorporate AI into your renewal process. We’ll include how to leverage AI, how to measure its impact, and the best software to use.

How AI is Transforming Customer Success

Think AI is just for automating “check-in” emails? Think again.

Sure, there are plenty of companies that use AI for basic tasks like support or content generation, but they’re limiting themselves. Customer Success teams that use AI to augment, rather than replace, their processes are the ones seeing real ROI.

That means exploring ways to:

• Automate key tasks: AI tools can turn call recordings into actionable next steps, update customer health scores, and much more. Think of all the repetitive tasks that suck up your time and don’t move the needle; chances are, AI can handle them.
• Speed up the time to insights: AI can ingest large amounts of data from customer interactions and other sources, allowing you to spot trends faster or even ask the AI about your own data.
• Empower teams to do more at scale: This means you can support more customers faster. CSMs provide tremendous value through the relationship-building work they do with customers. With AI, you can free up more hours for that higher-value work and support more customers without tearing your hair out.

We’ve all heard the audacious claims made about AI tools and how they will transform the workplace, so here’s a story that grounds you in reality and, hopefully, inspires you. Meet Triptease, a Vitally customer that reclaimed 30% of CSM time, all thanks to Vitally’s AI.

Triptease had a problem: The Customer Success team was juggling multiple tools, products, and subscriptions for customer account management and had no visibility into churn. With revenue on the line and no clear picture, they needed a solution. Larry Hogan, VP of Customer Success, chose Vitally.

“Before Vitally, if I asked a CSM, ‘What’s your churn rate this quarter?’, the answer was, ‘I don’t know, I’ll tell you at the end of the quarter.’ If your bonus is based on a number and you don’t know that number until the end of the quarter, how can someone maintain their sanity?… The concept of being a truly strategic CSM was impossible before. With the AI features in Vitally, now they actually have the time and visibility to do the work they were hired to do.”‍

Larry Hogan

Global VP of Customer Success & Support at Triptease

You can read the full story here.

The big question for CS leaders is whether AI makes teams more efficient (doing the same work with fewer people) or more effective (enabling better outcomes with existing headcount). The companies getting this right use AI to augment CSM judgment, not replace it.

Where AI Can Fuel Your Renewal Process

The above is theoretical, so let’s get tactical. The following are the best ways to incorporate AI into your renewal management processes:

• Identify at-risk accounts
• Save time and automate with playbooks
• Personalize outreach at scale 

Identify At-Risk Accounts

Rather than pore over your CRM records by hand or take time every day to run a gut check on your accounts, you can let AI do the heavy lifting for you to spot renewal risks well ahead of schedule.

With the right Customer Success Platform, you’ll get access to powerful features like:

• Health scores: Custom health scores that factor in product usage data, engagement signals, and support sentiment can help you gauge account health and drill into your biggest churn risks in seconds.
• NPS: In addition to customer health, tracking NPS (Net Promoter Score) can give you a bird's-eye view of how your customers feel about the product and how much value they derive from it
• Note-taking and call recording: Paying close attention to your accounts will pay dividends when it comes to spotting churn signals early. Any examples of frustrations, questions about exporting data, or mentions of competitors are red flags. With AI-powered note-taking, you can record and transcribe every call and ask for warning signs to stay on top of.
• Ask questions about your data: Some platforms even allow you to ask questions about an account: things like “what are the top risk signals threatening renewal?” or “how can I best prepare for this upcoming call?”

You can’t just ask a few questions and leave it at that, though. Work the above into your renewal process:

• 120 days out: Leverage the above for early warning signs of churn so you can get ahead of it. Tune health scores around usage declines, support sentiment, or budget conversations.
• 90 days out: Look for signs of buying friction. This could be budget pushback, hesitation about expansion, or requests for ROI.
• 30 days out: Flag any risks to closing and locking in a renewal. Things like lapses in communication, contract revisions, or delayed approvals.

This is a lot to manage on your own, but with the AI-powered features above, you can identify risks and get ahead of renewal threats well in advance.

Save Time and Automate With Playbooks

The key to managing renewals at scale is to systematize as much as possible. At least, that’s if you want to hit your numbers while staying sane. 

Systematization is a buzzword, though, so here are some practical examples where AI can help automate processes and save you hours of time:

• Automate messages or task creation based on churn signal triggers from above.
• Break down your processes into steps and remove yourself from the process. Whether it’s a 90-day renewal playbook or a process to save an account when churn signals flare up.
• Generate call summaries, tasks, and recommendations for next steps with AI after customer calls.
• Automate QBR prep by pulling in insights and helping create presentations.

For a little inspiration, learn how Compt automates its renewal process to improve retention while saving time. With Vitally’s Playbook automation, Compt set up Playbooks triggered by an Account to kick off a series of automated emails and tasks ahead of renewal.

“We no longer need to start each renewal from scratch and determine which steps we need to take, Vitally determines what needs to be done automatically and assigns the tasks to the right people accordingly.”

Mary Migiano

Senior Customer Success Manager - Team Lead at Compt

Personalize Outreach at Scale

AI can’t fully replace you, but with the right training, it can sound a lot like you and save you time by stepping in for lower-value tasks. 

Whether you need help drafting a post-call email, thinking up tasks and action items after interacting with a customer, or drafting renewal reminders, AI can help.

For example, Vitally’s AI Copilot can help you:

• Draft follow-ups by analyzing call transcripts.
• Generate personalized emails for every account
• Extract next steps and create tasks

Remember, it’s not about removing the human touch from the process, but about making it scalable. Having a good product goes a long way to locking in renewals, but it’s not the only factor. Being supportive, helpful, and empathetic about your customers' concerns counts too; the question is whether you can deliver that experience on your own or need a boost.

How to Integrate AI into Your Renewal Management Workflow

You’ll need to do a bit more than sign up for a ChatGPT subscription to fold AI into your workflows, but that doesn’t mean you’re in for a complicated process. Just follow the four steps below:

1. Centralize your data
2. Define signals and triggers
3. Choose your stack
4. Iterate and optimize as you go

Centralize Your Customer Data

The better your data, the better the output of any AI tool will be. 

Start by ensuring you have all relevant data in one place so you can train any AI tool you use and guide its outputs. That means finding a way to blend the following:

• Communications data
• Subscription data
• Product usage data
• Support tickets and escalations

Remember Triptease from earlier? The main blocker for them – and benefit from Vitally – was the fact that their data was spread across too many broken systems. Bringing your data together under one roof gives you (and your AI tool) all the relevant details to determine whether an account is likely to renew, so make sure your data is accessible before moving on to the next steps.

Define Your Renewal Signals and Triggers

Once you have your raw data in order, it’s time to give your AI tool guardrails to help it analyze your customers and make recommendations. Take some time to list out the renewal signals and risks you most commonly see in your customer base. These could be things like:

• Budget conversations
• Requests to export data
• Champions leaving the company
• Increased or decreased product usage

The time you spend here will help ensure that any AI tools you use generate relevant outputs aligned with your business and resonate with your customers.

Choose Your Tool Stack

With those ducks in a row, now it’s time to choose your tool stack. You could settle for a ChatGPT or Claude subscription, but non-specialized tools will result in non-specialized outputs. 

We find that the best AI tools for Customer Success are the ones built with Customer Success in mind. Our four favorites are:

• Vitally: Vitally's AI Copilot captures insights at scale, automates repetitive tasks, and turns knowledge into shared team intelligence. Vitally is flexible, easy to use, and quick to implement. Vitally’s strength lies in its ability to collect usage data, notes, transcripts, tickets, and NPS data and turn them into structured insights.
• ChurnZero: ChurnZero offers AI-powered "always-on digital teammates" that summarize customer information, suggest tasks, and draft content. AI agents require additional credits from their "AI Marketplace."
• Planhat: Planhat excels in flexibility and data-warehouse integration, with AI features that integrate with Gemini, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Unlike Vitally and ChurnZero, Planhat mainly leans on external AI functionality rather than native features.
• Gainsight: The most enterprise-centric option. Gainsight acquired Staircase in 2024 to add AI capabilities for sentiment analysis, risk identification, renewal forecasting, and task automation.

Each of them packs in a ton of useful features that can assist and automate your renewal process, so choosing one comes down to:

• Budget
• Implementation timeline
• How well their features suit your needs

While all four platforms offer strong AI capabilities, Vitally stands out for innovative CS teams that value speed and the ability to build their processes their way. That’s because Vitally gives you the full flexibility to set up your workflows and processes your way, while packaging it in an intuitive platform that inspires your team rather than overwhelms them.

Here’s what one customer has to say about Vitally’s AI capabilities on G2:

“In just one year, Vitally has fundamentally transformed our Partner Success organization… it has truly become the central nervous system for all our customer-facing activities. The new AI-powered features are phenomenal. The Meeting Recorder automatically joins, transcribes, and summarizes our Zoom calls, and the AI Copilot helps us instantly uncover risks and key insights from across the entire customer account. The AI meeting summaries alone have been a massive time-saver and have significantly improved our post-meeting follow-up.”

Iterate and Optimize Based on Results

At every step, take a moment to review and assess. Remember, you’re implementing AI to reduce churn, so review your topline metrics:

• Gross Renewal Rate
• Net Revenue Retention
• Churn Rate
• NPS
• CSAT

And so on. 

We’ve all heard the horror stories of brands that ran wild with AI, harming their customer relationships in the process. One SaaS founder shared on Reddit that they replaced half their support team with AI, and churn increased as a result. The reason was simply that they considered the “close rate” for tickets a success metric, thereby incentivizing their AI tool to close tickets even when customers were not satisfied. 

Review to make sure the steps you take are forward, not lateral or backward.

4 AI Prompts to Add to Your Renewal Workflow Right Now

Alright, choosing enterprise-level software to gradually phase in and automate your renewal process is a tall order. Especially when your day-to-day is already stacked with calls, QBR prep, and team meetings.

Fair enough. If you’re still hesitant to dive into the deep end of the AI pool, here are four prompts you can use in your LLM of choice. Be warned: they will lack the full context of your company, customer, and communications history, but they’ll save you some time and show you how AI can elevate your workflow:

1. “Here’s usage + support + renewal date. Identify 5 specific risks and 5 expansion hypotheses. Tie each to a stakeholder persona and suggest 1 slide idea per point.”
2. “Here is a call transcript with an account. Give me a summary. Date and time of call: Who were the attendees, topics, and what were the next steps?”
3. Generate a customer meeting agenda using the last 30 days of activity: Slack messages, emails, support tickets, product usage, and previous meeting notes."
4. “Here is a sample of product usage and subscription data. Please flag risks and trigger interventions based on usage, sentiment, engagement, and related factors. Benchmarks and recommendations are great.”

With these four, you can begin to see how useful AI is for meeting prep, meeting follow-up, and alerting you of risks. Imagine what you could do with a dedicated CSP!

What Not to Automate: Best Practices When Using AI

A good way to think about AI in a young CS function is to start with the parts of your workflow that repeat every week. That’s where you’ll get quick wins without over-engineering anything.

No, AI can’t lock in renewals outright. But the right blend of AI with a human touch can direct your CSMs to the highest-risk customers, preventing churn before it becomes a major problem.

We’ll leave you with a few best practices before we close:

• Start with clear goals: Are you trying to reduce churn by 15%? Maintain renewals while consolidating your CSM team by 10%? Without concrete metrics, you'll end up with expensive technology that does interesting things but doesn't move the needle on what actually matters to your business.
• Phase AI in gradually: Always start simple. The goal isn’t to make AI visible; it’s to make your customers' experience smoother and to help them get more value faster. Every hour you free up is another hour you can spend on real customer conversations. Pick a small number of quick-win projects to work on first.
• Match AI with human judgment: Use AI for pattern recognition and operational tasks, but keep strategic decisions and relationship management firmly in human hands. AI excels at flagging a customer whose usage dropped 40% last month, and your CSM excels at understanding whether that's because their busy season ended (fine) or because a key champion left the company (crisis). 
• Keep an eye on your data: AI is only as good as the data feeding it, and garbage in means garbage out. Regularly audit whether your usage data is capturing meaningful signals, your CRM hygiene is solid, and your health scores actually correlate with retention outcomes. If CSMs aren't consistently updating account information or if your product telemetry has gaps, your AI models will generate misleading insights, eroding trust in the system.

If we could sum up all these recommendations, though, it’d be this: Start slow and prioritize work that takes time but doesn't generate value. A great place to start is reviewing your day-to-day workflow for repetitive tasks or things you’d like to offload. You’ll be surprised by how much you can get done with a little automation.

Take a Product Tour to See Why 600+ CS Teams Love Vitally

So buyers are pickier than ever and looking through a microscope at every financial decision.

With the right blend of AI in human-driven workflows, you can make renewals a breeze while spotting churn risks well in advance. 

You just need the right software.

While many CSPs offer the same suite of features for logging customer data and generating reports, Vitally stands out for its integration capabilities, flexibility, and speedy implementation timeline.

You don’t have to take our word for it – and you don’t even need to schedule a demo (though you can here, if you’d like). Click the button below to take a product tour of Vitally. You’ll see the best that Vitally has to offer, and how your CS team can serve customers at scale.