AI is everywhere these days, so you might as well embrace it.
In all seriousness, while AI has stolen the spotlight over the last few years, we think it’s justified. Yes, AI has its limitations, but when used effectively, it can also be a major asset for scaling CS teams. According to a survey from Zendesk, 81% of CX leaders expect AI to change customer success for the better by 2027!
The key is to choose a platform that intentionally implements AI, rather than tacking on AI features for marketing buzz. In this article, we’ll walk you through the top Customer Success software platforms and examine their AI capabilities to help you make the right choice for your team.
How AI Can Aid Customer Success Teams
We've all heard the horror stories of AI running amok, offering car shoppers free Chevy pickup trucks or purchasing PlayStations for The Wall Street Journal staff.
We’re not going to tell you to flip a switch and let AI do all the thinking, writing, and communicating for you. But you can leverage AI in a way that allows you to provide a great customer experience at scale – and do so without checking your email every five minutes or working 10-hour days.
Here are the top ways that we see CS teams benefiting the most from AI:
- Automate repetitive tasks: While some tasks require a human touch to get right, others clog your workflow and slow you down. By identifying the low-hanging fruit of repetitive tasks in your workflow, you can offload them to AI and shave minutes or even hours from your day.
- Gather information on accounts: Who has time to sift through a year's worth of notes, transcriptions, tasks, and account info? AI tools can gather data into easy-to-read summaries, giving you an overview of each account at a glance before every customer interaction.
- Reveal key insights: Even data junkies can benefit from a bit of help in turning spreadsheets and charts into insights. AI tools can analyze data and summarize it for you, and even call out potential next steps and action items.
- Generate content: Again, a personal touch does wonders in minimizing churn or ensuring renewals, but does every email really need to be written from scratch? AI tools can analyze calls and customer sentiment, helping you write emails or create tasks as you manage accounts.
We’re just scratching the surface here. Read on to see what else the top Customer Success Platforms can do.
The Best Customer Success Platforms With AI Capabilities
We chose the following four software platforms based on their features, user reviews, functionality, and G2 ratings. The best AI-powered CS software platforms we found are:
- Vitally
- ChurnZero
- Planhat
- Gainsight
Vitally
Vitally is one of the leading Customer Success Platforms (CSPs) on the market. While it often earns high marks for its flexibility and ability to bring your data under one roof, its AI capabilities are not to be missed.
For starters, Vitally offers an AI Co-Pilot specifically designed for Customer Success. Its AI functionality is a triple-threat; you can:
- Capture insights at scale
- Automate repetitive tasks
- Turn knowledge into shared intelligence across your team
But pairing Vitally’s unified data model with its AI features is where the platform really shines. Vitally collects your usage data, notes, meeting transcripts, tickets and requests, conversations, NPS data, and more, and turns them into structured insights, allowing you to automate with confidence rather than second-guess every step.
Vitally does so much more than offer AI features; fast-moving CS teams rely on Vitally to automate entire workflows, forecast revenue, and deliver a fantastic customer experience at scale. As one of the most popular CSPs on the market, Vitally earns rave reviews from CS teams for its user-friendly interface and seamless integration capabilities, offering a variety of automated actions and extensive API support.
One customer says it best in a recent review:
“I really appreciate the AI copilot feature in Vitally. It enhances my experience significantly by allowing me to ask it to summarize recent touchpoints, including those I am not directly involved in, such as support emails. It also effectively summarizes my meetings with customers, providing me with the most up-to-date reminders, which is immensely helpful for managing multiple touchpoints and ensuring that no important detail is overlooked. Additionally, I found the initial setup to be fairly easy, making it accessible for my team from the start. Overall, these features make Vitally an invaluable tool for staying organized and efficient in customer success activities.”
It’s no wonder Vitally earns high marks with 4.5 stars on G2!
Top Features
ChurnZero
ChurnZero is a legacy CSP with several features to empower CSMs, along with AI-powered automation.
Like Vitally, ChurnZero offers AI functionality baked into the platform and has also added AI agents and assistants to help you automate tasks and cut down on busywork.
ChurnZero markets its agent functionality as “always-on digital teammates” that can summarize customer information, suggest tasks, and draft content. Access to these agents requires additional credits, which can be refilled at ChurnZero’s “AI Marketplace,” so you will need to factor that into your overall budget when estimating subscription costs.
As a legacy CSP, ChurnZero’s interface can be a bit more challenging than some of the newer upstarts on this list. As a result, it’s important to have the time and technical resources needed to implement ChurnZero and get the most out of its AI features. Here’s what one recent reviewer on G2 had to say:
“I would like to see the relationship map from Engagement AI have more flexibility and function. Also, wishing for an AI Agent that prescribes playbooks, as playbooks seem to be the most daunting part of automation and segmentation. Also, AI widgets for the custom dashboards would be beneficial to leverage AI data summaries effectively. The initial setup of ChurnZero was challenging, primarily due to internal development and technical blockers, taking over a year to complete our success center build.”
Top Features
- AI-powered automation and insights
- AI agent assistants
- Account segmentation and management
- Health score tracking
- Dashboards and reporting
- NPS tracking
Planhat
Planhat earns high marks in the industry for its flexibility and extensibility with data warehouses and other tools. Planhat users regularly cite both flexibility and robust data modeling and management as the platform’s top perks.
It's these advantages that come in handy when matched with AI functionality that can turn data into actionable insights. Planhat’s AI features allow you to integrate with leading AI platforms like Gemini, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and offer an MCP server for external agents. Like Vitally and ChurnZero, Planhat also offers agentic functionality that suggests action items and drafts content as well.
Altogether, Planhat is a powerful platform that can help your team scale. It’s no surprise that Planhat earns plenty of rave reviews for its AI features:
“The recent integration with our meeting notetaker has also been extremely valuable, automatically capturing AI-generated notes and logging them under the appropriate account.”
But, of the platforms on this list (other than Gainsight), Planhat is one of the more complex CSPs to use, as evidenced by this G2 review:
“I find some actions within Planhat aren't extremely intuitive and require a lot of training. It's not always easy to figure things out through self-discovery, which can be frustrating. I sometimes need to rely on the AI chatbot with Finn to understand how to use certain features or perform specific actions. It has also created some challenges with adoption on the CS team, as they'd sometimes rather default back to their own individual manual processes than take the time to figure out how to work in Planhat.”
Top Features
- Account segmentation and management
- AI-powered features built on GPT, Gemini, and Claude
- Data warehouse syncing
- Health score tracking
- Automation
- Dashboards and reporting
Gainsight
Of the platforms on this list, Gainsight is by far the most enterprise-centric option.
Gainsight purchased Staircase, an AI platform, in 2024 to add AI functionality to its expansive suite of products. With the acquisition of Staircase, Gainsight can offer AI-powered features to analyze customer sentiment, identify risks, forecast renewals, and automate tasks.
This was a big move for Gainsight and a shortcut to layering in AI on its platform.
Launched in 2021, Staircase automatically analyzes all customer interactions and turns them into real-time insights. The value here is Staircase’s ability to connect email accounts, meetings, chat, Slack, and ticketing systems to scan for interactions for insights. Now, Gainsight gets the same capabilities alongside the product and customer data it already collects.
Gainsight is a fantastic tool, but of the platforms on this list, it is best for enterprise use cases. For small and mid-market teams, Gainsight is likely overkill because of its complexity (the reporting tools alone require full-time attention) and price tag.
Top Features
- Customer 360 view
- Product adoption and usage tracking
- Automation
- Goals
- Customer journeys
- Surveys
- In-app engagement tracking
Why Customer Success Teams Love Vitally AI
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.
Here’s why:
- Purpose-built, not tacked on
- Works with all of your data
- Time-saving tools
Purpose-Built AI for CS
Many of these platforms have the same value proposition: your data + AI = automated customer success.
Where Vitally stands out among the rest is its purpose-built approach to implement AI with intentionality rather than as an afterthought. Yes, you can ask Vitally AI questions about your data and generate content like tasks and emails, but you also get powerful features like:
- AI-powered call summaries and insights
- AI-generated tasks, conversations, notes, and more
- Risk detection
- Custom Health Score tracking
This makes Vitally AI more than a ChatGPT wrapper layered onto a CSP. You get a centralized repository of every customer interaction and a powerful AI platform that allows you to turn your data into actionable insights and next steps in seconds.
Works With All of Your Data
When you’re managing 50 or 100+ accounts, it’s incredibly easy for customers to slip through the cracks and drop off – unless you have the data you need readily accessible.
The ability to connect to and bring all your data together is what separates Vitally from many CSPs on the market. Vitally integrates with your product and favorite tools to collect:
- Customer interactions
- Call transcripts
- Product usage
- Engagement
- Revenue and subscription data
And when you match that with a native AI, it’s like giving your CS team a superpower. Not to mention Vitally’s flexible reporting tools that allow you to build and share custom dashboards to review customers, forecast renewals, and much more.
Time-Saving Tools
Every second counts, and there’s probably no one who feels that more acutely than CSMs.
Vitally offers a ton of time-saving functionality that frees you up for high-impact relationship-building work. For example, in a matter of seconds, Vitally can:
- Identify at-risk accounts
- Pinpoint key interactions
- Draft meeting follow-ups
- Generate tasks and notes
- Capture call recordings and unlock real-time insights
That means post-call, you don’t need to sit down and review your notes to recall what happened and what to do next. In less time than it takes to grab a cup of coffee, Vitally does all that and more for you, allowing you to move on to the next call or task.
When you compare these platforms side-by-side, the difference becomes clear: Vitally gives CS teams the fastest path from raw data → insight → action.
Take a Product Tour to See Why 600+ CS Teams Love Vitally!
If you’re going to pick one tool from this list, we’d recommend selecting software purpose-built for CSMs' needs: a CSP like Vitally.
While many CSPs will offer the same suite of features to log customer data and generate 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.
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