Lovable, Harvey & Assembly AI: How the Fastest AI Companies Rebuilt Customer Success. And Why NPS and Activity Scores Are Dead

**The Forward Deployed / Customer Success track at SaaStr AI 2026 **turned into something closer to an autopsy and a rebirth at the same time. Leaders from the fastest-growing companies in B2B + AI got on stage and said versions of the same thing: the post-sales playbook most of us spent the last decade building is now a liability.

The data backs it up. The CSM role grew over 700% through Q2 2022 and then flatlined for four years running. Over that same window, forward deployed engineering is up more than 1,000% and still climbing. That is not a rebrand. That is a structural shift in where the work lives and who does it.

Here’s what each speaker actually said, and the specific numbers behind it.

The Top 10 Unexpected Learnings:

**The CSM title is a tax on your customer experience.**Ryan Seams (Assembly AI) watched technical buyers physically go defensive the moment he said “head of customer success.” Renaming the role to forward deployed engineer filled a recruiting pipeline that the “technical account manager” title couldn’t, two candidates in 2.5 months versus a full pipeline, with no change to the actual job.**Saying “AI-powered” signals you’re behind, not ahead.**Monica Perez (Lovable) stopped leading with AI entirely. Her logic: AI is becoming the baseline, the water the fish swims in, so making it the headline reads as not thinking ten steps ahead. The moment you stop saying AI in every sentence is the moment you’re actually AI-native.**A traditional, on-site, “2001-looking” CS motion can still be the right answer.**Tom Ronen (Harvey) runs EBRs, heavy on-site work, and old-school change management frameworks at an $11B company, and tells other CS leaders to do the same. Selling AI into a law firm isn’t selling software, it’s selling a change in how 30-year partners work.**Adoption is now the starting line, not the finish.**Ronen’s point: a firm can log into Harvey constantly without changing how it operates. The old SaaS shorthand of “good seat utilization equals a safe renewal” breaks with AI, where daily use of the wrong workflows still means churn.**A single change-management document drove 2x revenue.**Ronen cited a Harvard study of 1,515 startups: same AI tools, same training, but the group that got one document on how teams like theirs had succeeded showed 2x more revenue and was 18% more likely to acquire paying customers. The human layer, not the model, moved the number.**NPS is dead, and the panel said so unanimously.**Bobby Cooper’s panel with Ursula Llabres (Content Square), Ashvin Vaidyanathan (LinkedIn), and Daniel Silverstein (Carta) agreed: low response rates where non-responders are the churners, no clean correlation to GRR, and a heavy translation layer to action it. Llabres flagged a real gap, a great NPS score sitting next to weak retention.**Over half of CSM activity has zero correlation with retention.**Cooper’s (Retention Intelligence) platform data shows more than 50% of what CSMs do doesn’t tie to the goals on their plate. The fix from Vaidyanathan (LinkedIn): map every activity, human or agent, to whether it changes the product outcome in the intended window, and cut what doesn’t.**Moving the “closed-won” line into implementation crushed churn.**Cooper’s case from Weave: a deal only counted as booked once the customer hit a success threshold inside implementation, not at signature. That fixed the handoff, aligned sales to qualify better, and took churn from 4% per month to roughly half a percent while scaling from $8M to $200M ARR through IPO.**The fastest companies to $100M ARR are all developer tools, and that’s the tell.**John Gleason (SuccessVP): Cursor (12 months), Bolt (14), Lovable (8), Replit’s agent ($10M to $100M in six). Code inherits high context and verifiable correctness for free. Every other domain has to engineer those conditions, and that engineering is the new job of CS.**You can rebuild your CS stack yourself, and version it weekly.**Perez (Lovable) replaced Gainsight with a command center built on Lovable, maintained like a product with a feature backlog and weekly releases. She’s not technical. Her argument: the team closest to the customer should build the tool, and waiting on a vendor’s roadmap is now the constraint, not the budget.

Monica Perez, Lovable: 5 Counterintuitive Moves From the Fastest Company to $400M

Lovable is the fastest company in the world to $400M, and Perez leads customer success there. Her framing of CS is broader than CSMs: it’s every person whose job is to close the gap between what you sold and what the customer actually experiences. She walked through five moves that felt wrong but worked.

Move 1: Stop talking about AI as the headline. Every deck in the room said “AI-powered,” including hers. Her point: leading with AI signals you’re not thinking ten steps ahead. AI is becoming the baseline, the ambient layer that powers everything, not the story. If you’re the fish, AI is the water. Lovable’s onboarding doesn’t start with what AI can do. It starts with what the customer will unlock. The moment you stop saying AI in every sentence is the moment you actually become AI-native.

Move 2: Rewire the clock. Quarterly cycles, 90-day plans, QBRs, annual renewals. All of it was built for products that shipped a couple times a year. Lovable ships multiple times a day, so CS has to move at product speed. Her own hiring proved the point: a one-week work trial where she onboarded a real Fortune 100 customer before she was even hired, then met every single customer in her first 30 days. No 90-day plan survives a world that changes completely in 90 days. Every customer gets a Slack channel with an AI bot scoped to their specific instance, their projects, their users, even their contract terms. Hundreds of individualized bots, no harder to build than one.

Move 3: Design for experiences, not activities. CS has been organized around who runs onboarding, who owns the renewal, who handles implementation. That ships your org chart to the customer. Customers don’t want an org chart, they want an outcome. Lovable has a full-time team running hackathons at customer offices. At T-Mobile, teams shipped over 100 working applications in a single day. They offer product management and engineering as a service. They run founder masterminds on Discord 24/7. And it changes who you hire: builders, not playbook-runners. “Show me your projects” beats “tell me your process.”

Move 4: Control your stack. Tools used to amplify humans. Then SaaS flipped it and humans started managing tools, 15 logins and 12 dashboards. Rigid tools also move on 12-month cycles, so if a tool moves slower than your team, the tool is the constraint. Lovable rebuilt its entire CS platform on Lovable, replacing Gainsight with a command center they version weekly. It tracks the portfolio in real time, surfaces risks and expansion before they become fires, and generates individualized living customer hubs. Her message: you don’t need to be technical to own your stack.

Move 5: Value and revenue are the same thing. Consumption and credit-based billing flips the incentive structure. The more a customer uses the product, the more they pay, so revenue is driven by adoption, and adoption is driven by everything CS does. No awkward upsell, just “let me help you do more of what’s working.” Her proof point: EXP Realty ran a company-wide hackathon, built 27 real products including a transaction management system and a microsite generator, replaced two major tools, saved over $1M, and then launched an internal app store so anyone could keep building. In an AI world, possibility is no longer impressive. Proof is.

Tom Ronen, Harvey: Change Management Is the Moat, Not the Cost

Harvey is the leading AI platform for legal, crossing $190M ARR in January, used by over 100,000 attorneys across 60+ countries and 1,500+ organizations, at an $11B valuation. The number that doesn’t make headlines: nine major releases