Are Forward-Deployed Engineers The New Customer Success Managers?
What does it actually look like when a company decides the old customer success model isn't working and builds something new in its place?
Facilitated by Jay Nathan, CEO of Balboa, and featuring Chad Horenfeldt, Head of Customer Success at Avoca, this peer discussion will explore what it takes to rebuild a customer success function for an AI-native world, including the role changes, the tradeoffs, and the hard calls that come with it.
At Avoca, the traditional CSM role is gone. In its place: the Technical Account Manager. TAMs are hands-on, technically fluent, and obsessed with customer outcomes. They can diagnose whether a problem is a bug, a config issue, or a model hallucination. They partner with forward-deployed engineers to unlock integrations and customizations that would have taken months before. And the commercial motion lives somewhere else entirely, because asking one person to go deep technically and carry a number is often how you get mediocrity at both.
Chad will walk through the actual decisions Avoca made, the reasoning behind them, and what has worked and what hasn't. If you've sensed that CS needs to change in the AI era but haven't seen a concrete model for what that looks like, this session is built for you.
Together, we'll explore how CS and CX leaders are:
Redefining CS roles for AI-native products and consumption-based business models
Separating technical depth from commercial ownership (and why that separation matters)
Deciding when a TAM or FDE model makes more sense than a traditional CSM structure
Partnering customer success and engineering to drive real, measurable customer outcomes
Thinking about the long-term architecture of customer-facing teams as AI products mature
This is a candid conversation about what CS actually needs to become. Bring your questions, your org chart frustrations, and your lessons learned.