TECHtonic: Trends in Technology and Services

Your CRM knows what happened. It doesn’t know why—or what’s about to happen next. That gap is costing revenue teams millions in preventable churn, missed expansion, and deals that slip away long before anyone saw it coming.
In this episode of TECHtonic, TSIA Executive Director Thomas Lah sits down with Alok Shukla, CEO and co-founder of Funnel Story, to explore a new category of technology: the AI-powered revenue intelligence layer. Unlike traditional CRM dashboards that report on structured activity data in a single point in time, Funnel Story’s patented composite model combines structured data (usage, revenue, activity), unstructured conversational data (calls, emails, notes), and third-party market signals—then reverse-engineers your full historical timeline to train itself from day one. Median deployment time: less than a day.
Alok introduces the concept of “needle movers”—AI-detected early warning patterns that surface months before churn or expansion become visible to any human. He shares a compelling real-world example where signals from three different organizational levels (an executive conversation, a support ticket, and a CSM interaction) were silently pointing to competitive risk—patterns that only emerged because of historical churn analysis. Without the intelligence layer connecting those dots, the account would have been marked “healthy” right up until it churned.
Drawing on his 20+ years in cybersecurity (McAfee, Intel Security, Imperva), Alok makes a powerful analogy: the Security Operations Center went from 80% people / 20% tech to nearly the inverse over 20 years—and that transformation is now coming for revenue and CS organizations. The leaders who will thrive are those who start thinking now about what it means to manage a fleet of agents rather than a team of reps.

Recorded live at the May 2026 TSIA Board Summit, this executive panel brings together technology and services leaders to explore how AI is transforming the future of customer engagement, professional services, support, sales, and education services.
Moderated by Thomas Lah and George Humphrey, the discussion dives into emerging business model trends shaping the technology industry, including forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), AI-native operating models, value realization frameworks, agentic workflows, outcome-based selling, and the evolving role of services organizations in driving revenue growth.
Panelists Kusal DeSilva of AptEdge, Prasad Sular of Certinia, Shari Cravens of HPE Digital Experience, Usman Nasir of Salesforce, Fotini Costopoulos of ServiceNow, and Kurt Kuelz of Siemens Digital Industries Software share real-world examples of how leading organizations are restructuring around customer outcomes, why services teams are playing an increasingly strategic role in the sales cycle, and the evolving skills technology professionals will need to thrive in an AI-first economy.
This candid, unscripted live discussion captures how leading companies are navigating one of the fastest technology shifts the services industry has ever experienced.

Recorded live at the 2026 TSIA Board Summit, held in May, Thomas Lah delivers a provocative and insightful keynote on why the AI era is forcing companies to fundamentally rethink their operating models, pricing strategies, and service organizations.
Drawing from nearly 30 years of experience advising global product companies, Thomas explains why today’s AI transformation is moving faster — and carrying higher stakes — than any previous business shift, including the rise of the internet and the move to “as-a-service” business models.
In this session, he introduces the “Services 2.0” framework: a practical model for navigating AI-driven business transformation while overcoming the two biggest obstacles companies face — organizational inertia and flawed business assumptions. He explores why outcome-based pricing is rapidly becoming unavoidable, how customer value delivery is evolving, and why service organizations are increasingly becoming central to enterprise growth strategies.
Thomas also shares research-backed insights into why most transformations fail, the leadership mindset required to succeed, and the specific operational capabilities companies must build now to remain competitive in the AI economy.

In this episode of TECHtonic, Thomas Lah of TSIA sits down with Michael Harnum, CEO of ESG Success, to unpack a bold idea reshaping the tech industry: Customer Success as a Service. As companies face mounting pressure to cut costs while still driving retention and growth, traditional customer success models are being pushed to their limits.
Michael shares how his experience scaling renewal operations and training services led to a broader, more holistic approach—helping organizations not just execute customer success, but design, optimize, and even outsource it. From building maturity assessments to leveraging AI for scalable success plans, the conversation dives into how companies can transform fragmented, underperforming CS functions into strategic growth engines.
If you’re grappling with churn, struggling to prove ROI, or wondering how to scale without adding headcount, this episode delivers practical insights and a fresh perspective on making customer success a true driver of business value.

In this episode of TECHtonic, host Thomas Lah sits down with Angelica Riemann, SVP and President of the CrossLab Group at Agilent Technologies, to unpack how a legacy hardware company is transforming into a modern, recurring-revenue powerhouse.
From its origins as a spinout of HP to becoming a global leader in lab innovation, Agilent is redefining what it means to deliver value—not just through instruments, but through an integrated ecosystem of services, consumables, software, and digital experiences.
Angelica reveals how Agilent is:
Building a “flywheel” of recurring revenue across the entire lab lifecycle
Navigating increasingly complex buying personas and pricing models
Leveraging AI and digital tools to transform both customer support and internal operations
Shifting from selling products to delivering outcomes and workflow solutions
The conversation also explores the future of enterprise buying—where frictionless digital experiences, self-service support, and even AI-to-AI transactions are reshaping how customers engage.
If you're in tech, services, or any industry facing disruption, this episode offers a powerful look at how to evolve your business model for a world that demands more value, speed, and flexibility.