Building for the Agentic Learner With Talya Reynolds

In this episode of CX Signals, Samantha sits down with Talya Reynolds, former Manager of Customer Education, AI & Automations at Pendo, to explore what it looks like to build customer education infrastructure for a world where the learner is no longer always human — and why the people who understand how to design for learning are about to become the most important people in the room.Talya stumbled into customer education the way most of us do — sideways, and completely by accident. A master's in conflict resolution, early instructional design work, a CS role at a boot-stage startup — none of it was planned. By the time she landed at Pendo, her north star for years, her conviction was clear: customer education's biggest problem wasn't content — it was that the field had never learned to define the business problem it was actually solving.What makes Talya's perspective so sharp is how far ahead of the curve she was building. At Pendo, she owned "Pendo on Pendo" — their own in-product learning experience — which gave her a rare opportunity to architect a fully orchestrated learning motion using the very tool she was educating customers on. What she discovered reframes the debate our industry keeps having about whether academies are dying. They're not dying. The learner is changing.We dig into how Talya went cross-functional — aligning marketing, lifecycle, community, and CS teams around shared definitions of adoption and health. We get into the data infrastructure behind it: combining Salesforce, Zendesk, and unstructured call data to build a true picture of user maturity. And we go deep on modular content architecture — why managing bite-sized, tagged content from a single source of truth is the foundational move that makes omnichannel orchestration actually possible. The boring infrastructure work, it turns out, is what makes the agentic future viable.In this episode, we cover:Why the agentic era doesn't kill academies — it demands better onesHow Talya used product telemetry, ticket data, and AI to build a unified picture of user maturity at PendoModular content architecture: the unglamorous unlock for in-product delivery, omnichannel distribution, and AI personalizationCross-functional alignment — how she got marketing, lifecycle, and CS on the same page without stepping on toesCurating the corpus: what it means for CE leaders to define guardrails, build feedback loops, and govern agentic learningGetting your team bought in on AI: why a skills hackathon changed everythingIf you've been feeling the pressure of AI adoption and wondering what your role looks like on the other side of it, this episode will reframe the whole conversation.Chapters:00:10 The Signal02:05 Falling Into Customer Ed Head Over Feet07:44 From Order Taker to Learning Orchestrator11:36 Pendo on Pendo — The Dream Come True22:14 The Cross-Functional Long Game30:56 Modular Content Is the Infrastructure Play39:00 When the UI Disappears — The Agentic Future44:52 Stop the Fear, Start With Your TeamConnect with Talya on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jillglynn/ Connect with Samantha on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-murray613/   Connect with Courtney on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/courtney-sembler/