EP016: Launching Uncommon

Jay and Jeff debrief last week's AI Show & Tell — 150 customer leaders watching four real builds in production. A custom CS platform in Claude Code. A sales reference agent. Renewal workflows that adapt to customer health. Plus the launch of Uncommon, a new community for AI-forward customer leaders: https://www.chiefcustomerofficer.io/uncommon Join us live for AI Demo Day on May 27 at 2pm ET: https://luma.com/i3kbo9m2 KEY TAKEAWAYS Build, don't buy: A CS leader stood up her own CS platform in Claude Code in two weeks. Her token costs are already lower than the SaaS subscriptions she replaced. The data layer is the moat: Whether you centralize via a data lake or wire connectors through MCP, your data architecture is the foundation everything else stands on. Every department needs a builder: Instead of departmental software, every team needs an ops person — or a manager — who can build with AI. From soft to hard agents: Most early use cases just surface information. The real lift comes from agents that draft, schedule, and act on your behalf. Renewal workflows that adapt: A 90-day renewal flow that reshuffles tasks based on customer health markers beats any generic checklist. Skills belong at the team level: Stop emailing markdown files around. Treat skills like internal products with owners, evals, and version control. Company-as-code: Balboa OS lives in markdown, distributed via GitHub to OneDrive to every team member's machine. Update once, push to all. Humans are still a moat: Automate the prep, but human relationships and judgment are not getting commoditized any time soon. CHAPTERS 00:00 - Welcome and morning chaos 02:32 - Why we ran an AI Show & Tell 04:30 - A custom CS platform built in Claude Code 08:20 - Data security, privacy, and the engineering layer 12:50 - Every department needs an ops person who can build 14:52 - The data layer as the real foundation 16:50 - An AI-powered sales reference agent 19:17 - Jeff's Fathom-to-PlanHat task automation 23:54 - A renewal workflow that adapts to health markers 27:27 - Skills, coaching, and enterprise-wide sharing 30:14 - Balboa OS: turning your company into code 33:20 - Why evals matter as models change 35:00 - Launching Uncommon for AI-forward CS leaders 42:10 - Why "Uncommon"? Bold decisions create the advantage About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it. Your Hosts: Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io