Why customer-centric companies always win | Insights from Customer Support Executive

In this episode, Mala sits down with Kshama Swamy, VP of Customer Engineering and Success at CircleCI, for a practical conversation on customer engineering, AI adoption, enterprise software, and what it takes to build customer-centric teams at scale.Kshama’s career spans consulting, the Department of Defence, Cognos, IBM, Intapp, PAR, and now CircleCI. Across these roles, she has led support, services, customer success, and customer engineering teams across legal tech, restaurant tech, and developer infrastructure.In this conversation, Kshama shares how curiosity shaped her career pivots, why support is one of the best places to deeply understand a product, and how customer-facing teams can become more strategic by aligning to revenue, leading indicators, and shared accountability.Mala and Kshama also explore how AI is changing customer success and support, where automation works, where human relationships still matter, and how leaders should evaluate the flood of new AI tools entering the market.The conversation also gets into a critical question for today’s AI era: are teams truly creating business outcomes, or are they just experimenting? Kshama brings a grounded view from CircleCI, where AI-generated code is increasing rapidly, but the real test is whether that code reaches production and delivers value.This episode is especially relevant for founders, customer success leaders, support leaders, product teams, SaaS operators, AI builders, and anyone selling into technical or enterprise customers.________________________________________________________Timestamps00:00 – Introducing Kshama Swamy, VP of Customer Engineering at CircleCI01:10 – Cognos, IBM, and the early path into customer success02:08 – Moving from legal tech to restaurant tech with Punchh and PAR02:33 – Joining CircleCI and entering the CI/CD developer infrastructure space03:56 – How executives manage the learning curve in a new role04:24 – Why support is the best place to understand product and customer pain05:42 – Building customer-centric organizations through internal language and shared accountability06:30 – Aligning support, success, product, marketing, and revenue07:12 – How CircleCI uses AI across support, success, and services09:00 – Evaluating AI tools and choosing vendors that can evolve with you10:02 – Advice for founders selling into customer engineering leaders11:26 – Navigating leadership, gender, and customer relationships12:35 – AI-generated code, experimentation, and the production gap13:45 – Why AI ROI will matter more than experimentation15:10 – Upskilling teams through quarterly goals and hands-on AI implementation16:10 – Measuring which AI experiments actually land________________________________________________________🔗 Connect with Kshama Swamy → https://www.linkedin.com/in/kshamaswamy/🔗 Connect with Mala Ramakrishnan → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malaramakrishnan🎧 Subscribe to the podcastYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnL3D6aI60R-cCvypFIkh4ASpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NIDE4cT5fuVjC3HaGbCDK?si=eoSTNmhqQNKHQl9d1Jx0UQApple Podcast: https://podcastsconnect.apple.com/my-podcasts/show/talking-to-the-leaders-of-ai-the-ceo-series-with-mala/22ad2bae-502b-4eb1-aa74-53bc79754db7Visit our Website: https://malaramakrishnan.com | https://founderscreative.org#MalasPodcast #KshamaSwamy #CircleCI #CustomerEngineering #CustomerSuccess #CustomerSupport #AIAdoption #EnterpriseAI #CICD #DeveloperTools #SaaS #TechLeadership #WomenInTech #CustomerCentricity #AIinBusiness #B2BSaaS #ProductLeadership #EngineeringLeadership #FutureOfWork #StartupFounders