Most SaaS companies talking about AI right now are talking about copilots, ways to make existing software look smarter without changing what they actually sell. Gainsight did something more drastic. It built an agent that can run a customer renewal end-to-end, tried to sell that agent as a product, watched the pitch fail, and made the harder call: stop selling the software and start selling the renewal itself. It's a live test of the SaaS-to-AI native services (AINS) transition most companies are still only talking about, and it's running inside a private-equity-owned business with real debt obligations and a large software franchise it can't afford to walk away from.
Gainsight was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2020 for a little over a billion dollars and today runs several hundred million dollars in SaaS revenue. Chuck Ganapathi took over as CEO roughly a year ago and announced at the company's customer conference a few months back that Gainsight would begin selling outcomes directly. At our AINS event in New York this summer, General Partner Jake Saper sat down with Chuck to talk through the decision, the pushback, and what's transpired since.
Jake: Why make this change to selling outcomes at all? You're running a large, profitable software business.
Chuck: It started before I became CEO. We asked who's going to build the agentic version of a customer success manager, not a human CSM, an AI one. We broke down everything a CSM does and landed on renewals as the clearest place to start. We built a renewal agent and took it to a few pilot customers.
It didn't go how we expected. When you sell someone software, they want to buy software. They ask about seat price the same way they always have. And customers didn't know how to use it. Bringing in an agent-led workflow with humans still in the loop asked for organizational change most teams weren't ready for. That's when we stopped trying to sell the tool and decided to own the whole outcome instead.
Jake: You're owned by a private equity firm that bought a software company. What was that conversation like?
Chuck: PE understands margin inversion, but the version they know is buying a low-margin business and cutting opex (R&D, sales and marketing, G&A) to make it high-margin. Historically they bought software companies with great gross margins and very high CAC, then cut the CAC to expand margin. What I had to explain was that this version runs through cost of goods sold instead.
I wrote an internal post for Vista's leadership and called it "COGS is the new CAC." In an agentic business it flips: CAC is low, and the cost lives in COGS, because the tokens and the humans in the loop both sit there. Cost starts high because agentic delivery is expensive up front, and the bet is that automation brings it down over time. Once I framed it in language they already used for evaluating other businesses, they got it immediately.
Jake: Who do you hire to build something like this inside a company that's never done it before?
Chuck: We built Atlas as effectively a separate company inside Gainsight. The first hire was a former co-founder of mine who'd gone from AWS to WeWork to a technology-enabled HR outsourcing firm, someone with a track record of moving from pure engineering into services. Our core software business essentially funded his small team the way a venture firm would fund a startup.
Once we decided to build the actual services layer, we needed someone to run the operational side, blending human and agent work. We found Grant Clarke, twenty years in BPO before moving to Dropbox to run revenue operations and analytics. Deep services experience paired with real exposure to an AI-native engineering culture is rare, and it turned out to be exactly what the role needed.
Jake: Where does Atlas actually land inside a customer? You're not walking in and offering to take over their whole renewals team.
Chuck: No. We found our landing wedge via the Pareto principle: 80 percent of the revenue comes from 20 percent of the customers, the big enterprise accounts, and that's where all the attention goes. Then there's a long tail, hundreds of small accounts that add up to the other 20 percent. They're a pain to serve and they've never been worth the cost of a human team, in-house or outsourced. So companies ignore them and accept a high churn rate. You don't want to kill that revenue, you just don't want to spend on it. We go to that company and say, give us that $20 million of ARR and we'll renew it for you. That becomes our revenue under management, the way a fund has assets under management. A customer paying you five grand a year has never gotten the white-glove treatment. Now an agent can give it to them, at economics that finally work.
Jake: I want to flag the landing strategy here, because it generalizes. There are two ways to enter a market as an AINS company. One is head-to-head with the incumbent provider: do the same job faster, better, and cheaper. The other is what you did: find the work nobody was doing because nobody could afford to do it, and take that. It's a version of the Jevons paradox. When a service gets cheap enough, people don't just switch vendors, they buy more of it than they ever did. You're not displacing anyone on these accounts. You're getting paid for renewals that used to be left to chance, and the expansion paths come from the same place.
So what's changed since you launched?
Chuck: First was pricing. We priced against revenue under management, but our own sales team kept defaulting back to flat contract pricing instead, because it was simpler to sell and easier to earn commission on. That took real retraining.
Second was what I'd call emergent work. Agents perform well enough that they create demand nobody planned for. A small account that used to get almost no attention starts getting real, responsive service, and suddenly that customer is asking for things we never scoped, and telling other customers about it. We're still figuring out where to draw the line, because chasing all of it without discipline is exactly how the margin math falls apart.
Jake: How do you know if any of this is actually working?
Chuck: Gross margin is the output, not something I obsess over day to day, because right now it's not pretty and I know why. What I watch is renewal autonomy rate: what share of a renewal cycle (outreach, negotiation, paperwork) gets handled by an agent versus a human. And revenue per renewal manager, the human-in-the-loop equivalent of ARR per FTE. It's early, but I know the shape of the curve we're on.
Jake: Five years out, does the software business still exist?
Chuck: It does, and it stays healthy. I have debt service to make every year that a venture-backed startup doesn't, so I don't have the option to burn that bridge the way some founders can. But the software business alone can't be how we grow anymore. The market for customer success software is close to saturated. The only real growth path is going deeper into our own space instead of chasing adjacent markets we don't have a right to win in. My expectation is the AINS business ends up five times the size of the software business in five years, while the software business keeps performing well in its own right.
Jake: What makes a company a good candidate for this kind of shift?
Chuck: Finding a golden zone. The function has to be important enough that your buyer feels some pressure around it, but not so critical that they'd never hand it to anyone outside their own team. Repetitive enough to automate, but with enough real variation that it isn't just RPA. And the customer experience has to matter: high stakes, but not the highest stakes in the business.
For us, that's the long tail: real revenue, real relationships, but not the enterprise accounts a customer would never fully hand over. Find that zone in your own business, and I think this is where the future goes.
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