When Denise Stokowski strolls through her neighborhood, she finds joy in the unexpected encounters and diverse stories of those she meets. Walking her dogs often leads to spontaneous conversations with her yoga instructor neighbor, the tech-savvy couple a few doors down, and the doctors around the block.
Human connection might not be her full-time career, but it does perfectly parallel her approach to work.
Denise is the senior vice president of product management at Gainsight where she helps build artificial intelligence (AI)-powered customer experiences with a human-first lens. Her team’s goal is to make business more human, harnessing the power of AI to enable customer-facing teammates to spend less time on administrative work and more time on, well, other humans.
We caught up with Denise to hear more about what Human-First AI means to Gainsight, why it’s important, and how you, too, can prioritize humanity when building AI-powered products.
Centering the human in products
Gainsight builds customer success, product, and community engagement solutions that enable businesses to scale efficiently, create alignment, and have a holistic view of their customers — all of which help increase product adoption, prevent churn, and grow renewals and expansions. Denise oversees this product roadmap, starting with understanding the users' needs all the way down to the design of the user interface.
Every step of this process incorporates a human-first lens.
“We own the customer journey. And this includes multiple people. So, this is where the humans come in,” Denise explains. “We have our customers, or those providing a product or service to their users. With them, we have to think about: How can they retain those customers, make them successful, expand, and build advocacy? And then, on the end user side, how do we provide the guidance they need and give them the tools to allow them to scale?”
Adding AI to the equation
With so many moving pieces and variables, AI emerges as an asset for Gainsight. Denise describes the customer journey as navigating a boat on the open seas — you know where it starts and where you want to go but, along the way, the wind, current, and conditions can change. You need the right guidance to adapt to this variability. At Gainsight, this can be user-specific like matching a user’s learning preference by pivoting information from a video to text to adapting a customer’s goals and success plan after their business undergoes a major change like an acquisition.
“AI also helps us make the right connections. When we've seen success with one client, this might be the right move for another — because not everybody is a complete snowflake, right? There are patterns, but it's hard for us as individuals to identify those patterns, especially as our businesses grow and get more complex. AI opens up a world of opportunity to access that.”
AI also reduces the amount of time it takes to complete monotonous or redundant tasks so team members can focus on their strengths.
“Human-First AI means we help people achieve their objectives in the most effective way,” Denise explains. “Maybe writing is not your specialty. You can use AI to create an email draft, tailor it, and send it.”
With every product decision made, it’s Denise and her team’s goal to marry these two priorities: AI-powered journeys with a human-first lens.
“Our purpose at Gainsight is to be living proof that you can win in business by being human first.”
3 ways to build human-first products
Are you building AI-powered products in your role? Or maybe you collaborate with your company’s product team? Denise shares three ways to center people in your teams’ processes:
- Test AI-powered features yourself. “There are plenty of ways to experience AI nowadays. It’s important for us to develop an understanding of what works and where there’s room for improvement.”
- Think about the people using your products. “How can you get your users to provide their own personal feedback so they have a say in what works and what doesn’t? Consider which pieces of your product would benefit from bringing a human into the loop.”
- Be open to radically different ways of working. “AI opens the door for us to access a vast amount of information, data, and knowledge that we haven't had easy access to historically. So, you have to be open to thinking: What new ways can I be helping people?”
Denise reminds us, “It's people that are using products and services to benefit themselves. And so, with people in the equation, we have to think about how AI can help them bring their best self to whatever they're doing and deliver the best outcomes.”
Want to build Human-First AI alongside Denise at Gainsight? They’re hiring! Explore the career opportunities with Gainsight here.
