Leaning Into AI: Gong's AI for Productivity Gains

Let me paint a familiar picture: It's 4 PM on a Wednesday, you've just wrapped your fifth call of the day, and you still have three proactive emails to write, five call follow-up emails to draft, and somehow need to prepare for Friday’s EBR. Sound familiar?

As CSMs, we're being asked to do more with less—larger books of business, deeper strategic partnerships, and heightened expectations for proactive engagement. The math simply doesn't add up anymore. We can't clone ourselves, but we can leverage the AI tools sitting right in our tech stack to handle the repetitive tasks that eat up our cognitive bandwidth.

I’ve been leaning more into AI this year. I was a skeptic at first, and truthfully, I was relatively novice in my knowledge of all the offerings on the market for AI tools that can help CSMs.

I’d like to highlight the tools I’ve been finding most helpful in my day-to-day since I know other CSMs out there are still holding out on leaning into AI. So, I’m beginning a mini-series here on CSin15 to highlight which ones I’m finding work best.

First up: Gong.

I've been using Gong's AI Assistant, and it's improved how I manage my day-to-day. Not by replacing the strategic, relationship-building work we do, but by automating the administrative overhead that keeps us from doing more of it. Here's how I'm using it to win back hours each week while actually improving the quality of my customer interactions.

Drafting Follow-Up Emails That Actually Sound Like You

One of the biggest time sinks in my day used to be crafting follow-up emails after calls. You know the drill—you want to capture the key points, next steps, and maintain momentum, but you also need it to sound personalized and thoughtful.

Here's the prompt I use with Gong AI after a call:

AI Prompt Example:

What used to take my 20+ minutes per email now takes 5-10 minutes of light editing and linking to the relevant resources. No longer needing to parse through the call or rely on my scribbled notes.

Pro tip: Create a few template prompts for different types of calls (QBRs, escalations, training sessions) and save them. You'll build a library of prompts that you can quickly modify rather than starting from scratch each time.

Recapping Calls in Slack Without the Painful Summaries

If your company uses Slack channels to keep your account team and leadership updated on what’s going on in accounts, you know the pain of keeping them up-to-date.

I use this prompt structure to generate Slack-friendly summaries:

AI Prompt Example:

The beauty here is that Gong AI understands the context of who was on the call, what was discussed, and can extract the signal from the noise. I've found my Slack recaps are now more consistent and comprehensive than when I was doing them manually, and they're posted within a day or two of the meeting: keeping everyone informed.

Identifying Success Milestones You Might Have Missed

This is where AI really shines as a strategic partner. With 30+ accounts, it's impossible to catch every success signal or milestone mention across all your calls.

I run this prompt ahead of meetings with executives at accounts or key touch points to surface success milestones I should surface to them and highlight.

AI Prompt Example:

Recalling Context Without the Mental Gymnastics

We've all been there—you're about to jump on a call and frantically trying to remember: What did they ask for last time? What was that specific integration question? What was the name of their new VP?

My go-to context prompt:

AI Prompt Example:

This gives me a one-page briefing in under 30 seconds. I'm walking into calls confident and prepared, not scrambling through notes or trying to jog my memory while making small talk.

More Time-Saving Prompts I Use Daily

For QBR Prep:

For Risk Detection:

For Renewal Prep:

The Mental Shift That Matters

Here's what I've learned: The guilt about "letting AI do your work" is misplaced energy. Every minute I save on administrative tasks is a minute I can spend on strategic thinking, proactive outreach, or actually being present during customer conversations instead of worrying about note-taking.

My customers don't care if AI helped me write the follow-up email—they care that it arrived promptly, captured everything accurately, and moved our partnership forward. They don't care if AI spotted the success milestone—they care that I celebrated it with them and leveraged it for an expansion conversation.

The CSMs who will thrive in this new reality aren't the ones who can write the fastest call recaps or have the best memory for account details. They're the ones who can leverage every tool at their disposal to maximize strategic impact while maintaining the human connections that make our role impactful.

Start Small, Scale Smart

If you're feeling overwhelmed, start with just one use case. Maybe it's follow-up emails, maybe it's Slack recaps. Get comfortable with the prompting, refine your approach, and then expand. The time investment to learn these tools pays dividends—I'm saving roughly 4-6 hours per week on administrative tasks.

That's 4-6 hours I can spend on strategic account planning, building deeper relationships, or… actually taking lunch breaks and ending work at a reasonable hour.

Our role is evolving, our account loads are growing, but our capacity for strategic impact has never been greater. We just need to be smart about where we invest our uniquely human capabilities versus where we let the machines handle the heavy lifting.

Despite some of the LinkedIn rage-bait, the future of Customer Success isn’t about CSMs versus AI. It’s about AI helping us truly act as strategic partners to our customers through lending a hand in minimizing the admin burden that often causes CSMs to be trapped in reactive mode due to a lack of sufficient bandwidth to be proactive.

What’s next: I’ll be writing up more of these as I refine how I’m using other AI tools to optimize my day-to-day. In the meantime, if you’ve become an AI pro leveraging AI at your company and want to be a guest contributor in this series, let me know!

P.S. I highly recommend adapting the prompts to your specific company and use case. The prompts shared above are very similar to the ones I use; however, they’ve been slightly modified.