Karl Mosgofian on the AI risks most CIOs are missing. On a recent episode of AI Impact, host Russ Frieden sat down with Karl Mosgofian, the former CIO of Gainsight and now a CIO advisor. Their conversation is aimed squarely at enterprise technology leaders. Karl spent the hour challenging some of the assumptions that have hardened around enterprise AI over the last two years and argues that most CIOs are bracing for the wrong security threat. The shadow AI problem CIOs haven't reckoned with Karl's most pointed critique is about where security attention is being spent. CIOs, he says, are overly worried about their contracted SaaS and LLM vendors. Those vendors have signed contracts and completed security reviews; they have solid business reasons not to misuse data. "If they mess it up, their whole company is gone." Karl notes. The real exposure, in Karl's view, is the free AI tool an employee downloaded without telling anyone: no contract, no IT review, no company visibility. His point lines up with a finding that Russ reports from Larridin's own customer base: roughly two-thirds of the AI tools in use inside an enterprise are unknown to the CIO. For CIOs and CTOs trying to set governance priorities, Karl's message is clear: the threat is on the unsanctioned side of the wall, far more than the vendor side. Agents need their own identity in directory services Karl then brought up a topic many enterprises haven't yet operationalized: identity for agents. When agents take real action inside a company, the question of who did this becomes critical. If an agent acts solely under a human's credentials, accountability collapses when something goes wrong. Karl pointed to Microsoft's recent move authorized agents now has their own identity within directory services, rather than running as the human who deployed the agent. For CIOs and CTOs, the implication is concrete: HCM and IAM strategies need to evolve to treat agents as first-class principals. Without this, audit trails, least-privilege controls, and incident response all degrade as agents proliferate. Why CIO and HR are aligning Karl agreed with Russ's thesis that the CIO and HR functions are converging. As agent workforces scale, the line between managing humans vs. managing systems that do human work blurs. Karl is careful to note that HR's legal and employment-law expertise won't vanish into IT, but he sees plenty of overlap waiting to be captured: shared help desks, shared policies, shared onboarding flows. Greenfield companies, he suggested, have a chance to design these functions together from day one. The anatomy of AI projects that actually scale For all the experimentation of the last two years, Karl's recipe for a successful AI project sounds refreshingly old-fashioned: start with the problem you're trying to solve and define how you'll measure whether it worked. He warns that the common approach - "cool stuff, let's throw it in there" - is an acceptable approach for generic productivity tools, but a budget-burner when applied to higher-stakes departmental projects. CFOs, he predicted, are about to start asking CIOs to consolidate the ten overlapping tools that experimentation produced, ending what Karl called the current "golden glow" of AI freedom. He was equally direct about adoption. Top-down Zoom trainings produced little movement at Gainsight. What worked was small-group peer learning: teammates trading real, relevant use cases. Karl framed prompting as a new core skill, comparable to the need to learn how to search Google effectively for research, beginning in the 2000s. CIOs and CTOs who underinvest here, he warned, are simply leaving value on the table. Where AI will hit next AI has already become normalized in Engineering and customer support. Where will it be more fully accepted next? Karl suggests the answer will derive from the first principles of LLM functionality: it's a large language model. The functions that work primarily with words will benefit most. He named legal, marketing, and technical documentation as the next wave. Karl describes this moment as the most exciting stretch of his career. Department heads who once viewed the CIO as an obstacle now want partnership. This window won't last forever; once CFOs start demanding ROI, CIOs will return to the gatekeeper role. But for now, Karl's advice to enterprise technology leaders is to get agent identity right, take shadow AI seriously, and invest in the small-group learning that actually moves adoption. Listen to the full conversation between Russ Frieden and Karl Mosgofian on AI Impact.

Glean partners with Gainsight to enhance customer view. May 6, 2026 Gainsight has announced a new partnership with Glean. Glean is a Work AI platform that provides an assistant powered by enterprise AI, that understands the context of work through integrations. The partnership sees a new integration between the Gainsight Revenue engine and Gleans' platform. The integration will enable the Glean assistant to leverage the customer health, risk, sentiment and lifecycle signals to provide teams and agents. For customers using Glean Search, it enables them to surface data held within Gainsight as well as other solutions that Glean integrates with to give a complete view of the customer. For example, a user might ask to show the complete customer record from Gainsight data. They may also ask to show any anomalous information across the different systems for that customer. Using data held within Gainsight and other products, whether CRM, Finance or operational systems, Glean can now surface data from across all systems that hold data relating to a customer. Importantly, the data is surfaced through a natural language interface. User permissions are understood and adhered to, meaning that users are only able to view what they are allowed to. The integration will enable users to have a complete view of the customer, enabling them to be better aligned and move faster by acting on surfaced risks or opportunities. Chuck Ganapathi, CEO, Gainsight, commented, "Customer health only delivers real value when it informs action and drives retention as an outcome for the business. As enterprise software goes increasingly headless, the expectation is that critical insights show up wherever work happens. "Our integration with Glean reflects this shift by surfacing Gainsight's trusted customer intelligence directly within Glean's Work AI platform. Both humans and agents working in Glean can access the full customer picture wherever they operate." A true customer 360. Most of the teams within an organisation work with customers in some way, whether that is finance, sales, marketing, operations, support legal customer Success or several others. With Gainsight helping the most customer-facing intensive teams within an organisation, Glean offers a single location where all teams, once integrated to Gainsight, can gain a complete view of the customer. However, even more important is the analysis that the Glean work assistance can complete for them. It can leverage the full enterprise context, including the applications, documents, workflows and people that can explain what is happening across an account. Gainsight's insights are now fully integrated into Glean's enterprise knowledge layer, ensuring every business team has access to a unified, consistent view of each account. This integration facilitates faster transitions, reduces organizational silos, and enables more informed decisions - all within the AI workflows where daily work occurs. This will result in a more consistent approach to customers, improve the customer experience and could make customers success more successful, with everyone having access to all relevant information. Liz Armbruester, CCO, Avalara, commented, "Customer expectations have never been higher, and the window to act on risk or opportunity is shrinking. Having Gainsight's health and account intelligence directly inside Glean means our Sales and Customer Experience teams are working from a single, complete picture of every account. When everyone is moving from the same context, you respond faster and execute better." Key benefits for Glean integration. Gainsight highlights some key benefits from the integration: * Unlock a 360° account picture: Combine Gainsight's customer health, risk, and lifecycle signals with the surrounding enterprise context across the business, so teams can quickly understand what is happening and why. * Reduce prep time for customer meetings: Simplify customer prep with health scores, goals, open actions, and more right in Glean to take action on. * Spot risk earlier and take action faster: Monitor renewals, sentiment shifts, health trends, and support activity in one place, with the ability to drill into the underlying context behind key changes. * Keep Sales and Customer Success aligned: Give both teams a shared, permission-aware view of customer context, priorities, and recommended next steps, reducing manual handoffs and disconnected decision-making. Arvind Jain, Founder/CEO, Glean, said, "Every company says it wants to be customer-centric, but most revenue teams are still operating through fragments - one view in the CRM, another in the CSP, another buried in call notes, support tickets, and internal threads," He continued, "What changes with this latest Glean and Gainsight integration is that customer signals become part of a deeper enterprise context that helps teams understand what is actually happening in an account and respond with much greater speed and precision." Enterprise times: what does this mean. Gainsight offers a Retention-as-a-Service (RaaS) AI-powered model that combines human expertise, digital journeys, and automated agents to boost net retention, expansion, and efficiency. By working with Glean, Gainsight makes its insights - like health scores, renewal dates, and sentiment - accessible to leadership, sales, product, and marketing teams without requiring them to log in. This boosts Gainsight's data value across the company. In effect it makes Gainsight stickier for customers. For Glean, it marks a significant addition to its integration portfolio as it has added the market-leading customer success platform. It increases the potential benefits of its Work AI assistant and opens up an even larger market for the fast growing AI firm.

Gainsight, a customer retention platform, has announced support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) across its Gainsight CS and Staircase AI products. The integration enables AI agents to execute retention workflows using comprehensive customer relationship data, reducing execution time from weeks to minutes. The MCP integration combines Staircase AI's signals from unstructured communications with Gainsight CS's customer records and action systems. Teams can now build custom workflows in natural language, including renewal playbooks and risk escalation sequences, without requiring engineering resources. AI agents can query customer data and take direct actions within Gainsight CS whilst respecting existing security and permission controls. Early adopter PartsSource is already deploying the technology. Gainsight MCP is available now through the company's platform and approved AI ecosystem partners, including Claude.