AI tips & trends

Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) were invented with good intentions: get out of the weeds, meet with your customer, and align on outcomes every quarter.

In practice? Many QBRs have become 40-slide product monologues that take weeks to build, bore executives, and don’t change much of anything.

As Aaron Thompson argues in his widely shared post “QBRs are Stupid” [1], the traditional way we do QBRs is often more about checking a box than driving real business value. But when done right—and when modern tools are involved—a QBR (or more broadly, an “Executive Business Review”) can still be one of the highest leverage motions in Customer Success, Sales, and Account Management.

This post breaks down:

• What a QBR is (and what it’s supposed to be)
• Who uses QBRs and why they matter
• The traditional steps to creating a QBR
• How QBRs are evolving (less “quarterly,” more “business review”)
• How Sturdy.ai can run QBRs for any account in seconds—not hours or days

What Is a QBR?

A Quarterly Business Review (QBR) is a structured, typically executive-level meeting between a vendor and a customer to:

• Review business outcomes and value delivered
• Align on goals, strategy, and risks
• Agree on a plan for the next period (not always a quarter anymore)

Unlike a status meeting, a QBR is supposed to focus on outcomes, strategy, and impact, not tickets, small features, or sprint updates.

Industry bodies like TSIA (Technology & Services Industry Association) and customer success leaders (e.g., Gainsight, Winning by Design) have consistently emphasized that effective business reviews should be outcome-based, data-backed, and jointly owned by vendor and customer [2][3].

Who Are QBRs For?

QBRs are heavily used across:

1. Customer Success (CS) / Account Management (AM)  
   • To prove ongoing value
   • Reduce churn and expand accounts
   • Align on adoption, usage, and business outcomes
2. Sales / Strategic Accounts / Customer Directors  
   • To maintain executive relationships
   • Surface expansion opportunities
   • Show roadmap alignment to strategic initiatives
3. Professional Services / Consulting / Agencies  
   • To connect deliverables to business impact
   • Discuss ROI, timeline, and next phases
   • Reset expectations where needed
4. Product & Executive Teams  
   • To hear voice-of-customer at the highest level
   • Validate product direction with strategic accounts
   • Identify common themes and risks across the portfolio

In modern SaaS and B2B, QBRs have shifted from a “CS-only” ritual to a cross-functional motion that spans CS, Sales, Product, and Leadership [4].

Why QBRs Matter (When They’re Done Right)

When they’re not just slidedecks for slidedeck’s sake, QBRs can:

• Prove value
  Tie your product directly to metrics your customer’s executives care about: revenue, cost savings, risk reduction, NPS, time-to-value.
• Protect and grow revenue
  Well-run business reviews correlate with higher renewal and expansion rates because they build trust and keep your solution aligned with evolving needs [2][5].
• Align on strategy and roadmap
  They create formal space to talk about: “Where is your business going?” and “How does our roadmap support that?”
• Surface risk early
  Adoption gaps, champion turnover, budget changes—QBRs are where these get raised and addressed proactively.

The problem is not the idea of a QBR; it’s the way traditional QBRs are executed.

The Traditional QBR: Steps, and Where They Go Wrong

Let’s walk through the typical (old-school) QBR workflow and why it’s so painful.

Step 1: Define Objectives and Audience

What’s supposed to happen:

• Clarify the purpose of the review:
  • Renewal risk?
  • Proving ROI?
  • Expansion discussion?
  • Strategic alignment with a new initiative?
• Confirm who will attend: executive sponsors, day-to-day users, procurement, etc.
• Tailor the content to those people, not a generic template.

Why it matters:
McKinsey and Gartner both emphasize executive conversations that center on the customer’s business priorities, not your internal agenda [5][6]. If you don’t decide the objective and audience upfront, you end up with a “kitchen sink” deck that satisfies no one.

Where it goes wrong:
Teams often skip this step and reuse the same template for every account, regardless of size, segment, or lifecycle stage.

Step 2: Gather Data (Usage, Outcomes, Support, Voice-of-Customer)

What’s supposed to happen:

• Pull product usage data (logins, key feature adoption, utilization vs. license)
• Capture business outcomes (KPIs, ROI estimates, improved cycle times, etc.)
• Summarize support data (tickets, escalations, time-to-resolution)
• Incorporate voice-of-customer: NPS, CSAT, survey results, call notes, emails

Why it matters:
Data-backed QBRs are more credible and effective. TSIA’s research on outcome-based engagement models shows that value evidence (data plus narrative) is a core driver of renewal and expansion [2].

Where it goes wrong:

• Data is scattered across CRM, helpdesk, product analytics, call recordings, Slack, and email
• CSMs or AMs spend hours to days cobbling it together manually
• Important context (like that frustrated email from the VP last month) gets missed because it lives outside the “official” systems

Step 3: Build the QBR Deck

What’s supposed to happen:

A concise, outcome-focused structure such as:

1. Executive Summary  
   • Key wins this period
   • Key risks and challenges
   • Recommended next steps
2. Your Goals & Strategy  
   • Recap of the customer’s stated objectives
   • Any changes in their business (M&A, leadership, budget shifts)
3. Value & Outcomes  
   • KPI trends
   • ROI or impact stories
   • Before/after comparisons where possible
4. Adoption & Usage  
   • Feature adoption
   • Usage by segment/team
   • Gaps and opportunities
5. Support & Experience  
   • Ticket trends
   • NPS/CSAT highlights
   • Themes from feedback
6. Roadmap & Alignment  
   • Relevant roadmap items
   • How they map to the customer’s goals
7. Joint Plan / Next 90 Days  
   • Clear action items, owners, and dates
   • Milestones for the next review

Why it matters:
This structure keeps the meeting focused on the customer’s business—not on an endless product tour. Gainsight and other CS thought leaders consistently recommend an “outcomes-first” format that leads with business results, not feature lists [3].

Where it goes wrong:

• The deck is 40–60 slides of feature screenshots and charts
• The story is missing: data with no narrative, or narrative with no data
• It’s built from scratch every time, burning hours of CSM and AM bandwidth

Step 4: Internal Review and Alignment

What’s supposed to happen:

• CS, Sales, and sometimes Product or Leadership review the QBR deck together
• Align on:
  • Renewal / expansion posture
  • Risk areas to probe
  • Who will say what in the meeting

Why it matters:
Cross-functional alignment ahead of the call means you present a unified front. Research on strategic account management underscores the importance of coordinated communication across all vendor stakeholders [7].

Where it goes wrong:

• Internal prep is rushed or skipped
• Different people show up with different agendas
• The customer experiences a fragmented, reactive conversation

Step 5: Run the Meeting

What’s supposed to happen:

• Start with outcomes and their priorities, not your agenda
• Spend more time on discussion than on presenting slides
• Ask questions like:
  • “What’s changed in your business since we last met?”
  • “What would make this partnership a no-brainer for you next year?”
  • “Where are we falling short of expectations?”

Why it matters:
Harvard Business Review and other executive communication research shows that senior leaders want vendors to:  

1. understand their business context, and
2. co-create solutions, not just present information [6].

Where it goes wrong:

• It’s a monologue; the vendor talks for 80–90% of the time
• The “review” is mostly a product tour or roadmap dump
• Action items are vague or never captured

Step 6: Follow-Up and Execution

What’s supposed to happen:

• Share a succinct recap:
  • Decisions made
  • Action items, owners, and due dates
  • Updated success plan
• Track progress and refer back to it in the next review

Why it matters:
Without follow-up, QBRs become “nice conversations” that don’t change outcomes. TSIA and Forrester both highlight the importance of codifying customer outcomes and success plans as part of a recurring cadence [2][8].

Where it goes wrong:

• Notes live in someone’s notebook or a random doc
• No shared source of truth for the success plan
• The next QBR starts from scratch, again

How QBRs Are Evolving

Several trends are reshaping how leading teams approach QBRs:

1. From “Quarterly” to “Right Cadence”

Not every account needs a formal review every quarter. Many organizations now use:

• Tiered cadences:  
  • Strategic: monthly / quarterly
  • Mid-market: 2–3x per year
  • Long-tail: automated or one-to-many reviews
• Event-based reviews:  
  • Post-implementation
  • Pre-renewal
  • After major org or product changes

This aligns with best practices in scaled customer success, where engagement is driven by value moments and risk signals, not arbitrary calendar quarters [3][4].

2. From “Slide Deck” to “Shared Workspace”

Instead of a static PowerPoint, teams are moving toward:

• Live dashboards (usage, outcomes, health)
• Shared success plans (in CRM or CS platforms)
• Collaborative docs with real-time notes and ownership

The review becomes a conversation anchored in live data, not a one-way presentation of stale screenshots.

3. From “CS-Only” to Cross-Functional

Sales, Product, and Leadership are increasingly:

• Joining key business reviews
• Using them to validate roadmap, gather voice-of-customer, and shape account strategy
• Treating QBR artifacts as input into forecasting, product planning, and exec reporting

This shifts QBRs from a “CS ritual” to a company-wide motion for strategic accounts.

4. From Manual to AI-Accelerated

The most important evolution: how the QBR is created.

Instead of:

• Manually pulling data from 6+ systems
• Rebuilding decks from scratch
• Hoping someone remembered that critical email or call

Organizations are now using AI and automation to:

• Aggregate all customer interactions and signals
• Summarize risks, opportunities, and sentiment
• Auto-generate QBR-ready narratives and visuals

This is where tools like Sturdy.ai fundamentally change the game.

How Sturdy.ai Can Run QBRs for Any Account in Seconds

Traditional QBR prep can easily consume 5–10+ hours per account once you factor in:

• Data gathering
• Deck building
• Internal alignment
• Revisions

Multiply that across a CSM’s portfolio and it becomes obvious why QBRs either get skipped or watered down.

Sturdy.ai flips this on its head.

At a high level, Sturdy.ai:

1. Ingests your real customer data  
   • Emails
   • Call transcripts
   • Support tickets
   • CRM notes
   • Product usage and other signals (where integrated)
2. Understands what matters  
   • Themes and topics (requests, bugs, risk signals)
   • Sentiment and urgency
   • Stakeholder changes and escalation patterns
   • Outcome-related language (ROI, time savings, revenue impact, etc.)
3. Auto-builds QBR-ready insights in seconds
   For any account, Sturdy.ai can surface:
   • What’s going well (wins, positive feedback, adoption signals)
   • What’s not (repeated complaints, unresolved issues, risk indicators)
   • Which outcomes you’ve actually helped drive
   • Concrete recommendations and action items for the next period
4. Generates QBR artifacts instantly
   Instead of starting with a blank slide, you start with:
   • An executive summary tailored to that account
   • Key metrics and trends pulled from your systems
   • Highlighted quotes and examples from real interactions
   • A suggested agenda and next-steps section

What used to take hours or days of manual prep becomes a seconds-long operation:

“Run QBR for ACME Corp.”

…and you have a structured, account-specific review ready to refine and deliver.

Why This Matters for Modern CS, Sales, and Account Teams

When QBRs are no longer time-prohibitive:

• You can run them for more accounts, not just the top 10%
• You focus on quality of conversation, not on slide assembly
• You capture real, holistic context, not just what’s in one system
• You can standardize excellence, instead of relying on heroics from your best CSMs

Instead of asking, “Do we have time to do a QBR for this customer?”, the question becomes:

“Given we can generate a review in seconds, what’s the right cadence and format for this account?”

That’s the shift from QBRs-as-admin-work to QBRs-as-a-strategic-advantage.

Bringing It All Together

• QBRs were created to align on outcomes, prove value, and co-create a plan—not to be product demos with extra steps.
• Traditional QBRs are broken because they’re manual, generic, and often misaligned with what executives actually care about.
• The fundamentals still matter: clear objectives, data-backed story, joint success plan, and strong follow-up.
• QBRs are evolving toward flexible cadence, collaborative formats, cross-functional ownership, and heavy use of data and AI.
• With Sturdy.ai, you can run QBRs for any account in seconds, pulling from the full reality of your customer interactions—not just the few metrics someone had time to find.

If you’re spending hours or days preparing for each QBR, you’re paying the “old tax” on a motion that no longer has to be that painful. The value of the QBR is in the conversation, not the manual labor behind the slides.

References

[1] Aaron Thompson, “QBRs are Stupid,” LinkedIn Pulse (discussion of common QBR pitfalls and how they fail to deliver real value).
[2] TSIA (Technology & Services Industry Association), research and best practices on outcome-based customer engagement and Customer Success motions.
[3] Gainsight, Customer Success thought leadership on Executive Business Reviews and outcome-focused customer engagement.
[4] Winning by Design and similar SaaS consulting frameworks on recurring value reviews and customer-centric cadences.
[5] McKinsey & Company, research on B2B customer value, account management, and executive engagement strategies.
[6] Harvard Business Review and Gartner, articles and research on effective executive conversations and strategic vendor relationships.
[7] Strategic account management literature and SAM programs that emphasize coordinated, cross-functional engagement with key customers.
[8] Forrester, research on customer lifecycle management and the importance of measurable, recurring value communication.

The most dangerous threat to CROs doesn’t live in the opportunity pipeline.

It's churn.

• It doesn’t scream like a missed quarterly pipeline goal.
• It doesn’t show up in dashboards until it’s too late.
• It's rarely caught by a generic 'health score'.
• It's the board meeting killer.

Retaining and growing our customers is the only repeatable, compounding, capital-efficient growth lever left in B2B businesses.

📉 CAC is way up.

📉 Channels are saturated.

📉 Talent is expensive.

📉 Competition is fierce.

📉 Switching costs are low.

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The path to $100M used to be “sell, sell, sell.”

Today? It’s “land, retain, expand.”

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No matter how strong your sales motions are or how slick your product or service looks during the sales process, if your customers are churning, you’re stuck in a leaky bucket loop of doom.

Every net-new dollar you win is offset by dollars you lose. It's just math.

Yet most GTM orgs still operate like retention is someone else’s problem. "That's a CS thing."

• The CS team might “own” the customer post-sale.
• Account Management may own the renewal and growth number.
• Support is in the foxhole on the front line.
• RevOps might model churn with last quarter’s data.
• Marketing might send an occasional newsletter via email.
• Finance may be leaning in on the forecasting.
• Product is building things that supposedly the customers want.

But in reality, churn is the CRO's problem. We wear it - or should.

If your go-to-market motion isn’t designed to protect and grow customers from Day 1, you’re not just leaving money on the table — you’re setting fire to it.

Retention and expansion aren’t back-end functions. They’re front-and-center revenue motions.

The most valuable work these days starts after the contract is signed — not before.

We need to stop treating post-live as a department and start treating it as the engine of durable growth.

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"How are we using AI internally?"

The drumbeat is real. Boards are leaning in. Investors are leaning in. Yet, too many leaders hardly use it. Most CS teams? Still making excuses.

🤦🏼 "We’re not ready."Translation: We don't know where to start, so I'm waiting to run into someone who has done something with it.

🤦🏼 "We need cleaner data."Translation: We’re still hoping bad inputs from fractured processes will magically produce good outputs. Everyone's data is a sh*tshow. Trust me. 🤹🏼♂️ "We're playing with it."Translation: We have that one person messing with ChatGPT - experimenting.

😕 "Just don't have the resources right now."Translation: We're too overwhelmed manually building reports, wrangling renewals, and answering tickets forwarded by the support teams.

🫃🏼 "We've got too many tools."Translation: We’re overwhelmed by the tools we bought that created a bunch of silos and forced us into constant app-switching.

🤓 "Our IT team won't let us use AI."Translation: We’ve outsourced innovation to a risk-averse inbox.

It's time to put some cowboy under that hat 🤠 . No one’s asking you to rebuild the data warehouse or perform some sacred data ritual. You don’t need a PhD in AI.

You can start small.

Nearly every AI vendor has a way for you to try their wares without hiring a team of talking heads to perform unworldly 🧙🏼 acts of digital transformation.

Where to start.

✔️ Pick a use case that will give you a revenue boost or reveal something you didn't know about your customers.

✔️ Choose something that directs valuable work to the valuable people you've hired.

✔️ Pick something with outcomes that other teams can use.

Pro Tip: Your CEO doesn't care about chatbots, knowledgebase articles, or things that write emails to customers.

What do you have to lose? More customers? Your seat at the table?

We obsess over hiring A-players. But even the best GTM talent will flounder if the foundation isn’t there.

I’ve seen companies overpay for “rockstars” who quit in 6 months—not because they weren’t capable, but because they were dropped into chaos. No ICP. Bad data. No process. No enablement. No system to measure or coach.

Great GTM teams aren’t built on purple squirrels. They’re built on a strong foundation.

That foundation looks like this:

✅ A crisp, written ICP and buyer persona (not just tribal knowledge)

✅ Accurate prospect data to target the right ICP

✅ A playbook that outlines how you win—and how you lose

✅ A clear point-of-view that your team can rally around in every email, call, and deck

✅ Defined stages, handoffs, and accountability across marketing, sales, CS

✅ A baseline reporting system to see what’s working—and what’s not

When this exists, you can onboard faster, coach better, and scale smarter. It's not easy, and it’s not sexy, but it works.

Want to cut CAC and increase ramp speed? Start with your infrastructure. Hire into a structure.

Most B2B SaaS companies still operate like it's 2020. Everything changed: customer expectations, growth efficiency, and competitive dynamics have flipped.

Here’s what’s changed:

Net-New Growth is Slowing: Recent benchmarks show it’s not just a feeling—it's a trend. The 2024 SaaS Capital Performance Metrics Benchmark report notes a pivot from "growth at any cost" to "lower growth at reduced efficiency," with CAC Ratios, Payback Periods, and Net Revenue Retention all trending in the wrong direction. The biggest slowdowns? Private SaaS companies in the $10-$20M ARR range, where growth rates dropped sharply from 2022 to 2023.

Real-Time Expectations: Today’s customers don’t wait for a QBR. They expect immediate action when things go wrong—or when their needs change. When ignored, they escalate quickly. If your team is still relying on survey responses or notes from a quarterly meeting, you’ve already lost.

Lower Switching Costs/More Competition: SaaS is saturated. Data portability, budget flexibility, and competitive pricing mean your customers can and will leave. Loyalty isn't dead—it just has to be earned every day.

The old playbooks are outdated. In the past, churn was a problem you could try to fix before renewal. Now? It’s a daily risk.

📌 The solution isn’t more headcount (flesh) or more software (abstraction layers). It’s visibility and intelligence/insights. Business need knowledge that uncovers what customers are actually saying—across every channel/silo—and turns it into action before the renewal is at risk.

The playbook is changing fast. AI is raising the bar by transforming how teams detect realtime revenue threats, identify cross-sell opportunities, and respond to customer signals/behaviors beyond just login/usage data, opinions, and surveys. The delta between AI-powered companies and everyone else is widening very fast.

SaaS teams that win in 2025 will focus on minding GRR and stop reacting to churn—and start preventing it.

Sturdy's Customer Intelligence Platform performs real-time revenue threat root cause analysis, and delivers cross-functional insights to the teams and systems to mitigate churn.

Portland, OR — April 1, 2025 — Sturdy.ai, a pioneer in AI-powered customer intelligence, today announced it has raised $6M in Series Seed funding. Voyager Capital led this round, with participation from Fortson VC as well as existing investor, Grotech Ventures. The funds will be used to deepen Sturdy’s AI capabilities, expand integrations with customer data silos, and grow its go-to-market and engineering teams.

Modern Teams Need Actionable Intelligence to Protect and Grow Revenue

With customer expectations higher than ever and retention under pressure, the need for proactive, AI-driven revenue insights has never been more urgent. According to industry data, reducing churn by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%. Enterprises have spent millions on building silos of applications to get closer to their customers and create active communication channels in the hope of mitigating churn risk early. Yet, this has failed to provide the proactive warning signals required. Sturdy closes the gap by seeing across these silos for a unified view of customer communication.

“We’re creating an AI-first intelligent interface for all things customer. This allows Sturdy to provide an almost magical understanding of every customer interaction across every data silo,” said Steve Hazelton, CEO and co-founder of Sturdy.ai. “This funding enables us to move faster to empower teams to stay ahead of risk and unlock new revenue opportunities.”

Investors Bet Big on AI-Powered Revenue Threat Detection

The funding round attracted a strong syndicate of investors aligned on Sturdy’s vision for a more innovative, AI-native approach to revenue intelligence. Voyager Capital, known for backing category-defining SaaS platforms, led the round, with General Partner Diane Fraiman joining Sturdy's board.

“Sturdy is tackling one of the most urgent and overlooked problems in enterprise software—how to extract proactive insights from the flood of daily customer interactions,” said Diane Fraiman, Managing Director of Voyager Capital. “Retention has become a critical topic in boardrooms. We believe that every business will have a system of intelligence in the next 3 years. Sturdy’s platform is positioned to become essential infrastructure for any company serious about protecting and growing revenues while truly putting their customers first.”

“Sturdy is one of the most powerful and immediate applications of AI and natural language processing we’ve seen,” said Thomas O’Keefe, CEO of Solo LLC. “At both Solo and previously at Syntrio, it has delivered instant value—surfacing proactive, actionable customer insights and driving measurable improvements in retention.”

About Voyager

Voyager Capital is a leading West Coast early-stage venture firm, providing entrepreneurs with the resources, experience, and connections to build successful companies for today’s modern economy. Voyager invests primarily in B2B technology companies, including AI-driven business solutions, software-driven hardware, sustainable agriculture, and supply chain. The firm's domain expertise, go-to-market, and team-building resources are proven to help build market leaders. Voyager Capital has over $550 million under management with offices and resources in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, and Calgary. 

About Fortson VC

Fortson VC is a seed-stage venture firm based in the Pacific Northwest, built for exceptionally rare founders who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.  Led by Cole Younger, Fortson brings over two decades of early-stage investing experience and a disciplined approach grounded in authenticity, grit, and courage.  While driven by curiosity, our primary focus is B2B software and the technological frontier around it—the infrastructure, intelligence, and automation shaping the future of how businesses create value.

About Grotech Ventures

Founded in 1984, Grotech Ventures is a leading early investor in high-potential technology companies. Grotech seeks innovative, early-stage investments across the technology landscape and continues to invest and add value throughout the life cycle of each portfolio company. The firm has a strong combination of financial backing, industry relationships, and deep domain and operational expertise to accelerate growth. With more than $1.0 billion in committed capital, Grotech supports early-stage companies through investments starting as small as $500,000. For more information, visit http://www.grotech.com.

About Sturdy

Founded in 2020, Sturdy is an AI-forward autonomous Customer Intelligence platform that proactively identifies churn risks across all customer-facing silos. Sturdy analyzes unstructured customer interactions—emails, calls, support tickets, chats, and more—discovering revenue threats, pinpointing root causes, and delivering cross-functional insights in real time. Sturdy has analyzed billions of customer interactions, giving it one of the largest proprietary datasets in the category and enabling its models to surface insights faster and more accurately than competitors. At a time when customer retention is a top priority for every business, Sturdy turns the noise of customer conversations into a strategic advantage.

For more information, visit www.sturdy.ai or reach out to Joel Passen at joel@sturdy.ai

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We’re making it easier than ever to turn customer feedback into action while saving businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. With Sturdy’s new Jira Connect, any AI-powered Signal in Sturdy can be automatically logged in Jira—helping teams capture, prioritize, and resolve issues faster than ever.

Sturdy for Jira is a Game Changer

Every team needs to know more about their customers. 

Turn customer feedback into valuable Jira content automatically. Sturdy’s AI accurately detects feature requests, bug reports, and other critical product feedback. Customizable agents then deliver this context-rich intelligence to a configurable staging area in Jira with all relevant user and account details, such as segment, ARR, and more. The content is objectively summarized automatically. From there, assigning it to an epic, task, sprint, or release is just one click.

Productivity Gains that Move the Needle

Businesses are unknowingly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on something as simple as manually logging Jira issues. A single customer-facing rep wastes nearly 87 hours annually on repetitive data entry—scaling up to a staggering $354,200 per year for a team of 100 reps. By integrating Sturdy’s AI-driven automation, businesses can reclaim thousands of hours, improve productivity, and reinvest those savings into growth and innovation—all while ensuring more accurate, real-time data flows into Jira effortlessly.

Align product teams with customer reality.

By centralizing AI-powered insights in Jira, Sturdy ensures that product and engineering teams get a complete, objective picture of what’s working, what’s broken, and what needs to be built—without relying on anecdotal feedback. Customer-reported issues appear in Jira moments after they happen, ensuring your product and engineering teams stay ahead of emerging trends and critical bugs—without the lag of traditional reporting.

Effortless setup, immediate impact.

Sturdy’s turnkey integration takes minutes to configure. Once connected, your team gains instant access to context-rich, structured feedback—helping you make faster, data-driven decisions that improve customer satisfaction.

Want to get started? Click the 'Schedule Demo' button at the top of the page.

We’re making it easier than ever for teams to tap into the power of customer conversations. With this integration, Sturdy’s AI-driven insights—trained to spot key behaviors and trends unique to your business—are now right where your team works. That means more proactive decisions, better collaboration, and a serious productivity boost.

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Here’s how Sturdy works with Slack.

• Get the right insights, right in Slack. Sturdy delivers AI-powered Signals where your team already works, flagging risks, expansion opportunities, and other key moments in real-time. No more digging through conversations—just actionable insights when you need them.
  
  
• Stay on top of every conversation. If your team works asynchronously in Slack channels, it’s easy for important feedback to get lost. Sturdy keeps you ahead by surfacing critical insights before they slip through the cracks.
  
  
• Act fast, not after the fact. Whether it’s a service risk, a feature request, or a potential upsell, Sturdy helps teams spot and respond to what matters—without disrupting their workflow.
  
  

Seamless sync with your tools. Sturdy doesn’t just stop at Slack. Insights discovered in customer Slack channels automatically flow into Jira, CSPs, CRMs, and other systems, ensuring the right teams get the right info—without extra work.

He doesn’t talk much, but when he does, you’d better listen.

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Quote from C-3PO, Star Wars: A New Hope

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A few days ago, I spoke to a business leader, and they asked, "How would Sturdy work for customers who never contact us?"

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"Do you know who those customers are?"

"No idea."

"Would you like to?"

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“Dark Customers.” It is almost impossible to source this list. Your customer might be dark to five silos, and bright in just one. 

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(By the way, there is a little-known filter in the Accounts page of Sturdy that lets you sort by “Last Inbound.”  Check it out. You can see the last time any customer sent you an inbound message.)

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Let’s be fair. In a recurring-revenue business, a lack of inbound contact isn’t necessarily bad. Sometimes your customers don’t feel the need to chat with you, but they like you just the same. 

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But, here’s the cool thought. What should happen when a Dark Customer suddenly reaches out? 

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For example, Acme Corp sends an email to your CS team for the first time in 18 months. What needs to happen next?

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I would want to know. So, we’re working on that. Naming such a signal is a bit tricky, if you have ideas, let us know.

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The future doesn’t belong to systems that store data and automate workflows—it belongs to those that synthesize information, surface insights, and drive action.

The days of bouncing between screens, hunting for information, and manually aligning teams? Numbered.

Every day, we are getting closer to a workplace where:

-Knowledge workers won’t be glorified data entry clerks. Technology will finally do the heavy lifting, freeing them to focus on strategic work. These people will be responsible for outcomes without being encumbered by the tedium. As a result, we will need fewer people to acquire and keep our customers.

- Every team continues to work on their screen of choice, but the data they have access to will be aggregated across every system. They may be on different screens, but everyone will be on the same page. The next era is about alignment, automation, and AI-driven decision-making.

- There will be a fundamental shift in the tech business model. Businesses won’t pay for ‘seats’—they’ll pay for intelligence. The old model of software—charging for logins, licenses, and user seats—is dying. No one wants to pay for access to another tool; they want outcomes, insights, and automation that drive real impact. The solutions that deliver intelligence over any interface will define the next era of technology.

The shift is happening—those who embrace it will lead, while those who resist will be left behind. The future belongs to businesses that trade inefficiency for intelligence, that replace busywork with impact, and that empower people to think, create, and drive outcomes—not just enter data. Innovation doesn’t wait.