This article was based on the interview with Courtney Baker, Chief Marketing Officer at Knownwell and co‑host of the AI Know How podcast by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
Walk the halls of any professional‑services firm and you’ll spot the same spreadsheet taped to cubicle walls: a traffic‑light matrix of key accounts shaded in green, yellow, or—worst of all—red. Everyone vows to fill it in before Friday. Everyone forgets. Meanwhile a “green” client quietly shops the competition, and leadership learns about it when the termination letter arrives.
Courtney Baker calls this the “surprise churn,” an avoidable heartbreak born of relying on subjective whispers instead of objective signals. Knownwell’s platform tackles the blind spot by treating every email, Slack, call transcript, and status note as a datapoint. Generative‑AI models parse that exhaust and deliver a health score rooted in sentiment, responsiveness, and topic trends—no more guessing whether silence is golden or ominous.
“What we provide is an objective view of the relationship,” Baker explains. “It’s not just a nicer spreadsheet; it’s a signal that says, Someone should act now.”
When AI surfaces a dip in responsiveness—or flags an upsell cue hidden in a throw‑away comment—account teams can intervene before “green” turns scarlet.
From Execution to Operations: Climbing the Five Levels of AI
Most marketers met Gen‑AI through ChatGPT: fun, useful, but largely limited to automating personal to‑do lists. Baker argues those tools sit on just the second rung of a five‑level scaffold:
- Manual Labor – Robotics for factories and fulfilment centers.
- Execution – Individual productivity boosters (think prompt‑based content or instant code refactors).
- Operations – Cross‑team coordination that moves the business forward.
- Strategy – Enterprise‑wide foresight (still nascent).
- Ideology – The values and purpose that should remain unmistakably human.
Knownwell lives on Level 3. By analyzing relationship signals across every client, it spots macro patterns no spreadsheet ever could—say, a product module that quietly drives churn after 90 days, or a regional portfolio suddenly ripe for expansion. Those insights feed revenue‑ops, customer‑success, and marketing in one motion.
“We’re using AI to help humans do what only humans can do—build trust and act on it,” Baker says. “The machine flags the moment; the relationship owner delivers the empathy.”
Operationalizing Relationship Data (Without Drowning in It)
Traditional CRMs excel at acquisition funnels; they’re spectacularly clumsy after the ink dries. Knownwell treats post‑sale interactions as first‑class data:
- Sentiment and tone across all channels are scored and trended.
- Proactive alerts highlight stalled projects, unaddressed questions, or new buying signals.
- Portfolio analytics reveal patterns—e.g., which service lines produce the highest advocacy or the quietest churn.
Because the engine ingests raw conversation data, practitioners gain insight without extra keystrokes. No more weekly “update the CRM” reminders; the system auto‑documents health while teams focus on delivery. The result: fewer surprise exits, faster upsells, and an evidence‑based forecast the CFO can finally trust.
Readying Marketing Teams for the Next Wave
Most firms still hover at Level 2: isolated productivity hacks plus a well‑meaning “AI task force.” Baker recommends three moves to graduate to Level 3 operations:
- Centralize your exhaust. Aggregate email, call, and chat data in a privacy‑compliant lake; intelligence is useless without raw fuel.
- Start with churn‑visibility. An early‑warning system pays for itself long before advanced forecasting.
- Pair objectivity with human nuance. AI can flag risk; a thoughtful account manager turns that alert into a candid conversation that saves the partnership.
Baker’s parting optimism echoes the early days of social media (this time armed with hindsight): “Let’s deploy AI intentionally—avoiding the hype traps—and bend the growth‑to‑headcount curve without sacrificing the human spark that makes services valuable in the first place.”
Spreadsheets colored like Christmas lights won’t cut it in 2025. Client intelligence now demands real‑time analysis of relationship signals—the kind a generative‑AI platform can surface while humans sleep. By elevating firms from execution tools to operational insight, platforms like Knownwell promise fewer Friday‑afternoon surprises and more Monday‑morning upsell calls. And—as Baker reminds us—the ideology at the top of AI’s ladder stays human: technology should let us know clients well enough to treat them the way spreadsheets never could.terday’s security footage.f nimbleness to unify the entire customer journey, from a single screen tap to the final in-store sale.
