David Melendez process-mapped Instructure‘s entire onboarding flow and realized they were operationally optimized for the wrong outcome: getting customers keys to their purchase rather than setting them up to renew. The team had confused access provisioning with value delivery—a distinction that becomes critical when services drive the onboarding motion for a 50%+ market share LMS provider.

David, Sr. Director of Customer Experience Strategy & Operations, brings a method from his Alteryx days: identify the three customer actions that correlate with above-average renewals, then architect everything to make those frictionless. At Alteryx it was community membership, connecting to data, and running a workflow. At Instructure, he’s rebuilding to answer that question before pointing AI agents at consultant workflows.

His approach to AI adoption counters the vendor pressure: inventory what’s already available in your stack (Gainsight’s Atlas, Staircase AI), instrument proper CSM role definitions in those systems, then automate only the repeatable service consultant tasks with clean data inputs. No foundation means AI accelerates broken processes.

Topics Discussed:

• Process mapping onboarding to separate access provisioning from value delivery outcomes
• Alteryx’s three-action renewal correlation framework applied to new context
• Vendor AI capability inventory before building or buying new tooling
• Instrumenting CSM roles in Gainsight before deploying Atlas and agent features
• Service consultant workflow automation as first AI deployment target
• Hiring for specific learning goals rather than general curiosity claims
• Automating yourself out of the same job annually as ops team standard
• Strategic thinking and business partnership as the non-automatable skill layer

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