If you've followed this blog for a while, you know I've written about Customer Success alongside Inbound PR, channel programs, leadership, career, and life across six countries. It's been a mix — deliberately so. This space has always reflected who I am, not just what I do over the last 12+ years.
That's not changing. But something is shifting.
I've made the decision that the CS content needs its own home and focus.
This is why I've launched CS in the AI Era — a bi-weekly newsletter with one specific focus: helping Customer Success leaders reinvent CS as a revenue function, using AI to make that shift irreversible, and helping CS folks move from relationship managers to revenue leaders.
What CS in the AI Era is
It's not another CS newsletter full of generic advice and recycled frameworks. It's built around a thesis I've developed across years at HubSpot, Cisco, and ServiceNow: that CS failed not because sales didn't believe in it, but because CS was never built to speak the language of the people who control the budget.
Issue 01 of my newsletter is now live. It's called Customer Success is not broken. The job description is. It opens with something that happened to me a few months ago: sitting across from senior sales leaders trying to sell them on a CS product that was, on paper, exactly what CS is supposed to deliver. The room was hostile. The numbers I brought were questioned. And I've had that same conversation at Cisco and at ServiceNow.
For a long time I called it a sales culture problem, but I was wrong — it's a CS mandate problem and I'll keep talking about this very same problem again and again in my newsletter.
In addition to some thought-provoking thinking, Issue 01 also includes:
- The CS Mandate Audit — 10 questions to assess whether your org has a genuine commercial mandate or just a relationship function dressed up in revenue language
- Three AI prompts you can use this week: to audit your mandate gaps, write a board-ready CS slide in revenue language, and rewrite your CS job description for the AI era
It's completely free to read. No paywall, no friction.
What this means for iliyanastareva.com
This blog is moving toward leadership — executive thinking, career, female leadership, life across cultures and companies. The personal and the professional, but through a broader lens than CS alone.
If you're here primarily for the CS content, the newsletter is where that lives now — and it will go deeper, be more structured, and come with practical tools every issue.
If you want to keep receiving it, subscribe at csintheaiera.com. It takes 30 seconds and you can unsubscribe any time.
Either way — thank you for being here. This blog has been part of how I've built my thinking in public for years, and that's not stopping. It's just getting more intentional about where different things live.
— Iliyana
