Like it or not, AI tools are going to be part of your toolkit as a customer success manager. In fact, that's already the case for a whopping 52% of CSMs. Most established tools used by customer success managers today have features that make use of artificial intelligence. And if you're looking for an overview of these tools there are plenty of great articles online. However, in this article we'll run you through the new tools you might be using tomorrow. More precisely, we'll venture deep into AI startup territory and uncover the top startups working on customer success products in 2025!
AI in Customer Success: Top 10 Start-ups
We've curated a list of 10 innovative startups developing fresh tools for customer success. In this deep dive, we'll explore each one in detail, highlighting their impact on CS teams, pricing models and user feedback.
Berry: AI-Powered Virtual Customer Success Manager for Scalable Onboarding and Engagement
Established in 2023, Berry is a Y Combinator-funded startup with a vision to transform customer onboarding and training using its AI-driven Customer Success Manager (CSM) platform. The company seeks to scale customer success operations for SaaS businesses by automating onboarding, training, and support workflows.
Berry’s AI CSM acts as a co-pilot to human CSMs, assisting in answering customer questions, creating success plans, and streamlining workflows. The platform boasts features such as infinite knowledge retention, human-like thinking, instant strategy adoption, technical expertise, and 24/7 availability, all designed to enhance the customer journey.
Impact on Customer Success Teams
By automating operational tasks, Berry enables customer success managers to focus on building meaningful relationships and executing a more efficient customer success strategy. The AI CSM provides personalized onboarding experiences at scale, reducing time to value and increasing account activation rates. Its ability to retain an unlimited memory of the product knowledge base ensures that customers receive accurate and up-to-date customer data, enhancing their overall experience. This helps improve customer satisfaction while reducing churn.
Additionally, Berry’s AI CSM can absorb and implement new customer success strategies instantly, promoting specific features to drive adoption and retention. Its technical expertise allows it to support code-related inquiries and complex logical reasoning, providing comprehensive assistance to customers and reducing the burden on human CSMs.
Pricing & Business Model
You'll need to book a demo and schedule a sales call if you want to see Berry in action!
HeyGen: AI-Generated Video & Interactive Avatars for Scalable Customer Success
Established in December 2020, HeyGen is a video generation platform powered by artificial intelligence that allows companies to produce high-quality videos with AI avatars, voice cloning, and real-time translations. The platform does away with conventional filming arrangements, making it possible for users to create professional-level videos in minutes.
HeyGen has scaled rapidly, powering over 45,000 businesses and millions of users worldwide. It specializes in synthetic media, providing personalized, multilingual video production at scale. HeyGen is committed to responsible AI and is a member of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) to facilitate transparency and trust in AI-generated content.
Impact on Customer Success Teams
HeyGen changes the game for CSMs by offering customers interactive AI-powered video avatars that will change how customer success teams approach customer engagement. Without having to lean solely on text-based support or live one-off sessions, CSMs can create AI-generated versions of themselves that can deliver personalized onboarding videos, training modules, and product updates at scale. These videos create a more personalized customer experience during onboarding and support. This approach transforms customer interactions into engaging, accessible touchpoints that scale globally.
The interactive avatar feature allows CSMs to replicate their presence, making customer engagement more consistent and scalable. This means customers can receive personalized, face-to-face communication without requiring real-time meetings, helping teams manage a growing customer base more efficiently.
Additionally, HeyGen's real-time translation breaks down the language barrier, enabling global customer success teams to provide localized onboarding and support videos in multiple languages without having to reshoot this content.
User Reviews
✅ “I feel that HeyGen is a very powerful tool for creating AI videos. The standout feature is undoubtedly the AI avatars. HeyGen’s avatars are incredibly lifelike and realistic, with natural movements and expressions virtually indistinguishable from real humans.” - G2 Review
❌ "Price – HeyGen is expensive, of all 3 services heygen is more expensive than other competitors combined. Limit of minutes – with a paid tariff of $30/month, they only give 5 minutes to translate a video." - G2 Review
Pricing & Business Model
HeyGen has a free tier which is sufficient to get a taste of what it can do. However, if you plan to use the tool for any real-world examples you'll need to switch to one of the paying plans at $24 or $69 per month.
Synthetic Users: AI-Generated Personas for Scalable User Research in Customer Success
Synthetic Users is an AI startup founded in 2022 and headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. It specializes in user research services by leveraging large language models to build synthetic personas that closely mimic real human behaviors and responses. These synthetic users, with detailed personality profiles, interact in simulated environments and provide valuable insights to businesses without actual human participants.
Impact on Customer Success Teams
Synthetic Users offers customer success managers a cost-effective and efficient alternative to traditional methods of user research. Teams can quickly get feedback on product ideas, designs, and user journeys using AI-generated personas, making it easier to analyze customer behavior for rapid iteration and improvement. In general, the platform helps gather customer insights that reveal hidden opportunities and friction points.
In addition, by simulating different types of user interactions, the platform increases familiarity with diverse customer standpoints, since the resulting strategies will be more inclusive and holistic. As a result, this can improve customer satisfaction and customer retention because products or services are more aligned to the user's needs.
User Reviews
✅ "Using synthetic users seems to be a cost-effective way to kick things off. It lets you explore ideas, test assumptions, and get quick feedback without the complication and expense of full-on user research." - Reddit Review
❌ "Yes, this implementation seems terrible. Yes, the marketing seems awful and deceptive and fantastical. Yes, the messaging seems incredibly tone deaf." - Reddit Review
We would like to note that most, if not all, negative reviews relate to the concept of synthetic users and not to the actual platform or its accuracy.
Pricing & Business Model
A 7-day trial allows you to test the waters and convince yourself and your team that synthetic users, in combination with real users, are a great way to rapidly test ideas.
Canvas: AI-Powered Copilot for Proactive Customer Success Management
Incorporated in 2024, Canvas is an AI-driven platform meant to enable enterprise customer success teams to change from reactive support managers to proactive growth drivers. It integrates various data sources in one place and in real-time to drive top-line growth through better efficiency in the identification and resolution of critical risks and growth opportunities by CSMs.
Equipped with AI-powered alerts, 24/7 AI assistant named Canvas Copilot, and generative analytics and reporting, among other capabilities, Canvas will surface and prioritize risk and opportunities for revenue while automating business-critical, repetitive tasks. The platform sports real-time, detailed reporting that works to improve customer success operations.
Impact on Customer Success Teams
Canvas enhances customer success operations by providing AI-powered alerts that automatically detect and prioritize risks, revenue opportunities, and strategic milestones. These insights can even surface changes in customer health scores, helping teams take action early. The platform supports predicting customer behavior, so CSMs can address issues before they lead to churn.
Pricing & Business Model
No details on pricing yet, you'll need to schedule a demo to see the tool in action and find out what it'll cost you!
Butterflye: AI-Driven Product Engagement to Align Customer Success and GTM Teams
Butterflye is an AI-powered product engagement platform founded in 2024 to bridge the gap between Product and Go-to-Market teams. It converts complex technical updates into personalized, persona-driven communications that keep all teams aligned in real time and make every feature a growth opportunity with clear, actionable updates.
Impact on Customer Success Teams
For CSMs, Butterflye automates release documentation, frequently asked questions, and messages for different personas—helping with customer journey mapping to keep everyone informed at the right time. The platform's feedback tools help track customer sentiment over time, informing better communication strategies.
User Reviews
✅ “Super easy to use and intuitive interface. As a manager, you quickly collect a lot of valuable insights about your team.” - UKG Marketplace Review
❌ "The tool has come a long way, however, there are 2 things that work but could be better. We have heard from our team is they don't give 10s as they have to scroll down via the Slack integration (which is silly but UX input) and on admin side our CSM had to do a lot to get our reporting structure functional." - UKG Marketplace Review
Pricing & Business Model
A 15-day trial leaves you ample time to try out Butterflye. If you're convinced of its value you'll need to pay $85 per month (0 - 25 employees) or $420 per month (26 - 199 employees)
Cast.app: AI-Powered Personalized Video Engagement for Scalable Customer Success
Founded in 2019, Cast.app is a SaaS-based customer success platform designed to enhance customer engagement through personalized, AI-generated video presentations. The platform integrates with various data sources to create tailored content that combines human-like speech, visualizations, and actionable insights, aiming to strengthen relationships between businesses and their customers.
Impact on Customer Success Teams
Cast.app automates the creation of personalized content, enabling efficient communication with a large customer base and reducing repetitive work for customer support teams. These videos are perfect for engaging customers during onboarding and beyond.
Pricing & Business Model
Cast's pricing is dependent on the number of accounts you have as a CSM. It starts at $400 per month for up to 200 customer accounts.
Enterpret: Customer Data to AI-Powered Insights
Enterpret was founded in 2020, with the goal of enabling companies to analyze customer feedback at scale. The Enterpret platform unifies unstructured customer feedback from various sources and builds adaptive AI models tailored to a company’s feedback architecture, delivering precise and granular insights to capture the "voice of the customer".
Impact on Customer Success Teams
Customer success managers often find themselves sifting through feedback scattered across different platforms. Enterpret makes this easier by pulling all that feedback into one place, giving teams a clear, complete view of what customers are saying and helping customer success teams analyze customer feedback effectively. Its AI models surface key trends through advanced sentiment analysis, helping teams prioritize the right actions.
With these insights, customer success teams can get ahead of potential problems and make smarter decisions about product improvements in general. The platform also makes it easier to spot recurring themes in customer feedback, helping teams respond more thoughtfully and stay connected to what their customers really need.
User Reviews
✅ "Enterpret proved to be an exceptional customer feedback analysis tool, surpassing my expectations. Leveraging natural language processing, the tool uncovers important themes and trends within customer feedback." - G2 Review
❌ "Works best for trends and data over longer periods of time -- can't reach for it for a real pulse on an emerging issue on day 0. Always getting better though!" - G2 Review
Pricing & Business Model
Pricing varies depending on the volume of data and the integrations you need. You'll need to talk to their sales reps to get an estimate of the exact price though.
Lica: AI-Powered Video Creation for Effortless Customer Education
Lica was founded by ex-Microsoft AI engineers. Lica leverages artificial intelligence to transform screen recordings and screenshots into polished, professional videos. The platform utilizes advanced AI to automatically add transitions, background music, and effects, streamlining the video creation process for users.
Impact on Customer Success Teams
Customer success managers often struggle to explain complex features in a way that customers easily understand. Lica helps by turning screen recordings and screenshots into clear, engaging videos that deliver personalized support during onboarding and beyond. These videos can be tailored to reflect customer preferences, making the learning process more relatable.
Lica's videos make learning easier for your customers. Moreover, they also cut down on repetitive support questions that bog down customer support teams. And honestly, as a customer, aren't you more satisfied with a product if you can find answers in a straightforward, well-explained video?
Pricing & Business Model
Lica's free tier is enough to get a taste of the magic: you'll be able to create 3 videos per month. These numbers might even suffice if you're a startup with a simple product. If you need to create more videos, you'll need to upgrade to the pro tier for $49 per month. However, this will still limit you to 10 videos per month. If you need even more videos you'll be greeted with the traditional "contact us" CTA.
Sierra: Autonomous AI Agents for Outstanding Customer Experience
Sierra was founded by two powerhouses: Bret Taylor (Co-CEO Salesforce, OpenAI board member) and Clay Bavor (Google Labs). They specialize in conversational AI platforms designed to transform customer service. The company focuses on building autonomous AI agents that assist customers in resolving issues and completing tasks without human intervention.
Impact on Customer Success Teams
CS teams are often stretched thin trying to juggle routine questions and more complex customer needs. Sierra is one of the most innovative applications of AI for customer success, helping teams handle routine tasks while prioritizing strategic goals. Sierra's agents are available 24/7, respond with a natural, empathetic tone, and adapt to match the company’s voice, ensuring every interaction feels personal.
On top of that, Sierra provides helpful analytics and reporting tools. These insights make it easier for teams to track what’s working, spot potential issues early, and continuously improve how they support customers.
Pricing & Business Model
At the time of writing there's no way to try Sierra's AI agents or find out their pricing without filling in their contact form. You know what that typically means, it's going to be expensive!
Lantern: Predictive Analytics with AI Agents
Lantern is an agentic AI tool designed to enhance customer relationships by unifying fragmented data and automating workflows. By consolidating various data sources, Lantern provides CS teams with enriched insights, enabling them to drive more pipeline with less effort. The platform offers features such as automated tracking of champion movements, intent signals, and changes within buying committees, all aimed at turning potential churn risks into expansion opportunities.
Impact on Customer Success Teams
As a customer success professional, you'll know how hard it is to stay on top of every customer relationship. Especially when key contacts change roles or usage patterns shift. Lantern helps by automatically tracking these important signals and sending timely notifications when there’s a shift in customer behavior or key contacts change roles. Its use of predictive analytics helps teams prepare for potential churn and uncover new growth opportunities.
With these insights delivered in real-time, customer success teams can jump into action when it matters most. They can reach out to reconnect with champions, address potential churn risks early, and spot new opportunities for growth. And because Lantern automates much of this tracking, teams can spend less time digging through data and more time building stronger relationships with customers.
Pricing & Business Model
Their pricing page mentions different tiers. Sadly it doesn't include actual pricing, you'll need to book a demo to find out!
