CELab: The Customer Education Lab

Customer education doesn’t have a confidence problem. It has a visibility problem wearing a confidence problem’s clothes. Thought Industries’ 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report found that 99% of leaders are confident their program influences business outcomes and 72% say they have the data to prove it — yet education is still one of the first functions on the block when budgets tighten. Both of those things can’t be true. In this episode, Dave puts that tension to Irana Wasti, CEO of Thought Industries, a product leader who spent twenty-plus years at IBM, Intuit, GoDaddy, Typeform, and BILL before stepping into the learning category a year ago — and who calls customer education “the best hidden secret” in every company she’s met.

Irana’s outsider lens is the whole point. She explains why the customer journey looks so much bigger from the education seat than it ever did from the product seat, why declining academy logins are an opportunity rather than a loss, and why the fix isn’t a better dashboard — it’s getting your best content out of the gated portal and into every place your prospects and customers actually ask questions, from ChatGPT and Claude to in-product chat and the help center. You’ll hear how Thought Industries’ Omnichannel Learning and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) work, why “two-second answers or a PhD” is the new customer expectation, and what changes on the vendor’s side of the table. If you sit in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is your case for a bigger seat; if you’re in Enablement, Marketing, Support, or L&D, it’s the argument for one shared source of truth instead of five teams educating in silos.

Highlights from this episode:

The best hidden secret. Coming from product, Irana had barely interacted with customer education teams — then she saw how much of the customer journey they actually own, and how little of it reaches the executive dashboard.

Falling academy traffic “screams opportunity.” Customers left for ChatGPT overnight. Irana reframes that drop as the moment to insert education into every touchpoint instead of asking people to come to you.

Everybody thinks they do customer education. Product tours, community, help center, academy — five teams, five versions of the truth. The team with the richest, most accurate content should own the fabric, not just a platform.

Why budgets get cut. When education is measured as “just another platform,” it looks redundant every renewal cycle. Tie it to the full customer journey and the metrics finally climb the dashboard.

A new goal for the industry. Irana’s closing challenge: stop at 99% of education leaders being confident and go for 99% of CEOs confident that education drives business outcomes.

Connect with Irana Wasti on LinkedIn, explore Thought Industries’ AI Wave — Omnichannel Learning and Conversational AI Learning — at thoughtindustries.com, and watch for the 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Thought Industries.

At most B2B SaaS companies, the customer comes last. Product announces, internal enablement scrambles, marketing drafts, documentation piles on — and the customer-facing material gets slapped together at the end by whoever’s left. Anna-Lena Kress, Senior Learning Experience Designer at quantilope, decided that order was exactly backwards. She pitched leadership on building the polished, customer-facing asset first and letting marketing and internal training derive from it — and got an immediate yes. The result: a help center rebuild scoped at six months shipped in two, a team that trained itself just by using the customer content, and a one-person education function that now runs like a system instead of a cleanup crew.
In this episode, Anna-Lena walks through the three pillars that made it work — Customer Education First (create once, publish everywhere), Capture at the Source (SMEs recording asynchronously in Camtasia Online instead of being interviewed), and Amplify with AI (Clueso for step-by-step articles, Claude for finished Zendesk HTML). Then the conversation turns to attention itself: how her family farm’s social channel went from 1,000 followers in March to 50,000 by recording day with strictly educational soil-health videos, and what hook–arc–payoff can teach Customer Education about getting people through the front door. If you’re in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is the playbook for going first. If you’re in Enablement, Marketing, L&D, or Support, it’s a look at what you get when the customer asset already exists on day one.
Highlights from this episode:
“Who actually sends our content to the customer? Our team.” — Why Anna-Lena treats internal colleagues as her first customer, and how that reframes the whole launch sequence.
The waiter effect — When the team trains on customer-facing material, they recommend it like a server who’s already tasted tonight’s special. Confident referrals, zero extra enablement lift.
The “it’s not baked yet” objection, answered — Last-minute product tweaks are cheaper to patch on a finished customer asset than to rebuild from internal drafts. The fear is legit; the conclusion is backwards.
Six months to two — 100+ help center articles rebuilt by one person: SMEs record in Camtasia Online, Clueso turns video into screenshots and steps, Claude assembles the final Zendesk HTML — and the leftover video library later powered an unplanned course update.
Fix the front door, not just the interior — We obsess over the inside of our academies while the entrance is off its hinges. Why 30-second, one-lesson, myth-buster videos are a scroll-stopping way in — and how Dave’s viral Atlassian short-form program got killed anyway.
Connect with Anna-Lena Kress on LinkedIn, explore the quantilope Academy to see the modular, customer-first model in action, and find her farm, Better Together Acres, on Facebook for the soil-health videos that stopped the scroll.

Every Customer Education team eventually hits the same wall: you build something genuinely good, and it quietly dies behind a portal your customers never log into. We call that an engagement problem. It isn't. It's a distribution problem — and most of us are still solving it one channel at a time. In this crossover episode, Dave replays a July 2026 webinar recorded with Casey Trujillo of BrainStorm, a digital transformation coach who has spent 20+ years helping Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies get their people to actually use the software they bought. The topic is content syndication, and the argument is blunt: "come to my site, create an account, take my course" is a losing pattern, and everybody in the chain knows it.

The through-line is build once, distribute many — build a genericized version of the material once, then split it two ways: one copy inside for enablement, one copy outside for customers, delivered where they already work and shaped to the slice of your product they actually own. Casey and Dave walk the two-sided standoff that keeps this from happening — vendors terrified of losing control of their content, customers exhausted by asking permission for every change — and land on the mechanism that resolves both at once. You'll leave with a way to think about shared reporting, a churn signal you're probably already ignoring, and a low-risk experiment you can run with a single existing customer this quarter. Primary audience here is Customer Education and Customer Success, but if you sit in Enablement, L&D, Support, or Marketing and you build content for people who don't work for you, this is your problem too.

Highlights from this episode:

"Why are you rebuilding this?" — Dave on watching enablement teams reconstruct fundamentals for content that already exists, in excellent form, out in the world.

It was never an LMS problem. Why the LMS mental model — completions, seats, box-checking — quietly caps what your education program can ever do.

The two-sided standoff. The vendor's fear of losing content control versus the customer's fear of asking permission forever — and why private portals resolve both at the same time.

Shared reporting, both directions. What changes when the vendor and the customer see the same engagement data, and nobody has to play reporting concierge at 7am on a Monday.

The signal you're throwing away. If a customer isn't touching the training, they're probably not touching the product — and that's a proactive play for your CSM, not a lagging metric.

Most companies handed the internal AI rollout to whoever sits closest to revenue — Sales Enablement or RevOps — and adoption promptly stalled at the login screen. In this episode, Dave reunites with his old Gainsight colleague Eve Kedar, EdD — Revenue Execution Architect at EK Consulting, author of Build a KickA$$ Sales Team, and creator of the Four Faces of AI Resistance — to make the case most org charts get wrong: the team that should own internal AI adoption is the one nobody put in the room. Customer Education.
Eve brings a combination almost nobody else in this conversation has: a doctorate in Education and Leadership for Change plus 15+ years inside revenue teams at Apple, Seagate, PayPal, Cisco, Gainsight, and copy.ai. Whether you sit in Customer Education, Customer Success, L&D, Enablement, Marketing, or Support — if your job is helping people genuinely change how they work, this episode hands you a diagnostic for the resistance you’re up against and two plays you can run on Monday, no platform purchase required.
Highlights from this episode:
The Four Faces of AI Resistance — status fear, displacement fear, change aversion, and rollout fatigue — and why naming which face you’re looking at tells you exactly which intervention to run.
Why not Enablement or RevOps? Neither function is chartered to own learning — and real “adoption” means use-in-workflow, not logins.
Attendance is a vanity metric. If all you can show is headcount and quiz clicks, your team may be next to get cut — bring KPI movement instead.
The master glossary play: become the anchor for canonical learning with two-minute mini-trainings — without critiquing Enablement’s content and losing them forever.
The cheapest AI enablement in the world: prompt-based roleplay with Claude or ChatGPT — twenty minutes per rep, no purchase order.
Learn more: get the Four Faces of AI Resistance framework — plus Eve’s speaking and workshops — at evekedar.com, explore EK Consulting’s revenue-execution work at ekconsulting.io, read her book Build a KickA$$ Sales Team, and ask her about the AI roleplay prompt workbook. And connect with Eve on LinkedIn!

In this kickoff to Season 8 of the CELab podcast, host Dave Derington sits down with Anya Eydman to explore a provocative idea: our biggest AI problem in Customer Education isn’t a skills gap or a technology gap - it’s a belief gap. Anya draws on her background in corporate finance, small business and startup operations, coaching, municipal and nonprofit work, and energy/civic tech to show how AI is becoming a new learning style and a genuine learning partner, not just another productivity tool. Anya connects the dots between AI, underserved communities, workforce shifts, and what it means to design learning experiences that people actually want to engage with.

Across the conversation, they unpack the role of prompt engineering as a core literacy, not just a niche technical skill, and examine how AI can level the playing field while also exposing new inequities. Anya shares how she’s using AI with interns, cities, and universities (including a forthcoming “AI Without Hype” course at Vassar College) to build trust infrastructure, redesign workflows, and bring more people into complex conversations about energy, affordability, and technology. If you’re in Customer Education or Customer Success and wrestling with how AI changes your strategy, your stakeholders, and your learners, this episode will challenge how you think about outcomes, belief systems, and what “meeting learners where they are” really means in 2026.

Key Topics:

The “belief gap” vs. skills gap

Why resistance to AI is often about belief systems, not capability.

How this parallels learner motivation and adoption challenges in CE/CS.

AI as a new learning style and learning partner

Treating AI like a sharp intern or co-worker rather than a magic answer machine.

Designing learning journeys that assume AI is in the loop.

Prompt engineering as a core literacy

Why prompt engineering should be taught like a fundamental communication skill.

How better questions drive better learning outcomes and better customer outcomes.

Non-linear, outcome-focused learning journeys

Moving beyond “I took a course” to “we changed a workflow and a behavior.”

Aligning CE programs with measurable participation and impact, not just completions.

Cross-pollination beyond SaaS/B2B silos

Lessons from civic tech, energy, and community engagement that apply directly to CE/CS.

How to bring community-style thinking into customer communities and academies.

Underserved learners and access to AI

What “underserved” means when AI accelerates knowledge but not everyone can use it well.

How CE can help customers navigate fear, overload, and trust issues with AI.

Trust infrastructure and stakeholder mapping

Building trust frameworks inside organizations and with customer stakeholders.

Rethinking stakeholder mapping now that decision-making paths and gatekeepers are changing.

Team dynamics, titles, and shared ownership of knowledge

Shifting from heavy titles to everyone as a “lead” owning a slice of the missio...