Your Customer Doesn't Need an Expert, They Need a Co-Worker.

Why leverage, not certainty, is what a partnership actually runs on.

Last week, I wrote about ditching the slide deck for an ugly, honest doc I threw together in an afternoon. What I didn't get to: my whole job has completely changed.

Recently, a controller I work with Slacked me because his Claude connection had dropped and he needed his numbers checked before a big meeting. So I checked them, right there in the channel we already shared, because I could. And it was shocking how normal it felt: not like helping a client, but like helping a co-worker. In my old world, that message never would have happened because he either wouldn't have asked, or he'd have sent a terse email that came in too late to matter. Instead, we sorted it out in ten minutes, and I backed up with action what I'd been saying all along: we're a partnership.

But it wasn't always like this

Now looking back, it's a little embarrassing to admit (not just for me, but for customer success at large) that our customer interactions took on a kind of performance: flowery emails, over-prepared calls, hours dressing up hard news into something mildly interesting. I became a professional naysayer in a nice outfit, someone who could deliver bad news smoothly enough that you'd still take my call the following week. And I was very good at it...

To be clear, I wasn't performing because I was dishonest, but because I had no leverage. I couldn't change the product, fix what we'd dropped, or move faster than the roadmap allowed, so the only lever left to pull was the story. When you can't change anything, the job boils down to storytelling — which is exactly what the slide deck was for.

AI didn't take the human out, it gave me something better than a story

The big fear with AI is that it strips the people out of business and automates the warmth away. But does it have to be that way? For me, the opposite happened: when I can vibe-code a real fix, pull the data myself, or reshape a deliverable live on a call, I don't need the costume. I've got real-time, transparent deliverables to bring instead of a well-told story about why things are the way that they are.

That leverage changes what I am to a customer; I can drop the expert act — we both know nobody has the whole AI playbook figured out anyway — and lean into the fact that we're all in the middle of an evolution that hasn't finished evolving. Instead of showing up with all the answers, we find the real pain point together, try something together, and iterate on it...together.

Proximity, agility, and a little humility

Those are the three things my best relationships run on now. Proximity, because I'm in the channel with you in real time instead of scheduling a performance two weeks out. Agility, because when something's wrong we change the actual thing, fast, instead of narrating our way around it. And humility, because unlike in the past, it means admitting I don't have it all figured out and asking you to figure it out with me anyway.

For the longest time we assumed a business had to be the all-knowing expert, that our certainty was the product. AI knocked that assumption over, because it let us stop selling the story and start showing the work. My whole pitch these days: I'll show you the machine instead of a deck about the machine. We run these systems on ourselves long before we hand them to you, because we're gonna walk the walk as we navigate this ever-changing AI landscape.

I encourage you to challenge the assumption of what a partnership has to be, and go get yourself some leverage. Drop the act and let your customers watch you build instead of watching you present.

If that sounds like the way you'd rather work, come see what we're building at datafabriq.co.