Smarter together: AI as a teammate at Customer.io 

At Customer.io, we see AI as a teammate. One that empowers and strategically accelerates every move we make. It’s a tool that helps us work smarter, focus on what matters most, and spark greater creativity throughout the company. AI’s role is to amplify, empower, and expand our collective capacity, enabling our teams to perform at higher standards, foster deeper creativity, and drive lasting innovation.

We approach AI thoughtfully and intentionally. Customer.io is committed to a future shaped by responsible AI adoption and continuous innovation. While we embrace an AI-first mindset, we do so with care, integrity, and accountability. We take privacy and security seriously and strive to align with global standards to ensure data is handled responsibly. Everything AI generates serves as a collaborative starting point, which is then reviewed, refined, and approved to ensure quality, accuracy, and ethical alignment.

This balanced approach is why AI is woven into the fabric of how we work. From Customer Success to Engineering and beyond, every team at Customer.io uses AI to elevate human potential, streamline workflows, and deliver even greater value to our customers — responsibly, creatively, and with purpose.

As a fully remote company spanning more than 30 countries, the People team needed to ensure that onboarding was well-structured and seamless, without requiring extra work from managers. To improve this and better empower new hires, the People team crafted a GPT-powered Slack workflow and built a system that instantly generates role-specific 30-60-90-day onboarding plans. These AI-assisted plans not only reduce creation time by up to 50% but also enhance alignment between managers and joining team members, ensuring consistency across departments and delivering a more engaging and personalized onboarding experience. By streamlining administrative tasks, managers can now focus on what matters most: building relationships, setting clear expectations, and helping every new teammate get off to a strong start at Customer.io.

When you need an answer and the person who has it is offline in another timezone, work can grind to a halt. For internal teams at Customer.io, digging through Notion or Slack and waiting for responses was slowing down teams. To remove that friction, the Operations team built Air Traffic Control (ATC) — a Slack-based AI assistant that serves as Customer.io’s operational hub. ATC does more than just answer questions. Built on a multi-agent architecture with specialized agents for company Q&A, IT support, and request routing, it actively connects employees to the information and resources they need to get work done. Powered by a custom retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline, ATC surfaces verified Notion documentation and intelligently routes requests to the right teams, systems, and workflows. Each answer links directly to its source, ensuring transparency, accuracy, and trust.

Time spent researching the wrong prospects is time that could be spent building real relationships. Identifying the right prospects for Customer.io takes time, and choosing the wrong ones can be even more costly. To remedy this, the sales team has access to Zoominfo Copilot and has built a GPT, also known as a Generative Pre-trained Transformer. A GPT is a type of AI model that is pre-trained on data. These particular GPTs enable them to research organizations and evaluate ICP fit quickly, accurately, and at scale. The GPT gathers key company insights that are publicly available, helping reps determine whether a prospect aligns with our target criteria and create a Point of View (POV) before outreach. This makes every conversation more relevant and valuable for both sides. Now, reps start conversations with relevance and value, creating a sales process that is more efficient, respectful, and impactful for everyone involved.

Six months ago, our engineers waited 3.5 hours for routine PR reviews. Today it's 33 minutes. That shift didn't happen by accident—it happened because the team stopped thinking of AI as a novelty and started treating it as a teammate. Waiting for reviews keeps code "in progress" mentally, forcing context-switches and reducing focus. Reviewers spent valuable time on straightforward PRs (like documentation fixes or small refactors), leaving less time for complex, high-impact work. To solve this, our engineering team taught AI to not only review but also approve pull requests. It approves routine changes consistently and knows when to escalate complex ones for human review. Engineers now move faster, focus better, and trust the system to strike a balance between speed and safety. That speed translates directly to our customers; features ship faster, bugs get fixed sooner, and our product evolves at the pace our customers need.

The Customer Success team is continually improving the onboarding process for new customers. To help identify opportunities for improvement, the team needed to research how other SaaS companies run high-impact onboarding programs. Using ChatGPT, they conducted in-depth analysis, synthesized market insights, and developed a data-informed proposal for adapting those best practices at Customer.io. This approach saved hours of manual research, built a solid foundation grounded in industry insights, and freed the team to focus on fine-tuning and alignment. By leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT, the Customer Success team researches, validates ideas, and plans projects with greater speed and precision, driving strategic initiatives, faster execution, and a greater impact for our customers.

How do you ensure that everyone at Customer.io adheres to brand guidelines without slowing down their workflow? That was the challenge the Marketing team set out to solve. Maintaining a consistent voice and tone, whether writing emails, ad copy, or one-pagers, is key to keeping our brand cohesive. Their solution was the Content Style Editor, an AI-powered tool for editing internal Customer.io content. Instead of relying on multiple review rounds or looping in Marketing for every edit, anyone can paste their draft into the tool and instantly receive feedback aligned with our brand standards. The Content Style Editor delivers actionable suggestions to sharpen clarity, refine tone, and strengthen consistency—serving as an on-demand editor that guides rather than writes for the teams within Customer.io.

Across Customer.io, AI is empowering every decision and action. AI is not changing our culture; it’s improving it. And, the same principles that guide us internally, in terms of how we use AI, efficiency, creativity, and human-centered impact, are built into the Customer.io platform itself.

Our AI Assistant helps marketers craft more effective messages, refine their tone, and generate ideas that remain authentic to their brand. However, beyond content, features such as our AI Segment Builder, smart send-time optimization, and AI-driven insights empower teams to surface opportunities more quickly, act with confidence, and connect with customers in more meaningful ways.

At Customer.io, AI is empowering creativity. It’s working for us, and for you, on your terms. It’s giving every marketer (and team member) the power to move faster, experiment more boldly, and focus on what matters most: building lasting relationships.