For most of the tech industry's history, the customer carried the risk. Vendors collected the money up front, fixed what broke, and sent a salesperson back four years later to sell the next thing. Whether the customer got value from the purchase was up to them. "The financial risk was theirs," said J.B. Wood, President and CEO of TSIA, the Technology & Services Industry Association, in his keynote on the future of the AI customer lifecycle at ELEVATE 2026, the customer value event Ecosystems co-hosts with TSIA.
That risk is now moving to vendors. J.B. called this "the time of the greatest change in how technology companies organize and design their customer lifecycle."
TSIA researches how technology companies sell and deliver services, so J.B. sees the problem across the industry. One executive in a recent TSIA conversation said the industry needs to "reimagine what it means to be a technology company in today's day and age."
How Did the Risk Shift to Vendors?
Subscriptions and consumption pricing gave customers a way out. When customers paid everything up front, low usage was their problem. With a subscription, they can decline to renew. With consumption pricing, they can stop consuming.
TSIA drew a picture of this around 2004 and called it the consumption gap: vendors were selling far more capability than customers used. Once that gap put revenue at risk, companies built customer success teams to drive adoption, and customer success grew into a big new service line.
Adoption, J.B. said, is "not the love language anymore. The love language is becoming value and outcomes." "We've been slinging those words for years," he said, but sales still dominated, and services "picked up the pieces of the deal."
What AI-Native Companies Are Changing
AI-native companies show customers the outcome before the customer buys. J.B. compared them to the SaaS companies that got subscriptions going. They put forward deployed engineers, or FDEs, on site. FDEs build a working solution with the customer's own data, so the customer sees the result before purchasing the product.
J.B. said time to full value under that model is much shorter than enterprise software used to deliver, and in many cases the customer experience is better too. "The net effect is that we are de-risking tech spend," he said.
Risk stayed with customers for so long because vendors have always been, and largely still are, "afraid of being on the hook for outcomes," J.B. said. Still, "I'm not saying you have to all run to outcome-based pricing. Very few people are actually doing that." Customer conversations are still moving toward value and away from demos and features, and the biggest, most transformational customers increasingly believe the vendor shares responsibility for realizing that value.
Why Promises Get Lost After the Sale
Sales and value engineering teams make promises about outcomes, and those promises rarely reach the people who deliver them. That's the promise gap, the problem ELEVATE 2026 kept coming back to. J.B. put it this way: sales is making promises, and "most of us are not being accountable for the delivery of those promises."
Two years ago, he asked 2,000 people at a TSIA event to raise a hand if their last closed-won opportunity in the CRM documented the customer's business outcome objectives. "Zero," J.B. said. "I'm like, you're kidding me." Presales teams work to understand what the customer is trying to do, and then professional services shows up and asks, in J.B.'s words, "okay, what are we doing today?"
Customer success measured something else. QBRs were built around adoption, because a certain adoption level was what secured the renewal. J.B. called the whole handoff model the bucket brigade: sales takes the deal so far and passes it to professional services, which passes it to support and success.
What Is NORR?
NORR, short for Net Outcome Realization Rate, measures how well a company keeps its value promises. J.B. spelled the letters out on stage and defined it with one question: "What percentage of the deals that we sold where we made promises about value or outcomes are we realizing in the time frame of the contract?"
Tracking it means four things have to be true:
- Someone writes down the promise and the time frame.
- The product produces the telemetry to measure it, which may mean asking product teams to build that data in.
- Sales and services hand off cleanly to each other.
- Channel partners take on new roles in the model.
Most teams can start on the first one now. "Somebody's got to write something down," J.B. said. The last one is still a gap. J.B. said he wished he could point to a reseller or dealer network ready to take this on, and he can't yet.
From LAER to DARE: A New Customer Lifecycle
TSIA is replacing its own customer lifecycle model. It coined LAER, short for land, adopt, expand, and renew. "It's not that anymore," J.B. said. The new model is DARE: design the value in advance, activate it, realize it, and evolve it. TSIA lays it out in From LAER to DARE: The New Customer Engagement Model for the AI Era.
"It's a different set of tasks requiring a different set of steps, a different set of skills," he said. The line between sales and services is already blurring. Service experts are being pulled into presales, and in consumption models, selling never stops. That raises practical questions, starting with sales comp. J.B. asked what incentive package gets a salesperson to sell the right deal with the right services attached, so the customer can prove the value.
One CRO told J.B. they had let go of top-performing salespeople who were at 200% of quota, because leadership didn't believe those reps could build the customer relationships and accountability the new model needs.
Your Customers Will Compare You to Their Best Vendor
Customers will judge every vendor against the best one they work with, including vendors outside your category. Once a customer has a supplier that proves value, delivers it, reports on it, and points to the next step, J.B. said, "they're going to wonder why other vendors don't do the same thing."
That experience, he said, will change how skeptical buyers who've been burned before behave: "it's going to make them write the check, it's going to make them pick vendors, it's going to make them stay with vendors." Scale is the open problem, even for AI-native companies. Of the FDE model, J.B. asked, "How do you get that to happen across thousands and thousands and thousands of customers?"
J.B.'s first requirement, a written promise with a time frame, is what Ecosystems is built to hold: the value case built with the buyer during the sale, carried through the handoff to delivery, and measured against after go-live, in one closed-loop system of record.
"It's going to be hell. It's going to be bumpy, there's going to be challenges, there's going to be pushback. But at the end of the day, it's going to stick because it's better for the customer."
— J.B. Wood, President and CEO of TSIA
Watch the Session
Watch J.B.'s full keynote, The Future of the AI Customer Lifecycle, from ELEVATE 2026. Read ur recap, Closing the Promise Gap, it covers the themes of the whole day.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the promise gap?
The promise gap is the distance between the value a vendor promises during the sale and the value the customer gets. J.B. Wood, President and CEO of TSIA, compared it to the consumption gap, TSIA's name for the distance between the capability vendors sell and what customers use. Sales teams make promises about outcomes, and most companies aren't yet accountable for delivering them.
What is NORR?
NORR, short for Net Outcome Realization Rate, measures how many value promises a company keeps. J.B. Wood, President and CEO of TSIA, defined it as the percentage of deals with promised value or outcomes that the vendor realizes within the time frame of the contract. Measuring it takes a written promise, a time frame, and product telemetry that tracks the result.
How is the customer lifecycle changing in the AI era?
TSIA is replacing LAER (land, adopt, expand, and renew), the customer lifecycle model it built for the SaaS era, with DARE: design, activate, realize, and evolve. J.B. Wood, President and CEO of TSIA, said DARE is "a different set of tasks requiring a different set of steps, a different set of skills." Value is designed in before the sale and measured after it.
What is a forward deployed engineer?
A forward deployed engineer, or FDE, works on site with a customer to build a working solution using the customer's own data. AI-native companies use FDEs to show the outcome before the customer buys, which shortens time to value. J.B. Wood said the open question is how to scale that model across thousands of customers.
Keep the Conversation Going
The conversations that started at ELEVATE continue all year with peers who are solving the same problems. Join the Customer Value Community to be part of them. And if you'd like to see how teams use Ecosystems to write down the value promise and track it through renewal, book a demo.
