
Two companies are betting on opposite futures for customer success software - one consolidating the old dashboard playbook, the other handing the work to AI agents. Here is what the split says about where retention revenue is headed.
Keith Frankel is CEO of Totango, the customer success platform, where he is fusing AI churn prediction with customer-led growth. A designer-turned-founder, he ran creative and design at HubSpot through its 2014 IPO, built adaptive-learning product at Firecracker (acquired by Wolters Kluwer), then founded Parative, an AI customer-intelligence startup backed by Bain Capital Ventures that forecast churn with greater than 99% accuracy. Totango acquired Parative in 2024 and folded its tech into the Unison growth-intelligence engine. Before any of it, he produced reality television at MTV.