Ziv Peled, Chief Customer Officer and Chief AI Officer at AppsFlyer, joins Jay to unpack how a $500M+ ARR company moved everyone to Claude, built its own AI stack, and now measures every role by "AI leverage." Plus: why Salesforce should resell Claude, and why FDE really means net dollar retention.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Everyone is a builder now: Building isn't writing software. It's workflows, skills, and automations, and leaders have to be hands-on to know what their teams need.
- Work 24/7 without working 24/7: Split work between you and AI, keep agents busy around the clock, and step in for a quick eval when a human is needed.
- Agents from a central place: AppsFlyer built an MCP, semantic layer, and data lake over 29 data sets so 800 people inherit agents instead of each building their own.
- Classifiers power automation: Fast, cheap, typed models make agent decisions like routing a customer request reliable in under a second.
- Build near the system of record: Own your Salesforce, NetSuite, and billing developers. Buy at the application layer.
- FDE is NDR: Forward-deployed engineering isn't professional services. It's about outcomes the customer judges, tied to retention.
- Measure AI leverage: If an SDR goes from 5 to 10 meetings a month, that's 100% leverage. Measure end-of-funnel, quality KPIs.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Ziv Peled is the Chief Customer Officer and Chief AI Officer at AppsFlyer, where he leads AI strategy across go-to-market while guiding a 170-person CS org. He previously served as VP Product and CCO at AppsFlyer. Connect with Ziv on LinkedIn
CHAPTERS
- 00:00 - Catching up: Israel's tech moment
- 06:08 - AppsFlyer's strategic investment from Meta, Google, Moloco, and Unity
- 07:04 - From CCO to Chief AI Officer
- 09:45 - Why every leader needs to be a builder
- 10:13 - Assistants vs. automation and the new adoption curve
- 13:24 - Multiplayer AI for teams
- 15:14 - Inside AppsFlyer's internal AI stack
- 19:56 - Splitting time between CAIO and CCO
- 22:53 - The 24/7 mindset and human-in-the-loop evals
- 25:44 - The AI budget equation
- 27:01 - Teaching people to think like designers
- 29:57 - Classifier models and go-to-market use cases
- 34:59 - Build vs. buy
- 39:08 - Salesforce, Anthropic, and the GRR play
- 44:33 - The value era for customer success
- 46:07 - The sewing machine story
- 48:07 - FDE is net dollar retention
- 52:25 - The AI leverage scorecard
- 54:52 - Goodhart's Law and wrap-up
About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it.
Your Hosts:
- Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io
- Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io