Q3 2025 Release Notes for Staircase AI

AI Expansion Analysis

Staircase AI has introduced the AI Expansion Analysis feature that automatically identifies potential revenue growth opportunities across your accounts by analyzing recent customer interactions. The system uses AI to uncover both direct and subtle expansion signals, ensuring Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and Account Managers never miss a growth opportunity hidden in daily communications.

Key Capabilities

• AI-driven opportunity detection:
Automatically analyzes customer communications such as emails, calls, tickets, and meetings to detect expansion signals.
• Multi-channel insight coverage:
Scans interactions from the past 90 days across multiple systems to provide a comprehensive account view.
• Actionable recommendations:
Generates action plans based on historical expansion patterns and similar successful opportunities.
• Prioritized opportunity list:
Ranks opportunities by AI confidence score and potential ARR impact to help teams focus on the most valuable leads.
• Weekly AI refresh:
The model retrains and updates weekly as new communication signals and account data emerge.

Key Benefits

• Surface potential upsell and cross-sell opportunities automatically, without relying on manual reviews.
• Focus on customer engagements and closing opportunities and reduce time-consuming communication reviews.
• Validate every recommendation with linked source evidence to ensure accuracy and transparency.
• Act on timely insights to strengthen customer relationships and accelerate growth.

For more information on AI Expansion Analysis, refer to the Ask Staircase article.

Admin Privileges for Deleting Communication Items

Staircase AI now allows admins to permanently delete sensitive communication data from the system. This functionality supports strict data governance, privacy, and compliance requirements by enabling secure, permission-based deletion of individual communications while maintaining a complete administrative audit trail.

Key Enhancements

• Configurable Permissions: A new Delete option is available in Communication summary for admins and can be enabled from Organization Settings > Staircase AI users. End users do not have delete access to prevent accidental or unauthorized removals. For more information on configuring permissions, refer to the Users and Permissions article. 
  
  
  
  Only users with the Admin access can delete a communication summary.
  
  
   
• Secure and Complete Removal: When an admin deletes a communication, it immediately deletes the selected communication from the Timeline and all user views. While all associated content, AI analysis, and activity details are permanently removed from the system, key metadata, such as account, subject, organizer, attendees, deletion timestamp, is retained.
• Built-In Audit: Each deletion generates a Deleted Engagements report. This report includes metadata to support traceability and compliance audits and offers search, date filters, and export options for data governance reviews.

Key Benefits

• Provides complete control over sensitive communication data, ensuring compliance with privacy and data governance policies.
• Enables executive participation in monitored communications while allowing selective deletion of confidential discussions.
• Reduces exposure of sensitive data and supports regulatory obligations (example: GDPR, internal audit policies).
• Allows admins to maintain clean, compliant data environments without manual engineering involvement.

Enhanced Topics Report and Configuration

Staircase AI‘s Topics report has been enhanced to provide deeper insights, more flexible setup options, and smarter AI-driven topic management. These updates empower admins and users to better categorize, interpret, and explore conversational trends across customer communications.

Key Enhancements

• Topics Report in the Sidebar: The Topics report is now accessible directly from the sidebar, the main navigation menu on the left. Previously available only within the Reports area. This change makes it simpler for users to find and analyze topic-based insights without navigating through multiple sections.
  
  
   
• Predefined and Custom Topics Setup for Admins: Admins can now access a dedicated Topics setup area in Settings > Configurations > Topics where they can view, rename, enable, or deactivate predefined AI-generated topics. Predefined topics, for example, Advocacy and Value Realization, Meeting Scheduling, can be customized to match your organization’s terminology.
  
  
   
• Create and Manage Custom Parent Topics: Admins can create custom parent topics alongside existing out-of-the-box (OOB) topics. Each parent topic serves as a container for related child topics generated by AI. You can create topics directly within the Topics area. 
• Convert terms to description: If you previously created keyword-based topics, use the new Convert terms to description button to let AI scan those keywords and automatically convert them into topic descriptions.
  
  
   
• Improved Handling of Legacy Keyword-Based Topics: You can now convert existing keyword-based topics into AI-generated descriptions. During conversion, Staircase AI automatically rewrites keyword-based topics into natural-language prompts for better AI interpretation. Example: To detect competitive risk, you can define a topic such as Competition and add the keyword <Company Name> with a descriptive prompt like: Identify when customers discuss switching to <Company Name> or evaluating it as an alternative.
  
  
   
• Enhanced Topic and Account Drill-Down: The Topics report now supports detailed exploration through two distinct views; Topic Breakdown and Account Breakdown. Users can drill into specific subtopics, view corresponding conversations, and analyze topic-level account metrics. 
  Example:
Under Advocacy and Value Realization, AI-generated subtopics such as Positive Feedback and ROI Achieved appear automatically based on customer conversations. 
  
  

Key Benefits 

• Manage both predefined and custom AI topics directly from the Setup area.
• Improve accuracy by combining keyword-based detection with AI-generated prompts.
• Explore granular insights through enhanced Topic and Account breakdown views.

For more information on adding topics, refer to Topics article. 

New Privacy & Security Tab and IP Access Control

A new Privacy & Security tab has been added to the Settings > Configurations page in Staircase AI, giving admins a centralized location to manage all privacy and security related configurations. This update improves visibility, control, and organization of system-level configurations.

Key Enhancements

• New Privacy & Security Tab: This dedicated consolidates all settings related to system security, privacy, and access management.

• Relocation of Existing Features: Several existing options  have been reorganized for better structure and usability described in the table below: 

• IP Access Control: Admins can now limit access to Staircase AI by specifying allowed IP addresses in the Privacy & Security tab.

  Note: If a CSM or admin enables IP Access Control without including their own IP address or the team’s IPs, the system may block those users from logging in.

Key Benefits

• Provides a centralized location for managing data protection and access configurations.
• Improves organization of settings by grouping all security-related options under one section.
• Enhances security by ensuring only approved network locations can access Staircase AI.

For more information on IP address control, refer to the Privacy & Security article.

Localize Organization Profile Using AI Language Preference

The Organization Profile now supports summary on the basis of language selected in AI Language Preferences option. When this setting is enabled, the profile automatically reflects content in the selected language, ensuring a localized experience for global teams.

Key Benefit: This enhancement improves accessibility and usability for non-English-speaking users by aligning organizational content with their preferred AI-generated language settings.

IMPORTANT: The Organization Profile updates once a month, unless it has been manually edited. If not edited, it updates during the next scheduled refresh.

For more information on Profile, refer to the Organization Profile section in the Organization article.

Configure Exact Match Rules for Custom Events

Staircase AI by Gainsight now supports exact match detection for Custom Events, giving users more control when configuring keyword-based event triggers. This enhancement gives users precise control over event detection, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing configurations. 

Key Enhancements

• Exact Match with Quotation Marks: Terms enclosed in quotation marks are treated as exact matches and substring or partial matching is disabled when quotes are used. Example: "PAS" matches only the string PAS (case-insensitive). 
• Backward Compatibility: Terms entered without quotes continue to use substring matching. Example: PAS matches PAS, passing, and compass.

Note: Custom events are applied only moving forward; they are not applied retroactively. Event detection is based on email subject, email body, and meeting titles. Call transcripts are not included.

For more information on Lookup Terms, refer to the Lifecycle Events article.

Adjust Sensitivity of Automated Email Detection

Admins can now control the threshold and sensitivity of automated email detection directly in the product interface from Automated Email Detection option in General settings. This gives users the flexibility to manage settings themselves.

Key Capabilities

• Staircase AI filters emails sent from typical service addresses (example: notifications@, no-reply@, support@).
• Includes all Standard detection and analyzes repetitive patterns (example, mass emails to multiple recipients).
• Effectively identifies most automated messages, but may occasionally flag human-generated content with repeated text or signatures.

Key Benefit: Admins can adjust detection levels, making the system less or more aggressive depending on whether it is over-capturing or under-capturing automated communications.

For more information on how to adjust sensitivity of automated email detection, refer to the General Configuration Settings article. 

Create Personalized Views Using Advanced Filters

Staircase AI has combined two filter options in Advanced Filters, Total activity and Team member filter, to give you greater flexibility in creating precise views of account activity. 

This empowers team members who are not directly assigned to an account, such as executives, product managers, or support leaders to gain meaningful visibility into their engagements. Users can now filter account views based on their personal interactions, including meetings, emails, chats, or support tickets, within a selected timeframe.

This capability ensures that stakeholders across the organization can track and prioritize the accounts they have engaged with, regardless of account ownership or role (CSM, AM or TAM).

Key Enhancement

• Team Member sub-filter under Total Activity filter: When adding the Total activity filter, use the new Team member filter to show only accounts that a specific teammate—or yourself—has engaged with during the selected period. The Total activity filter lets you set a minimum engagement threshold. Enter a value such as 1 to include accounts with at least one teammate interaction, or set higher thresholds (for example, 3 or 5) to to view accounts with more frequent engagement. 
  

Key Benefits 

• Users can focus on the accounts they have personally engaged with by filtering for themselves.
• Managers can narrow their scope to the accounts a teammate or multiple teammates have engaged with.
• Teams can generate targeted reports to support account management and follow-up actions.
• Activity thresholds can highlight accounts a team member (including yourself) has engaged with, either at all (greater than or equal to 1) or more heavily (set 5+ activities), depending on the selected timeframe.

For more information on Advanced Filter, refer to the Ask Staircase article.

Staircase AI Account Page Widget for Salesforce

The Staircase AI Salesforce app is now officially approved and listed on the AppExchange. Admins can embed the full Staircase account page directly into Salesforce Account records as a widget, giving teams access to key account insights without leaving Salesforce. This integration provides a unified view of account insights without leaving Salesforce. 

Previously achievable through custom setup, this capability is now fully approved and streamlined as a certified AppExchange solution.

Key Capabilities

• The embedded widget displays the full Staircase account page, including:
  • Accounts Summaries
  • Ask Staircase
  • Dashboard widgets
  • Stakeholders heat map
  • Open items
• Available as an installable package from the Salesforce AppExchange.
• Admins can configure the widget placement on the Salesforce page layout (iframe-style embedded widget).
  

IMPORTANT

To use this feature:

• The account must exist in both Salesforce and Staircase, matched by Salesforce Account ID.
• The viewing user must have an active Staircase user account. If the user does not have an account, the widget doesn’t display any data.

For more information on Staircase AI account page widget for Salesforce, refer to the SDFC Widget article.