Risk Analyst
The article describes how end users can leverage Risk Analyst, an AI-powered tool that surfaces risk by detecting hidden churn signals in customer interactions.
Overview
The Risk Analyst is an AI-powered insight agent in Staircase AI that helps teams proactively identify, understand, and mitigate churn risk. It builds on the same agentic AI architecture as the Expansion Analyst, leveraging historical outcomes and real-time communication signals to deliver contextual risk analysis and actionable guidance.
Risk Analyst acts as an always-on AI teammate, learning from your past, monitoring your present, and guiding your next best action, so teams can respond to churn risk earlier, faster, and with greater confidence.
How Does Risk Analyst Work?
Risk Analyst identifies potential risks across accounts by analyzing recent customer interactions. The Risk Analyst is an agentic system with multiple AI sub-agents that work together to analyze risk.
The following image shows how Staircase AI’s Risk Analyst analyzes historical churn data and current customer communications to detect risk signals, assess churn severity, and generate evidence-based insights and recommended mitigation actions, presented as a unified risk synopsis with a continuous feedback loop.
Process Overview
- Experience Curator: The Experience Curator, scans six months of historical churn risk events to build an experience library and analyzes customer communications that previously triggered churn risks. It captures what worked, what didn’t, the actions taken, and who was involved, enabling the AI to personalize recommendations based on proven, real-world outcomes. The Experience Library is a backend knowledge base that reflects your organization’s real-world playbooks, workflows, and success patterns. This library continuously informs all downstream AI analysis and recommendations.
- Signal Scout: Monitors current risk signals and scans current customer communications, including, emails, calls, support tickets and meetings. Risk Analyst activates its sub-agents when a “Churn Risk” event is detected.
- Risk Analysis and Synthesis:
- Analyzes the triggering communication
- Reviews surrounding and recent communications for the account
- Incorporates recent history of risk-related conversations
- This results in a holistic understanding of what is happening at the account, why the account is at risk and how the risk is evolving over time.
- Risk Synopsis Generation: All insights are synthesized into a Risk Synopsis that appears directly on the account page. The risk synopsis provides a clear, plain-language summary of the risk and includes the following:
- Risk score (1–5)
- Risk trajectory
- Risk reasons
For more information on risk score, refer to the Risk Level Score section.
- Playbook Creator: Scans the Experience Library to identify patterns from similar past churn scenarios and generates curated actions and playbooks aligned with what previously worked. Recommended actions are embedded directly into the risk synopsis and teams can:
- Review suggested steps
- Identify key internal and external stakeholders
- Take action directly from the playbook
- Right-Side Panel Experience: Risk Analyst insights are consolidated in a redesigned right-side panel, which includes:
- Playbooks tab
- Recommended actions
- Step-by-step mitigation guidance
- Stakeholders tab
- Key customer contacts and detractor/advocate state
- Communication guidance
What’s Changed From the Previous Churn Risk Summary
The following table summarizes the key differences between the previous Churn Risk Summary and the Risk Analyst experience.
| Previous Experience | Risk Analyst |
|---|---|
| Single-paragraph summary | Full multi-layer risk analysis. Classifies risks into nine actionable categories. |
| Trigger-based explanation only | Provides contextual analysis across all related communications and indicates the urgency of the risk, including recommended days to action. |
| Limited guidance | AI-generated playbooks and actions. Recommends actions based on what actually worked in a similar situation. |
| No learning loop | Continuous learning through Experience Library. |
Risk Categories
Risk Analyst classifies risks into the following nine actionable categories:
- Product Issue: Lists issues such as bugs, outages, missing features. For example, "3 production incidents in Q4".
- Value Perception: Lists ROI concerns and pricing pushback. For example, "CFO questioning whether we’re worth it".
- Competitive Pressure: Evaluates alternative solutions. For example, "TechRival POV in final week".
- Service Experience: Lists down support issues with slow response. For example, "Escalation still open after 2 weeks".
- Stakeholder Change: Records if the champion left or if there is a new decision maker. For example, "VP of CS departed 30 days ago".
- Commercial Friction: Lists billing disputes or contract issues. For example, "Disputing overage charges".
- Technical Blockers: Records integration failures, or compliance failure. For example, "SSO integration won’t connect".
- Adoption Struggles: Lists low usage or training gaps. For example, "Only 12% of users active".
- Strategic Misalignment: Lists priorities that shifted away. For example, "Moving budget to different initiatives".
Playbooks adapt based on the risk category. Competitive pressure may require executive engagement, while product issues call for engineering escalation. This ensures teams take the most effective actions for the specific risk at hand.
Risk Level Score
The Risk Level Score evaluates how likely a customer account is to churn based on conversational and engagement signals. Scores range from 1 to 5 that helps identify accounts that are on the verge of churn.
Score Definitions
| Score | Risk Level | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2 | Monitor | While early churn signals are present, current mitigation actions are successfully stabilizing the account. |
| 3 | Engage | Accounts exhibit signals of risk emerging. |
| 4 | Escalate | The account shows serious new indicators of churn, with risk continuing to grow. |
| 5 | Critical | The account shows a high likelihood of churn and requires executive intervention. |
Add Risk Analyst Insight Card
You can filter and access accounts with AI risk analysis from the Executive Dashboard. To do so:
- Navigate to the Executive Dashboard page.
- Scroll down to an out-of-the-box insight card, Churn Risk.
- Click the Churn Risk. This takes you to the corresponding Accounts page for deeper insights.
- Select an account. The AI risk analysis tab is added next to the AI summary.
For approximately three months after release, your instance will display both the new Risk Analysis summaries and the previous Churn Risk Analysis summaries. The previous summaries will phase out automatically over time.
Components of AI Risk Analysis
The AI Risk Analysis experience is made up of several components, each designed to help you understand account risk, identify its causes, and take action to reduce churn:
- Summary: The AI risk analysis displays key account insights, risk level score, and the date the summary was generated. It also lists the products mentioned in the churn-related discussions.
- Risk reasons: You can drill down into individual risk reasons to view detailed insights. Each summary includes the risk severity, recommended actions to improve account health, and contextual intelligence derived from historical outcomes and current account activity.
- Playbook: The Playbook converts risk insights into a clear, execution-ready action plan by outlining specific steps to mitigate account risk, prioritizing each action by urgency, and assigning clear ownership across roles such as Account Manager, Support, and Engineering. It helps teams coordinate effectively, take timely action, and stay accountable by defining what needs to be done, by whom, and within what timeframe to stabilize the account and reduce churn risk.
- Stakeholders: The Stakeholders tab highlights key customer and internal stakeholders associated with the account, their roles, sentiment, and recommended actions. It helps you understand who influences outcomes, track engagement health, and prioritize targeted outreach to mitigate risk and drive success.
Risk Analyst transforms churn mitigation from reactive firefighting into a proactive, intelligence-driven discipline. By combining historical outcome learning through the Experience Library with real-time communication analysis, it gives your team earlier visibility into risk, clearer understanding of root causes across nine distinct categories, and execution-ready playbooks grounded in what's actually worked before. This results in faster response times, more confident decision-making, and measurably better retention outcomes. As Risk Analyst continuously learns from new interactions and outcomes, its recommendations become increasingly tailored to your organization's unique patterns, making your entire post-sale motion smarter over time.