CELab - Ep 188 - Customer Education Doesn’t Have a Confidence Problem - It Has a Visibility Problem: Irana Wasti of Thought Industries

Customer education doesn’t have a confidence problem. It has a visibility problem wearing a confidence problem’s clothes. Thought Industries’ 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report found that 99% of leaders are confident their program influences business outcomes and 72% say they have the data to prove it — yet education is still one of the first functions on the block when budgets tighten. Both of those things can’t be true. In this episode, Dave puts that tension to Irana Wasti, CEO of Thought Industries, a product leader who spent twenty-plus years at IBM, Intuit, GoDaddy, Typeform, and BILL before stepping into the learning category a year ago — and who calls customer education “the best hidden secret” in every company she’s met.

Irana’s outsider lens is the whole point. She explains why the customer journey looks so much bigger from the education seat than it ever did from the product seat, why declining academy logins are an opportunity rather than a loss, and why the fix isn’t a better dashboard — it’s getting your best content out of the gated portal and into every place your prospects and customers actually ask questions, from ChatGPT and Claude to in-product chat and the help center. You’ll hear how Thought Industries’ Omnichannel Learning and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) work, why “two-second answers or a PhD” is the new customer expectation, and what changes on the vendor’s side of the table. If you sit in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is your case for a bigger seat; if you’re in Enablement, Marketing, Support, or L&D, it’s the argument for one shared source of truth instead of five teams educating in silos.

Highlights from this episode:

• The best hidden secret. Coming from product, Irana had barely interacted with customer education teams — then she saw how much of the customer journey they actually own, and how little of it reaches the executive dashboard.
• Falling academy traffic “screams opportunity.” Customers left for ChatGPT overnight. Irana reframes that drop as the moment to insert education into every touchpoint instead of asking people to come to you.
• Everybody thinks they do customer education. Product tours, community, help center, academy — five teams, five versions of the truth. The team with the richest, most accurate content should own the fabric, not just a platform.
• Why budgets get cut. When education is measured as “just another platform,” it looks redundant every renewal cycle. Tie it to the full customer journey and the metrics finally climb the dashboard.
• A new goal for the industry. Irana’s closing challenge: stop at 99% of education leaders being confident and go for 99% of CEOs confident that education drives business outcomes.

Connect with Irana Wasti on LinkedIn, explore Thought Industries’ AI Wave — Omnichannel Learning and Conversational AI Learning — at thoughtindustries.com, and watch for the 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Thought Industries.