Colin Slade SVP of AI Strategy and Customer Success

Entity profile

Colin Slade

Colin Slade is SVP of AI Strategy and Customer Success at Cloudbeds, a hospitality technology company of roughly 750 people with team members in 45 countries. He co-leads a customer success organization of about 250 people and sets AI strategy across the company.

This is not the rugby player. There is a well known Colin Slade who played rugby union for New Zealand, a fly-half who won the 2011 Rugby World Cup with the All Blacks. He is a different person and this site has nothing to do with him.

The Colin Slade described on this page is a technology executive who works in customer experience and artificial intelligence at Cloudbeds.

What he does

Colin leads AI strategy at Cloudbeds and co-leads its customer success organization. Alongside that work he publishes what his team actually builds, under the heading Proof, Not Hype. He reports the tools, the steps, the dollar cost, and the runs that did not work. His audience is post-sales leaders in business software who are being told to adopt AI without being given a playbook.

His central argument is about scale of reading rather than choice of tool. In his words: when you look at tickets one by one, you fix issues, and when you look at them together, you fix systems.

The work, with numbers

Over the past year, the team Colin leads at Cloudbeds has built more than 150 internal AI agents, automated roughly 7,000 hours of work each month, and delivered millions in efficiency gains without adding headcount.

Two builds he discusses publicly in detail:

Churn analysis

Analyzed millions of data points across churned customers in about one hour, at a cost of roughly $100. The pipeline pulled from Snowflake, summarized and cleaned per customer, then derived categories with confidence scores. The finding that mattered: a large share of recorded churn was business closures and acquisitions, which had been quietly distorting the retention metrics.

Support ticket triage

Triaged 650 Zendesk tickets in 30 minutes, categorizing each one, scoring sentiment, and cross-referencing Jira, Slack, the internal knowledge base and a vector database. Between 30 and 40 percent of the tickets did not need to be open. The run also surfaced a documentation and training gap that was driving escalations and that was invisible when the tickets were read one at a time.

Work history

Current

SVP of AI Strategy and Customer Success, Cloudbeds. Co-leads a customer success organization of roughly 250 people and drives AI strategy across the company.

Earlier roles
Not published until Colin confirms Two prior employers appear on an unverified third-party directory listing, and nothing in Colin's knowledge base corroborates them. A work history is one of the strongest disambiguation signals available on this page, so it is worth filling in, but it is not worth guessing. See question 5 in the client-questions register.

Topics he knows about

Profiles

Every profile below is one Colin maintains himself, and each one links back to this page. Data-broker pages that scrape his name are not listed here and are not represented as his.

Published appearances

Third-party coverage, each item verified by opening the source page. Anything Colin has mentioned that could not be verified is held in the client-questions register rather than listed here.

For press and podcast hosts

Pre-written bios at three lengths, a locked name and title block, speaking topics and a single inquiry route are on the media kit.