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What's Next (or Cohorts)

What's Next (also called Cohorts, after the underlying Cohort Analysis) is an AI-generated read on an account's retention risk and expansion potential, built by comparing the account against how similar accounts — or cohorts — have actually performed in your workspace. Open it when you want data-grounded talking points for a renewal conversation or QBR: what's quietly working against this account, and what a similar account did that led to better retention.

How it works​

A cohort is a group of accounts in your workspace that share a trait — the products they own, their usage-percentile band, a specific combination of products, or account traits like industry. FunnelStory computes a retention rate for each cohort and tests whether the differences between cohorts are statistically meaningful, rather than noise from too few accounts.

The account you're viewing is placed into its relevant cohorts, then compared against the cohort with the best retention for each factor — for example, accounts using a product heavily versus accounts that own it but barely touch it. Every claim in the write-up is grounded in this comparison: a real retention percentage and the number of accounts behind it.

What you see​

Open an account, go to its Renewal tab, then choose What's Next from the sub-tabs (alongside Dossier, Renewal Overview, Business Intelligence, and Driving Factors — see Account Dossier for that sibling tab).

The panel streams in an AI-generated write-up as it's produced, structured in this order:

  1. TLDR — a two-to-three line summary of the account's most important hidden risk, its primary risk category, and one strength.
  2. Hidden Risk Signals — usage patterns that look fine on the surface but correlate with worse retention.
  3. Ownership Traps — cases where the account owns a product but barely uses it, which retains worse than not owning it at all.
  4. Retention Risk Signals — up to four signals where low usage of an owned product lines up with worse retention.
  5. Strengths — up to three things working in the account's favor.
  6. Product combination and upsell — shown only for workspaces with more than one product. When a specific product combination would meaningfully improve retention, this section names it and states the expected retention improvement.

Each risk and strength includes a plain-language What this means, followed by a numeric Detail — the retention percentages and cohort sizes behind the claim.

What's Next is read-only. There's no dismiss, act-on-it, or task-creation control on a suggestion — unlike the Dossier tab's fact controls, this panel is a briefing you read, not a worklist you manage.

Configuration​

What's Next depends on:

  • A cohort model for your workspace. An admin builds this from your workspace's account data; if none exists yet, the tab has nothing to show.
  • Prediction data on the account. Accounts without churn-prediction data won't have a What's Next analysis.
  • Enough accounts per cohort. Cohorts need a minimum number of accounts to be included, so very small workspaces may see thinner analysis with some sections omitted.

This tab is feature-flagged and may not be visible in every workspace — if you don't see What's Next under an account's Renewal tab, ask your admin whether it's enabled for your workspace.

  • Account Dossier — the sibling Renewal sub-tab with AI-synthesized stakeholder and account facts.
  • Account Predictions — the churn/retention prediction data What's Next builds on.