Gainsight Acquires Skilljar as Customer Education Moves to the Center of Enterprise Growth
Customer education has quietly evolved from a support function into a strategic lever for enterprise growth, and the acquisition of Skilljar by Gainsight reflects that transformation. Skilljar, a customer education platform used by companies such as LinkedIn, Verizon, and Shopify, has been acquired by customer success software leader Gainsight. The deal highlights a broader consolidation trend in enterprise SaaS, where learning, enablement, and customer success are increasingly treated as interconnected parts of the same lifecycle. The move suggests that education is viewed as a foundational capability that directly influences product adoption, customer satisfaction, and revenue outcomes.
Skilljar has positioned itself as more than a traditional learning management system. Its platform focuses on delivering high impact customer education through AI-powered federated learning, allowing training to reach customers wherever they already engage. This approach reflects a shift away from centralized training portals toward more distributed and contextual learning experiences. As software products grow more complex, customers expect education to be embedded into workflows rather than isolated in separate systems. Skilljar’s technology has been built to support this expectation, offering integrations with tools such as Salesforce and data connectors that allow learning outcomes to be tied directly to customer behavior and business metrics.
For Gainsight, the acquisition represents a strategic expansion of its customer success platform. Gainsight has long focused on helping enterprises reduce churn, improve onboarding, and drive long-term customer value. By bringing Skilljar into its ecosystem, Gainsight is effectively integrating education into the core of the customer success function. This alignment suggests a view that education is about accelerating time to value and sustaining engagement throughout the customer lifecycle, and not just training. In industries where software adoption determines renewal and expansion, customer education is increasingly inseparable from customer success strategy.
The industries that Skilljar serves further underscore the importance of this shift. Its platform supports organizations across software, healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services sectors where regulatory requirements, operational complexity, and product sophistication demand continuous learning. In healthcare and financial services, education is often tied to compliance and risk reduction. In manufacturing and enterprise software, it supports operational efficiency and product utilization. Skilljar’s ability to deliver tailored education across these industries makes it a natural fit for Gainsight’s enterprise customer base, which spans similarly complex environments.
This acquisition also reflects a broader evolution in enterprise learning technology. Traditional LMS platforms were designed primarily for internal employee training and often struggled to adapt to customer-facing use cases. Customer education requires different capabilities, including personalization, integration with customer data, and delivery across multiple touchpoints. Skilljar’s focus on federated learning and data-driven insights aligns with this need, positioning education as an operational system rather than a static content repository. As AI becomes more embedded in enterprise software, learning platforms are expected to become more adaptive, responsive, and tightly integrated with business outcomes.
What the Skilljar Acquisition Means for the Future of Post-Sale Platforms ?
Looking ahead, the integration of Skilljar into Gainsight’s platform could accelerate the trend toward unified post-sale technology stacks. Rather than managing separate tools for onboarding, education, support, and success, enterprises are increasingly seeking platforms that bring these functions together. The challenge for Gainsight will be to preserve Skilljar’s flexibility and focus on learning innovation while embedding it into a broader customer success framework. If executed effectively, the acquisition could help redefine how enterprises think about customer education as a growth engine that drives long-term customer relationships.
In our opinion, the acquisition of Skilljar signals a deeper shift in enterprise priorities, where customer education is no longer peripheral to growth strategy. As software becomes more complex, continuous learning will be essential to realizing product value and reducing churn. Platforms that connect education directly to customer outcomes are likely to gain influence in the enterprise stack. If Gainsight successfully integrates Skilljar’s learning capabilities, it could help redefine customer education as a strategic pillar of modern SaaS businesses rather than a supporting function.