How can you retain customers in the long term when the competition is just a click away? How can you identify signs that customers are considering switching before they actually cancel their service?
Our hackathon in late June 2026, which we organized in Munich together with Kay Buchheister and Julia Böckenförde from Salesforce, focused on these million-dollar questions.
Customer churn is a concern for companies across all industries. In the insurance sector, however, the challenge is particularly significant: there are often long periods with few touchpoints between insurers and customers. This makes it all the more important to identify customers’ intentions to switch early on and take targeted action to prevent it.
The good news: AI can help. The Salesforce team of experts gave hackathon participants from our partner companies a hands-on demonstration of how effective prevention systems can be built usinglow-code approaches.
In this context, three forms of AI interact depending on the situation:
1) Predictive AI uses churn scores to identify the likelihood of a customer canceling their subscription
2) Generative AI helps companies engage with customers in a relevant and personalized way
3) Agentic AI automates processes and makes it easier to provide targeted customer support
But technology alone isn’t enough. As Alexander Wallner, CEO of Salesforce Germany, emphasized in his keynote address: “Projects rarely fail because of the technology, but because of how it’s adopted.” Salesforce expert Martin Ahlert adds: “An agent is a tool, not the interface.” AI-powered chatbots can already do quite a lot, but human sensitivity is still as essential as ever.
After all, customer loyalty is built when companies foster trust at crucial moments, as ITHM Managing Director Dr. Joachim Ziegler and Salesforce Regional Sales Director Kay Buchheister emphasized in their talk: trust in people, in companies—and in technology.
