← Back to Blog
digital experienceaiproduct analyticspendostrategy

Digital Experience is Changing Faster Than We Think

By Jay Nathan, Jonathan Huhn|

Beyond The Click · Vol. 30 · April 2, 2026

Digital experience used to evolve in chapters. New platform here, new integration there. It was change you could plan around, but that’s no longer the case. The convergence of AI, product analytics, and rising user expectations is compressing to months what used to take years. And most organizations are just beginning to reckon with what that means for their data, their teams, and the way they work.

Welcome to Beyond The Click by Balboa. Our team just got back from Pendomonium 2026 in Raleigh, and our key takeaways from the event are what fueled this edition, including:

  1. AI in the enterprise is early days, high stakes 🌄
  2. The data quality problem nobody talks about 📉
  3. Novus is a leap forward, but with real complexity 👉
  4. The revenue reckoning is here 💸
  5. Centers of Excellence make AI stick 🏦

Let’s dive in.

AI in the enterprise is early days, high stakes 🌄

Pendomonium made one thing clear: AI is the topic everyone is talking about, but few organizations are actually executing on. Tools like Novus, Leo, and Pendo’s MCP integration signal a new shift in what the platform can do, and where the industry is headed.

But excitement and readiness are two different things. Across the board, enterprise AI adoption is still nascent, and the organizations that will win are the ones treating it as a strategic initiative rather than a feature box to check.

The data quality problem nobody talks about 📉

Before AI can deliver on its promise, the underlying data has to be trustworthy. And right now, for many Pendo customers, it isn’t. Dirty tags, disconnected data silos, and unintegrated tech stacks remain the single biggest barrier to extracting real value from the platform.

And AI doesn’t fix bad inputs, it just amplifies them. The organizations getting the most out of Pendo aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated AI strategy. They’re the ones who did the unglamorous work of getting their data “house” in order first.

Novus changes the game ⚽️

Pendo announced Novus at Pendomonium, and it is a fundamental shift in how product analytics gets implemented. Instead of manual tagging and configuration, Novus connects to your GitHub repo, analyzes your codebase, and auto-generates tagging, track events, funnels, journeys, and user personas. It even submits pull requests when code changes are needed.

For Pendo customers, it will dramatically reduce implementation friction. The heaviest lift in any deployment has always been instrumentation, and Novus eliminates that bottleneck entirely. Add in proactive UX review, AI-surfaced problem detection, and a now-public feature flag SDK, and the platform story just got a lot more complete.

Graphic summarizing how digital experience is evolving with AI, data quality, and product analytics

The revenue reckoning is here 💸

Here’s something that stood out at Pendomonium: even in 2026, an overwhelming majority of attendees came from Product or Product-adjacent roles. And yet, in conversation, many Product professionals still struggle to articulate what specific business outcomes they actually drive with Pendo. The platform is in use, but often more as a monitoring tool than a strategic asset.

Meanwhile, the customer success and customer experience practitioners in the room told a different story. Smaller in number but growing fast, this group is more naturally wired to connect product data to revenue outcomes like retention, expansion, and churn. As that population grows within the Pendo ecosystem, it stands to make the entire platform more strategically valuable for everyone. The best-run enterprises will bring these two groups together as often as possible.

Centers of Excellence make AI stick 🏦

Sustainable AI adoption doesn’t happen by accident. It requires executive sponsorship, bottom-up engagement, structured learning forums, and KPIs that tie tool usage to real business outcomes. The enthusiasm created by a Pendomonium session on building your Pendo Center of Excellence (shoutout to Balboa’s own Keith Wagner!) was a live proof point.

Organizations aren’t just looking for better tools, but rather for a framework to make those tools actually work. Building that infrastructure is what separates the companies that dabble in AI from the ones that compound value from it over time.