> This page is for Developers. > For clean Markdown of any page, append .md to the page URL. > For a complete documentation index, see https://zuora.ferndocs.com/llms.txt. > For AI client integration (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.), connect to the MCP server at https://zuora.ferndocs.com/_mcp/server. # Blog ## Zuora's Prompt-A-Thon 2025: The 10x Catalyst > Inside Zuora's Prompt-A-Thon 2025 — the C.L.E.A.R. prompting framework, five real-world business cases, and the three winning AI projects. Zuora recently hosted **Prompt-A-Thon 2025: The 10x Catalyst**, an event that demonstrated the transformative power of Generative AI. Held across our Chennai and Bengaluru offices, the Prompt-A-Thon brought together over 190 participants from not just Zuora but also organizations such as Amazon, PayPal, Cisco, and Goldman Sachs — all focused on solving real problems using AI, on a Saturday. ## The sessions The keynote from Zuora's Prasy Velagareddi (Product VP), Shanthi Sridhar (Engineering Director), and Anirudh Ravichandran (Data Science Director) spoke to Zuora's AI-driven 10x journey. Next, an AI Masterclass by Gopi Krishna Lakkepuram (Founder & CEO of Hyperleap AI) and Amit Sharma (VP AI & ML, Flexera) focused on effective AI prompting for ideation and innovation, and introduced the **C.L.E.A.R.** framework — Concise, Logical, Explicit, Adaptive, Reflective — an effective way to write useful prompts. A third session, delivered by Zuora's Summet Kumar (Director, Global Services) and Prasy Velagareddi, introduced the five real-world business cases to pick from: * Monetization Woes * Forecasting Usage Revenue * Silent Churn * Global Expansion * Growth Plateaus Then we put up some prize money to keep everyone focused, put out more coffee and snacks, and set a timer to start the innovation. ## The winners With over 180 submissions, the judges used the evaluation criteria of *Problem Insight and Relevance*, *Business Feasibility*, *User Experience Thinking*, *10x Potential & Innovation*, and *Clarity & Communication* to select three projects for the prize money: * **ChurnGuard AI** — *Winner, C Greeshma from SignDesk.* A behavioral early-warning system to detect silent churn 60–90 days before cancellation. Rather than asking "Will this customer cancel?", ChurnGuard AI asks "What specific behaviors indicate this customer is pulling away, and what intervention has the highest probability of success?" — generating AI-personalized intervention strategies and natural-language explanations of churn risk drawn from Zuora's rich billing and usage data. * **RevStream: The Usage Revenue Intelligence Revolution** — *Runner-Up, Kayalvizhi Karthikeyan and her AI Cross-Functional Super Team from PayPal.* Research indicated nearly 50% of usage customers churned because their usage bills were mysteries. RevStream leverages predictive intelligence, real-time bill predictions, and behavioral optimization from actual usage patterns to deliver 90%+ revenue forecasting accuracy. * **GenAI-Powered Silent Churn Prevention** — *Runner-Up, Rajeshkumar Arumugam from Ideas2IT Technologies.* Detects early disengagement signals to generate highly personalized, contextually relevant intervention strategies using an LLM — a self-learning retention engine to drastically improve customer lifetime value. Our Prompt-A-Thon underscored Zuora's strategic commitment to embedding AI and LLMs deeply into our product offerings in a safe and secure manner. ## Latest AI Week at Zuora > Recapping Zuora's internal AI Week — LLM internals, prompt best practices, our internal AI architecture, the UI Toolkit for AI, and more. Once we heard about Amplitude's successful AI Week, we knew we had to host our own for our Product & Engineering group. We even managed to get Wade from Amplitude to come talk to us. ## Our AI Week sessions included * **LLM Internals** — what's inside the black box, and why does that matter? * **Prompt Best Practices** — good prompts aren't easy. * **Our internal AI architecture** — so we can ensure the uniformity and centralized management needed for compliance, security, and to keep our costs under control. * **UI Toolkit for AI** — our UX team created one design language and toolkit to bring our AI-based solutions to life, whether a team is building for Assistant, Insight, or Agent experiences. * **Developer Reference Store** — a prototype repository to ensure the highest consistency from prompt-based features. * **Effective context management** — Aman Singla, from Immersa, on getting the LLM to reason effectively through tasks, not just retrieve answers. * **Shipping AI products** — Wade Chambers, from Amplitude, shared their experiences. * **A review of in-flight AI projects** — we set a goal of 50 such projects by fiscal year end. And we saw Windsurf, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Vercel, and Trupeer used in our hands-on practical sessions. ## We're not new to the AI game Zuora started leveraging machine learning long before ChatGPT's big debut. Back in 2021, we leveraged our database of tens of millions of anonymized payments across different card networks, countries, and payment gateways to predict when the next payment retry should be attempted. This became our **Smart Retry** feature — customers measure its success using the additional dollars our 20% higher retry collection rates provide. We've already shipped other AI-based features, from an AI assistant for querying metrics that doesn't necessitate sharing your tenant's data with the LLM, to our Order Entry feature that accepts a PDF of a contract or signed quote and builds a Zuora Billing Order for you to review before invoicing. > **Reminder:** Our public AI policy document guides all this work. We'll always be clear when we are using AI, and we'll safeguard your data just as we always have. AI should augment and empower humans, not replace them. ## Unleashing developer innovation at Zuora's Partner Hackathon > How developers used Zuora's extensibility platform — Extension Studio, Workflows, APIs, and the Rules Engine — at the Partner Hackathon, and how you can get involved next time. Developers don't just solve problems — they create the solutions that shape the future. The Partner Hackathon gave developers a platform to solve real-world challenges in the subscription economy using Zuora's most powerful extensibility tools. When you're building on Zuora's platform, you're not just working with pre-packaged solutions — you're extending and customizing them to fit unique business needs. This hackathon gave developers the chance to take that flexibility even further, testing their skills with Zuora's Extension Studio, Workflows, and Rules Engine. ## Hackathon highlights Out of 60+ submissions, the standout teams demonstrated real-world value: * **AI Rhino** — automated complex billing workflows to streamline customer onboarding, using Workflows and Extension Studio to remove manual processes and cut time to revenue. * **Bedtime Stories** — built a Zuora-to-CDN integration to optimize content delivery for media subscriptions, using Zuora's APIs to connect the subscription service and content distribution network. * **Team Physalia** — developed a dynamic pricing engine that adjusts pricing based on usage and geographic data, relying on the Rules Engine to apply complex pricing logic in real time. ## How developers used Zuora's tools * **Extension Studio** — build and automate workflows by dragging and dropping elements into place. AI Rhino used it to set up automated triggers that streamline billing processes. * **APIs** — integrate with external systems and extend the platform. Bedtime Stories used Zuora's REST APIs to sync subscription data with external CDNs. * **Rules Engine** — build complex, data-driven business rules that apply in real time. Team Physalia used it to adjust pricing based on usage data and location. ## How you can get involved 1. **Explore Zuora's developer tools** — start experimenting with Extension Studio, Workflows, and Zuora's APIs. 2. **Follow us** — stay tuned for announcements on the next hackathon via Zuora's Developer Center. 3. **Join the hackathon** — when the next Partner Hackathon rolls around, put your skills to the test. Zuora's Partner Hackathon isn't just a competition — it's an opportunity for developers to showcase their skills, build real solutions, and learn from their peers. ## A look inside Zuora's patent portfolio > A summarized tour of a few patents behind Zuora's platform, from the multi-tenant extensible billing system to custom objects and custom fields. There's a perspective around here that we do some cool things at Zuora, but no one knows about them. A goal is to shine light on these less well-lit corners of Zuora. As of April 2025, [Zuora holds 49 issued U.S. patents](https://patents.google.com/?assignee=ZUORA%2c+INC.) and 8 issued foreign patents across our suite of products. We also have 20 U.S. patent applications and 5 foreign applications pending. Being a Zuora customer comes with benefits, and you can't get this sort of stuff elsewhere. Unless, of course, we've licensed you 😊 Here are just a couple of examples from our patent portfolio, summarized for convenience — you can see the patents themselves for more details: * [**Multi-Tenant Extensible Billing System**](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220222717A1/) — a method of using a price-calculating microservice in combination with consumption-based usage and rating microservices to generate invoices. This forms part of the foundation of our [massively scalable mediation engine](https://knowledgecenter.zuora.com/Zuora_Platform/Extensibility/Mediation). * [**Extending Data Model of Monolithic Database Through a Microservice for a Multi-Tenant Platform**](https://patents.google.com/patent/US11734092B2/). * [**Systems and Methods for Providing Custom Objects for a Multi-Tenant Platform with Microservices Architecture**](https://patents.google.com/patent/US11615066B2) — used for our Custom Fields feature. This extends our standard tenant database with a custom-fields database and service; using object maps, the custom-fields service enables each tenant to add custom fields as needed.