Will AI Agents Replace Your CRM?

There is a lot of talk at the moment about the impact of agentic AI, with some people arguing that it could replace CRM altogether.

Firstly, why are they saying that? How would it do that? And what is your view about this?

When companies get it right, regardless of the technical architecture, is that the results speak for themselves.

Just like the story of L'Oreal.

When they shifted 28 brands to purely digital brand during COVID, it fundamentally saved the company.

This is information anyone can go look at and read online.

It was a spectacular story of how CRM can really help innovate into problems of opportunity.

And so I think it's a good story.

However, most stories we hear nowadays are the opposite.

Like I see workflows, too hard to modernize, too detect that, and expensive license costs.

And we see things on social media all the time about companies that, I don't need CRM anymore, I can just use agents to build things and it retires my license costs.

And I think that we're gonna be running into really interesting, difficult conversations as those archetypes come to bear.

I think that people are conflating, let's replace the CRM interface with the underlying data backbone and the capability.

What agents, in our view, are replacing is the screen, the different ways in which humans are meant to interact with technology.

But when you think about it, agents aren't meant to replace the one coherent, governed, compliant record of the customer.

In our take, I think there's four fundamental reasons why you wouldn't replace a CRM with agents, and we can get to that one whenever you're ready.