Originally published in Workflow

By ServiceNow executives, Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer; Brian Solis, Global Head of Innovation; and Simon Grice, Senior Director, Innovation

How reimagining customer relationship management for an AI-first world can help deliver more relevant, personalized, and productive experiences

CRM has all the ingredients of an epic enterprise tech success story: massive growth, industrywide adoption, and innumerable technological innovations that have suggested new strategic possibilities for the enterprise over the span of decades. There’s only one problem: Despite massive promise, it often doesn’t deliver.

CRM solutions are ubiquitous among sales, support, and marketing teams, but it remains difficult to fully leverage every CRM feature to maximize business value and return on investment. Getting data into a CRM can be tedious, manual, and imperfect, leading to poor insights. Information remains scattered across organizational and technological silos, resulting in an incomplete understanding of the customer. CRM solutions can be clunky to use and complicated to implement, manage, and integrate with existing systems.

CRM systems also increasingly seem out of touch with the changing landscape. Customer behaviors are evolving and no longer reflect the top-down or linear models CRM was designed to support. And as our understanding of customer journeys and experiences becomes far more expansive, disconnected systems of record increasingly feel inadequate. When you take this all together, is anyone truly happy with their CRM system? Spoiler alert: The answer is no.

That’s about to change. Thanks to agentic AI, these persistent challenges will soon become a thing of the past. The advent of autonomous AI agents is changing the CRM paradigm. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s recent comments suggest, this transformation signals CRM’s post-SaaS era.

What will that look like? Imagine a future where AI agents eliminate the need for traditional applications and deliver more autonomous, personalized, and intelligent CRM. Visionary companies that boldly embrace this new age will have the opportunity to put the customer back in customer relationship management.

The AI difference

Today, employees interface with CRM systems through traditional user interfaces, just like all software. Even with AI, users are, for the most part, manually interacting with these systems, with generative AI providing summarization, search, and curated recommendations to help optimize productivity and outcomes.

But in the agentic era, the way users interact with CRM solutions will completely change. AI agents will provide the user interface as well as execute tasks. These agents will operate not just in CRM, but across all relevant apps and databases to orchestrate and integrate the entire customer lifecycle. Let’s look at a B2B example:

At the beginning of the lifecycle, AI agents will monitor market trends, company behavior, executive statements and sentiment, and other data to identify high-intent prospects before they are even in the funnel.
During sales engagement and progression, AI agents will initiate personalized conversations, preemptively answer questions based on past interactions, and recommend actions to optimize revenue. Because AI agents will have broad visibility into things such as social media activity and online engagement, they will drive individual instead of account-based customer management.

After the sale, AI agents can monitor customer sentiment and suggest upselling and retention actions.
With AI agents handling the execution, customer service teams can focus on relationship building, strategy, and creativity—all possible because of the integration of previously disconnected, siloed systems and operations.

In the agentic AI era, traditional interfaces and a SaaS-based mindset will constrain what’s possible. If we keep looking to specific software with siloed data for solutions, we will not be able to fully capitalize on the power of AI, which will prevent agentic AI from working across vital systems. Instead of adding AI to legacy SaaS models, AI can liberate CRM from any one system into a network of AI agents that proactively manage relationships, decision-making, and customer interactions.

CRM reimAIgined

With agentic AI, CRM can operate as an intelligent system that autonomously manages the entire sales pipeline. Humans will shift from operators to supervisors overseeing AI agents that handle the day-to-day CRM work and serve as the user interface. AI agents will actively manage the customer lifecycle, executing actions, adjusting strategy in real time, and continuously learning. The ability to learn and adapt will allow AI agents to offer hyper-personalized customer care and campaigns. They will also be able to identify changes and problems before they arise and take preemptive actions.

This is not CRM with an AI twist. It’s a fundamental reimagining of how CRM operates. CRM is no longer a tool for humans to manage customer transactions; it is an intelligence that is studying the entire customer ecosystem and modifying its behavior based on what it learns, operating 24/7 to support revenue growth and customer success.

Agents become the interface

When AI agents can gather insights, take actions, and make decisions across systems, the way we interact with software will completely change. Traditional interfaces will either disappear or be relegated to back-end systems. In 2030, you might not log in to your CRM. Instead, you’ll supervise your AI agents updating systems, prioritizing next steps, recommending and optimizing next best actions, and guiding users toward unprecedented, personalized, efficient, and effective outcomes. AI agents will autonomously do more than manage relationships; they will enhance them and the experiences of all users.

In this next evolution of CRM, the challenges of the past, such as siloed, incomplete data and complex and underutilized systems, will quickly disappear. In their place will be a new form of intelligent customer relationship management that transcends any one app or system to deliver autonomous, dynamic, and transformative results.