Francesca Roche sits down with John Golden, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Coevera, to discuss how AI is changing B2B sales, why traditional CRM systems may need to evolve, and how businesses can improve customer experiences without losing the human trust that complex enterprise deals still depend on.
Golden’s central point is clear:
“AI shouldn’t own the relationship.”
For CX and sales leaders, that idea matters because enterprise buying is becoming harder to manage, with more stakeholders, more internal influence, and more pressure on sellers to understand the people behind each opportunity.
Golden explains that AI should help sales teams arrive better prepared, saying “It should make sure that the human is the most prepared and the most knowledgeable person in the room.”
That role becomes especially important when CRM systems are expected to do more than store contacts, track activity, and produce reports for leadership teams.
Golden argues that many legacy CRM platforms were built around “command and control,” which often placed the burden of data entry on salespeople while offering limited practical support in return.
The risk is that businesses add AI to weak foundations and expect better outcomes, even when the underlying information is incomplete, inaccurate, or too thin to support useful recommendations.
“If that data is not clean, if that data is not accurate, or if that data is thin,” Golden warns, AI becomes “a more efficient way of giving you inaccurate information.”
For customer experience teams, the opportunity is to use AI to remove friction from the sales process while giving human teams more space to focus on trust, strategy, and relationship-building.
Golden says AI is “fantastic for doing all of that task based work,” including the routine activity that takes sellers away from meaningful customer engagement.
The more valuable layer comes when AI helps teams understand the buying center, identify influence across an account, and spot where relationships could make or break an opportunity.
“The revenue really lives in the relationships.”
He also cautions against taking automation too far, particularly in outbound engagement where AI-led interactions can quickly frustrate buyers.
“People still want to interact with people,” he says.
That warning is especially relevant for CX leaders trying to balance efficiency with the quality of the customer journey.
Golden suggests the future of CRM will be shaped by systems that help salespeople improve their craft, ask better questions, think more strategically, and become more valuable to customers.
