CRM has been declared dead more than once. AI agents are giving the prediction a new lease of life, but the bigger story may be that CRM is being rewritten rather than replaced.
As customers increasingly interact with businesses through AI-powered interfaces, CRM platforms face a different kind of challenge. They still hold much of the customer data and business logic enterprises that depend on, but they cannot assume the traditional CRM interface will remain the primary way that customers or employees engage with that information.
Ian Kahn, U.S. & Global Customer & Commercial Excellence Platform Leader at PwC, argues that CRM providers still have a key role to play in this emerging environment:
“We are at the beginning of the era of the intelligent enterprise. This represents a major shift in how companies go to market. It’s a major shift in operating models and how business works to create value for the customer, for their stakeholders.”
Speaking to CX Today alongside Preet Takkar, U.S. & Global Salesforce Alliance Leader, Kahn said CRM platforms will remain part of the foundation for this next phase, but increasingly as connected infrastructure rather than isolated applications.
“CRM platform providers represent part of the foundation for future innovation. They provide critical infrastructure for managing customer data, right, across the end-to-end customer journey.”
CRM providers do not necessarily need to disappear as AI agents become more capable, but they do need to make their data, business logic and capabilities accessible beyond the conventional CRM experience.
Kahn pointed to a wider ecosystem emerging around CRM, including customer data platforms, experience orchestration and new interfaces through which customers interact with businesses.
“The evolution of these platforms through open standards, embracing the change and being part of it is critical versus… the walled garden or the closed-off platform approach.”
CRM’s Data Challenge Is Really a Context Challenge
The question of what happens to CRM becomes inseparable from what happens to customer data.
Takkar argued that the traditional division between marketing, sales and service reflected the way organizations were structured around human workers.
“AI is actually breaking that silo,” Takkar said. “So for that silo to truly break, you need access to the data across all of these functional domains.”
Rather than creating another giant repository of customer information, Takkar advised that enterprises should focus on connecting the systems they already have, rather than another large-scale attempt to consolidate every customer record into a single repository.
“The right answer is connecting the dots between all the different systems so that the AI agents that we are putting on top of these workflows or to execute those workflows get the right context.”
Takkar described the resulting model as PwC’s Intelligent Customer Edge, with data and context connecting the customer journey across organizational boundaries. “Having access to the data across that life cycle and passing the context seamlessly, that’s how we need to think about data.”
This is becoming a central question in the CRM versus CDP debate. CRM has traditionally centered on customer relationships and the workflows surrounding marketing, sales and service, while CDPs have focused more on bringing customer data together from multiple sources.
In a recent CX Today interview, Richard Manthorpe, Director of Product Management at Content Guru, took the view that CRM remains the system of record, capturing what a customer has said or what interaction has taken place, while the CDP adds the wider context needed to understand why that interaction is happening.
Manthorpe cited an ISP as an example, where a CRM might show that a customer has raised a connectivity case, while a CDP could reveal packet drops from the customer’s router and their recent searches for support articles.
“A CRM will tell you that a customer has raised a case because they’ve got connectivity issues,” Manthorpe said. “A CDP will tell me that actually their router has been reporting over the last 48 hours, packet drops, and that’s affecting their connectivity.”
As agents need both customer context and the ability to act on it, the boundary between the two becomes more significant, as they need to be able to work together without creating another silo.
Recent announcements indicate that access to relevant customer information is becoming a differentiator as AI takes a more active role in customer engagement.
More Context Creates More Responsibility
Better context can help an organization anticipate what a customer needs and deliver a more relevant experience, but more access also raises the stakes around governance. As Kahn explained:
“What additional context and data can provide for companies with the right architecture and the right approach is it gives you the ability to anticipate customer needs before your competitors do.”
Proprietary customer information can create an advantage, but AI agents also introduce new ways to use that information.
“It really raises the bar on governance and trust. And so as companies start to invest in new agentic capabilities, I think designing with trust and putting proper governance in from the start is critical,” Kahn added.
The challenge extends beyond giving an agent access to more data. Enterprises need to establish what agents can access, what they can do with that information and where human oversight is required.
Dreamforce Puts The CRM Question Under The Spotlight
Salesforce is already pushing beyond the conventional CRM model with its Headless 360 strategy, which aims to make its data and business capabilities available to authorized AI agents and other interfaces through open standards. The strategy is exemplified buy its launch of Claudeforce in Anthropic’s Claude interface.
This week’s Dreamforce gathering on September 15-17 in San Francisco provides a timely useful backdrop for a broader industry question: if customers increasingly interact with businesses through agents, what exactly should the CRM platform provide?
The answer emerging from PwC’s perspective is less about replacing CRM than extending its role.
CRM platforms still need to manage customer information, business logic and core marketing, sales and service capabilities. But they increasingly need to operate as part of a wider architecture in which data, agents, other enterprise systems and human employees can work together.
This may require a redesigning how customer information and workflows move across the organization.
Kanh’s advice is to start with the customer rather than the technology.
“Start with your customer and think about how you’re delivering value to the customer. This is always the place to start.”
From there, organizations can identify friction and growth opportunities, rethink the end-to-end journey and introduce agentic capabilities where they can deliver measurable value.
The question is increasingly what CRM becomes when the interface is no longer the center of the experience, and when customer context can travel wherever an agent needs it.
