AI has the potential to transform every aspect of an enterprise, but nowhere more so than in customer relationship management (CRM), the outward-facing business functions of sales, marketing, and customer service.
AI can help salespeople by automating routine tasks, gathering relevant data from multiple sources, understanding customer intent, and making suggestions and recommendations to help drive new business. Generative AI can help write marketing materials. Even more exciting is the promise of autonomous agents (agentic AI) flawlessly and seamlessly taking over a variety of customer service functions across multiple channels (voice, chatbots).
While increased use of AI is by far the most significant trend in CRM, it is certainly not the only one. Here are the key developments and market factors moving CRM forward this year.
AI moves from hype to value
While everyone recognizes the incredible potential of AI, the initial hype and excitement generated by the release of ChatGPT in 2022 has dissipated somewhat.
“First, people were talking about how AI could conquer the world,” says Donna Fluss, founder and president of DMG Consulting. “But now we’re getting past the magic and into the practical application and benefits of AI.”
Harry Datwani, a principal at Deloitte Digital, adds that many clients he talks with have tried AI pilot projects and proofs of concept (POCs), but “haven’t figured out how to extract value at scale and how to drive savings, whether that’s productivity or efficiency or savings that translate into redirected headcount or reduced headcount.”
In 2025, look for enterprises to seek out targeted AI use cases that deliver measurable value to the organization in areas of customer satisfaction, automated business processes, and enhanced sales revenue.
Agentic AI emerges as game changer
As exciting as AI is for things such as predictive analysis and creating content, agentic AI takes CRM to another level. Mark Purdy, managing director of Purdy & Associates, says that rather than relying on preset rules, agentic AI can act independently — and customer support automation and business intelligence are two of the technology’s early promising use cases.
These systems “do not rely on human prompts but rather are set to optimize particular goals or objectives, such as maximizing sales, customer satisfaction scores, or efficiency in supply chain processes. They can carry out complex sequences of activities, independently searching databases and triggering workflows to complete activities,” Purdy says.
Datwani predicts that cutting-edge organizations will begin to deploy agentic AI “within the enterprise walls” in 2025, but probably not for direct interaction with customers — at least not yet. “Particularly in regulated industries, companies are excited by agents that engage with end customers, but there’s still some trepidation and nervousness,” because AI system do make mistakes that could cause damage to brand reputation.
Forrester analyst Kate Leggett agrees that agentic AI could eventually completely automate customer engagement, but we’re not there yet. AI agents on the market today are limited in what they can accomplish, she says, but “they will get better very quickly.”
AI drives workforce realignment
Adoption of AI requires realignment and rethinking of the CRM workforce. AI can be positioned to boost employee retention by easing the burden of routine tasks for harried workers, particularly in high-stress, high-burnout jobs such as customer service.
But this also means adjusting job descriptions, changing goals and objectives, and retraining employees to work cooperatively with AI, while also overseeing and monitoring the AI.
At another level, the AI systems themselves can help orchestrate the most efficient use of human expertise. For example, Fluss envisions an AI orchestration layer within a contact center that routes customer inquiries to the appropriate person with the required skill set to meet that customer’s needs.
The AI system can then apply that routing intelligence to making workforce management decisions — how many of this or that type of human expert (tech support vs. billing problem) is needed.
Outcome-based pricing is on the rise
There is rising debate over how agentic AI will be priced. One model, outcome-based pricing, was first introduced to the CRM market in August 2024 by Zendesk for its increasingly autonomous AI agents. Zendesk said at the time, “Our pricing is now directly tied to the outcomes delivered by AI agents, meaning customers will only incur costs for issues that are resolved autonomously by AI.”
Keith Kirkpatrick, research director at the Futurum Group, says, “Outcomes-based pricing offers benefits for both vendors and customers by guaranteeing value and aligning costs with results. Zendesk, for example, plans to charge for successfully resolved interactions, while Workhuman has introduced guarantees tied to broader metrics such as employee retention.”
He adds, “Though still in its early stages, outcomes-based pricing is gaining attention as AI agents become more widespread. It addresses customer demands for ROI-driven investments and flexibility, especially compared to traditional fixed licensing fees. As AI agents improve and become integral to business processes, this pricing model could increase vendor stickiness and reshape SaaS market dynamics.”
Composable CRM gains traction
Forrester’s Leggett explains that a major problem with CRM is that vendors have stuffed so many features in their CRM packages that customers are overwhelmed. “I’ve talked to a bunch of customers who are using the leading CRM solutions, and they tell me that they can’t keep up with the pace of innovation. Vendors are rolling out so much innovation so fast they don’t know where to start.”
She adds, “AI and automation are coming fast and furious. Now, we’ve got a wave of AI agents who are going to do more and more work, but CRM vendors need to think about simplification and breaking down their products into composable bits of functionality that customers can pick up, license, and use.”
Leggett believes the composable CRM movement is picking up steam, with Creatio leading the way, and other CRM vendors following suit.
CRM when the customers are machines
One emerging AI use case involves personal assistants that can autonomously plan your vacation, order your groceries, or take other actions based on what they know about your preferences. Similarly, in the business world, AI agents will soon be able to take over large purchasing decisions, even negotiating contract terms, says Gartner analyst Don Scheibenreif.
For example, Scheibenreif foresees a day when a factory robot goes out and orders its own replacement parts.
“Organizations need to be ready for machines knocking at your door,” he says, pointing out that AI agents have different sales requirements — you can’t take them out to dinner or impress them with fancy slides. They demand instant information and will probably prefer interacting with another AI agent rather than a human.
Scheibenreif recommends that organizations start today to establish separate business units or sales channels to accommodate the day when “billions of machine customers come headed for your business.”
ServiceNow shakes up competitive landscape
Salesforce has been the unchallenged market leader in CRM for a long time. The latest IDC numbers give Salesforce 21.7% market share; the closest competitor is Microsoft with only 5.9%.
Earlier this year, however, IT service management (ITSM) leader ServiceNow took direct aim at Salesforce by announcing, “We are in CRM.”
The company already has a market leading customer service management (CSM) platform, but this is the first time it has positioned itself as a full-blown CRM vendor. And ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott is going all-in with a multi-front assault on Salesforce.
He is building alliances. “ServiceNow and Microsoft are expanding our alliance to accelerate disruption in the CRM category,” McDermott said. “This is built on Microsoft Copilot and ServiceNow AI agent collaboration, leveraging the unique strengths of both platforms.”
And he is making strategic acquisitions. ServiceNow just announced that it is acquiring Moveworks for $2.8 billion, the largest deal in its history. Moveworks provides companies with ChatGPT-like AI assistants to manage organization-wide requests from employees. ServiceNow also recently bought CueIn, an AI-native conversational data analysis platform. Both acquisitions are aimed at driving agentic and generative AI adoption across the enterprise.
Not to be outdone, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently indicated that Salesforce might be jumping into ServiceNow’s ITSM market. So, expect the competition to heat up in 2025.
Citizen developers create AI agents
The low-code, no-code movement is being extended to the domain of AI so that citizen developers can create their own AI agents.
For example, Salesforce has released Agent Builder, which enables users to customize out-of-the-box agents or build new agents for any role, industry, or use case. Using low code or no code, Agent Builder aggregates structured and unstructured data from Data Cloud, and uses existing tools such as Flows, Prompts, Apex, and MuleSoft APIs to configure an agent.
ServiceNow has also announced ServiceNow Studio, a centralized spot for no-code and low-code developers to manage and develop agentic applications.
Industry clouds embrace AI and LLMs
Leggett says that industry clouds speed time to value, fuel innovation, and create market differentiation. Forrester survey data shows that 61% of global business and technology professionals say their firm wants to increase their industry clouds.
Popular CRM vendors such as Salesforce and Microsoft offer multiple industry clouds. The pharmaceutical company Veeva recently announced its own industry cloud for life sciences.
And Leggett says, “I expect vendors to announce new industry clouds, industry-specific LLMs, and new verticalized go-to-market approaches.”