3 Reasons To Start An AI Journey In Your CRM

Use cases for AI to augment CRM usage

Jason Andersen

Companies in the CRM space have made some AI-related announcements over the past month that suggest a maturing of generative AI in the enterprise.

For instance, on Salesforce’s latest earnings call, CEO Marc Benioff dedicated most of his comments to AI’s potential and Salesforce’s unique advantages in AI. Salesforce also kicked off a series of worldwide developer events this month to help developers learn how to use AI within the Salesforce platform. Looking beyond Salesforce, a couple of weeks ago Creatio announced a $200 million investment round for its no-code CRM platform, which also has many GenAI capabilities.

So AI in the CRM space (like almost everywhere else) is having a moment. And I believe it’s been a long time coming. I also think it’s great news for the AI movement, because CRMs are an excellent proving ground for GenAI. Here’s why.

Revenue-Bearing Use Cases Get Big Attention From CEOs And CFOs

When a technology is new, the value proposition often centers on internal, cost-reduction use cases. There are a few reasons for this, but the biggest is that it’s easier to directly measure cost savings versus increases in revenue, which could be attributed to all sorts of things. There are also factors of comfort and risk to overcome when launching new technologies; executives are more open to testing a new technology internally rather than impact a revenue-generating process, simply to minimize business risk.

However, to get executives to really invest in and scale a technology, use cases that increase revenue get a lot more attention. So far, GenAI successes have been consistent with the early-stage pattern. We have been seeing lots of product launches and some success stories in areas such as developer productivity and lower support costs, for instance in contact centers. (There’s a great real-world example of the latter in a piece about ServiceNow that I recently cowrote with my Moor Insights & Strategy colleagues Melody Brue and Robert Kramer.) However, I think the announcements we are seeing from Salesforce and Creatio suggest the beginnings of a trend toward higher-scale projects aimed at increasing revenue.

CRMs Are An Ideal GenAI Incubator

The case made by Salesforce is that because it has so much customer data, it has a massive opportunity to deliver high-value AI-augmented solutions. This is a very pragmatic statement that makes sense. However, the potential value of using AI with a CRM goes beyond just the data.

CRM solutions also have a very high rate of ad hoc reporting because there are lots of people using them to answer many different questions. This means that the rate of change and the urgency within CRM reporting are fairly high, because sales and marketing teams are always on the lookout for new trends or buying patterns.

Finally, CRMs have a diverse set of users. Sales ops, marketing ops, sellers, field marketing teams, customer service and so on all have a stake in how the CRM works. From the standpoint of AI, this diversity should foster richer and more nuanced insights on a per-customer basis, but also more perspectives to train the models and produce better results. So, CRMs are especially well placed to take advantage of AI because they have a big base of data, a high rate of change and the ability for diversely skilled humans to help train the solution. That is a very potent combination.

There Are Some Good AI-For-CRM Use Cases Out There Already

Clearly, the customer service agent use case is well established by now, even outside of the scope of CRM. Additionally, Salesforce is touting how AI can be used for account-based marketing with the improvements it has made to its Pardot marketing automation system and its Einstein AI platform. There are also well-established practices for salespeople preparing for a meeting or product marketers doing positioning work using general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot. The fact is that sales, marketing and services are high-touch, high-value and wordy parts of the business, so there are lots of opportunities for GenAI to automate and improve processes.

This all raises the question of how far GenAI in a CRM can go. While I think that all of the progress we’ve seen has been great so far, in my view the killer app isn’t here yet.

Getting Good Data From Users Who Don’t Want To Provide It

With that said, I’d like to propose my own “killer CRM app” using GenAI. The inspiration for my proposal is my long-held belief that the biggest challenge with CRMs is that salespeople do not like to use them. So, how can a CRM make it easier to get good data from the people using the system who don’t always want to make the updates they’re supposed to?

Salespeople will do almost anything to avoid typing in all the information the business would like. This leads to a couple of problems. The first is that mandatory data entry is kept to a minimum so sellers spend more time selling and less time in the system. The second is that over time the data gets out of date and hard to manage. This in turn leads to poor data quality and an inordinate amount of time and cost to clean up the data. These two factors either slow teams down or, worse, lead to shadow processes to manage the “right” data.

My proposal is for a CRM to reinvent the weekly forecast meeting between a seller and their manager. There are already tools out there that can “sit in” on a meeting and build a transcript of the conversations. (See the diagram at the start of this article.) I, for instance, sometimes use Otter.ai for this very purpose. If every forecast meeting had a virtual scribe, every salesperson with just a little bit of GenAI prompt training could simply dictate everything into the CRM. Imagine if an active opportunity changes its sales stage. The sales manager is going to ask the seller about it that week during their one-on-one meeting for sure. The salesperson simply says “Yeah, we need to change the status for Account X to ‘Budget Review,’” and the online assistant updates the record automatically.

Again, I think that the combination of GenAI and CRM already has a lot of potential. But if you can make it so easy for a seller to give the CRM the data it needs, then you’re really onto something. More than that, you’re tapping into the motivating force of revenue generation, not just cost reduction, which I believe will be a surefire way to accelerate AI adoption in enterprises.

Moor Insights & Strategy provides or has provided paid services to technology companies, like all tech industry research and analyst firms. These services include research, analysis, advising, consulting, benchmarking, acquisition matchmaking and video and speaking sponsorships. Of the companies mentioned in this article, Moor Insights & Strategy currently has (or has had) a paid business relationship with Microsoft and Salesforce.

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