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Reimagining CRM with AI superpowers

ARTICLE | September 4, 2025

Reimagining CRM with AI superpowers

Legacy CRM systems can no longer keep up with the pace of business. AI is set to change that.

By Elisha Harrington, APAC Innovation Officer

Today’s customer relationship management (CRM) has reached a breaking point. As Forrester Vice President Kate Leggett characterizes it, modern-day CRM systems are overengineered, and their complexity is killing value.

Yet organizations remain trapped in reactive roles, constantly responding to emergencies while lacking comprehensive customer context.

Today, much of a typical sales rep’s workday is spent toggling between multiple applications while trying to manage customer calls. Account information is scattered across disconnected systems, making specific details difficult to find when they’re needed. Meanwhile, every morning, customer experience leaders are greeted with an inbox full of customer crises: urgent escalations, unexpected churn risks, and deals on the brink. They mobilize teams to put out fires today, knowing that a new set will ignite tomorrow.

Imagine a different reality: In 2030, your CRM won’t be a system you log in to and navigate via drop-down menus and text boxes. Instead, AI agents will help deliver new levels of service before the customer complains and anticipate customer needs based on market signals or weather data. An AI-powered CRM will enable entire customer portfolios to be managed dynamically, with humans stepping in only for high-impact interventions. For employees, intelligence will be embedded in daily workflows, empowering them to have complete visibility into customers, nurturing strategic relationships, and creating value.

To get to that future, we must move beyond incremental improvements. The CRM of the future will be an AI-driven enterprisewide intelligence hub. Rather than layering automation onto existing interfaces, tomorrow’s AI-native CRM will collaborate with employees, enabling them to evolve from emergency responders to cultivators of customer relationships.

Tomorrow’s AI-Powered CRM: From passive data to proactive intelligence

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Today’s customers are raising the bar on what defines good service. Technological advances, such as always-on handheld devices, have changed customer expectations; they want immediate service across all channels. But fragmented, complex business systems hamper employees’ ability to meet these expectations. Teams lack real-time context and situational awareness and are often blind to actions customers have already taken. A customer's interaction in one channel or department might not be visible in another, forcing them to repeat information, receive inconsistent service, and potentially go elsewhere.

In the AI age, leaders must reimagine CRM as the core of their businesses to stay relevant and unlock growth. Tomorrow’s AI-powered CRM will eliminate the silos and complexity that currently limit employees' full view of the customer. Front-, middle-, and back-office functions will be integrated into an enterprisewide hub that synthesizes data from disparate sources, presenting comprehensive customer context in real time. When a customer contacts support, their billing/payment history, service requests, and usage patterns will be visible in one place. By the time the employee begins the conversation, an AI-powered agent will have already diagnosed the problem and identified potential solutions.

Armed with an unprecedented level of customer context, the CRM of the future will transform employees into informed advisors able to spot potential problems before they become actual problems, creating novel opportunities for strategic interventions. For example, if a client’s product usage metric suddenly drops or if multiple support tickets start coming in from one account, the AI hub will alert the team and recommend preemptive outreach. Employees can address these issues soon after they start, turning potentially angry customers into delighted ones.


CRM users spend an inordinate amount of time navigating and interacting with countless fields, forms, modules, menus, and dashboards. As well-intentioned as these features are, they overwhelm the users with options they barely use. This leads to poor employee experiences, disconnected decisions, slower resolutions, and missed opportunities for value creation.

AI-powered CRM will fundamentally change this dynamic. Imagine intelligent systems capturing conversation details across sales channels, updating customer records, maintaining data consistency, and connecting touch points throughout the enterprise—all without human intervention. Free of these administrative burdens, human employees can focus on building connections, solving complex problems, and creating value through strategic customer relationships.

In the AI age, leaders must reimagine CRM as the core of their businesses to stay relevant and unlock growth.

The transformation from managing crises to managing entire customer and business ecosystems represents more than an increase in operational efficiency.

AI-driven CRM is poised to revolutionize the customer/employee relationship from transactional to collaborative and value generative. Rather than being seen as a cost center, the CRM of tomorrow will serve as a growth lever. It will identify warning signs of customer dissatisfaction, predict upsell opportunities, recommend optimal timing for strategic outreach and even highlight activities in R&D, supply chain, and other back-office functions that can be useful to customer acquisition and retention. At the same time, it will build customer trust and loyalty.

In the AI age, continuing to do business as usual with legacy tools is a serious competitive disadvantage. When it comes to the future of CRM and AI, companies must lean into reinvention, because their customers won’t wait.

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Author

Elisha Harrington is APJ innovation officer at ServiceNow. She helps enterprises harness AI responsibly to drive growth and innovation across the Asia-Pacific region.

Articles by Elisha Harrington