CRM in 2025: Will the Promise of Agentic AI Be Enough to Overcome Organizational Inertia?

Incrementalism vs. disruptive innovation was a big topic that came up during the first panel of the CRM Playaz "What is CRM in 2025" series. Are Generative AI and Agentic AI revolutionary enough to fundamentally change #CRM in the year ahead? And will it be able to overcome the organizational inertia that has kept other technologies from having an even greater impact that many anticipated them having in the enterprise?

This video and edited transcript, taken from the series, features the following executives discussing their thoughts on if AI has enough momentum in the enterprise to overcome the traditional challenge of inertia and significantly shake things up next year:

• Adam Justis - senior director of product marketing, Adobe Experience Cloud.
• Anthony Leaper - senior vice president of Sales and Service Cloud product management, SAP.
• John Taschek - chief market strategy officer, Salesforce.
• Rob Pinkerton - senior vice president, Oracle CX.
• Terence Chesire - vice president of product management for customer and industry wWorkflows, Service, ServiceNow.
  

Adam Justis: I think CRM in 2025 we’ll focus on how do we – or do we - escape this notion of incrementalism. How does Gen AI get us to compounding advantage where we take leaps and we get a little bit more bolder than getting slightly more incremental. Where we think about taking real steps towards a much more personalized, much more unified way that we treat an account.

Brent Leary: You look at all the decades and how all these exciting technologies - important technologies - have come around and have improved our lives from a personal perspective, but then when they start to be integrated into our professional lives they don't seem to have that same level of impact. What will it take to point the Gen AI lens not just at efficiency and cost effectiveness, but at doing what we've never done before that could be a game changer from a customer interaction or experience perspective?

Rob Pinkerton: We're in a major technology paradox shift right now with AI. I think that's a big test on the technologies that are out there. And I think to get to something big like you asked Brent also means customers are going to have to take a hard look at what the current technologies are doing. I mean I love the golden age of digital prospecting over the last ten years but I think we can all acknowledge that a two percent success rate on conversion is also a 98 percent failure rate, and there's a lot that is going into the customer experience that isn't particularly useful to doing big things… that isn't particularly useful to doing what customers may ultimately want. 

AI use cases are being knocked around right now and we're still not at a point where we know what the use cases are. We're still developing the infrastructure and the platforms. But we're talking about whole screen displacement and self-driving cars and health diagnostics without doctors, and these are the sorts of things that are going to completely transform the customer relationship, and the models people use to go direct to their customers. And I think  the test is can we figure those out before customers figure it out for us.

Anthony Leaper: We've gone through so many technology changes in CRM, and so many times the businesses have not had the confidence to change. They've not had the appetite to change, and therefore they haven't changed. And that's why so many CRM implementations fail.  

What we're now asking them to do is with some incredible technology really think differently. But we're not just asking the people who own CRM to think differently, we're asking the business to think differently.  

When you get your modern gadget whatever it is it's only you that has to consume that gadget and change what you do with it for it to impact your life. But we are asking big institutional companies who still implement old paper processes in the most modern of CRM… we have to help them have the confidence, the appetite, and the commitment to want to make that change and embrace what this technology delivers.

John Taschek: There's two sides to that. The CIO is always on the top of efficiency, maintenance, uptime; things like that.

The CEO is always about growth and retention and things like that. They don't always agree. The priorities aren't always set.  There's a lot of inertia out there.  There's whole systems and policies in these companies.  They don't change overnight.  They're not going to change in 2025. 

They have to deal with new regulations and compliance. What I'm concerned about with many technologies that are out there is throwing something like Copilot or Agent or AI is just going to expand what is now the paradox of choice. There are so many choices. And what AI has to do is simplify that.

Terence Chesire: People overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.  I wouldn't doubt that in ten years CRM may be completely disrupted, but it's not happening in 2025. And to John's point the regulations and the need to stay in business means you have to run controlled experiments.

We still have this problem of hallucinations. And these things will very confidently drive you off a cliff. So it is good that you are cautious, but those experiments build boldness. And I agree it's not just efficiency, It is driving to new offers.  Agentic AI has legs. Next year will be the first of those experiences, but organizations at scale are not responsible if they flip the switch immediately.

John Taschek: To build on what you just said CRM won't be completely transformed until it's invisible to the customer using it. They don't need to use a form. They don't need to interact in a way that's not natural to them. Not in a vocabulary they don't understand. It has to be invisible to them in order for it to be really successful.

Once that happens, that's when CRM will change. And companies that are best set up for that,  which connect the data sources, they'll be able to offer that seamless experience to the customer.