CRM in 2025: It's Not About AI, Agents, or Even CRM; It's Still About Data

The future of CRM lies in addressing foundational issues with data rather than relying solely on advanced technologies like artificial intelligence or bots. This was the consensus when we brought together a group of leading analysts and influncers as part of our CRM Playaz "What is CRM in 2025?" series. 

The following clip features the following industry vets making the case that despite all the hype and discussion about AI in all its forms (predictive, generative, agentic, etc.) the success of CRM still lies with the data:

* Michael Fauscette - founder, CEO and chief analyst of Arion Research;
* Sheryl Kingstone - vice president of customer experience and commerce and general manager of the Voice of Connected User Landscape at 451 Research;
* Liz Miller - vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research;
* Rebecca Wettemann - CEO and principal analyst of Valoir.

Edited transcript

Sheryl Kingstone: It's about the data. It's not about the bot. It's about how we are training, how we are using, and how we are gathering our most important asset in our organization,which is about the data. And the governance about how we're going to use that appropriately. And that's what 2025 is gonna be all about. It's not about CRM. We've had CRM for two decades and still haven't solved the problem… Three decades now. Sorry I'm getting old.

Rebecca Wettemann: The other interesting point that came up in the first part of the program today was incrementalism. How do I get from the incremental to the exponential promise of what AI can do? And I think we can all agree it is not about the AI at this point. To Sheryl's point, it's about the data.

Mike Fauscette: If you don't fix the data, you can't do any of these other things anyway. You think you're arguing with agentic AI bots right now, if you don't have the data there you're going to really be arguing with them.

Liz Miller: You have to acknowledge the human before you can fix the data. Where we've gotten lost since the very beginning of CRM, and quite frankly we got lost at the very beginning of sales force automation, was we forgot that the data is really just a manifestation of the customer that has been able to fit into our systems.