A Q&A with SugarCRM President and CEO David Roberts

David Roberts, named president and CEO of SugarCRM in September 2023, joined the company from Alchemer, a global software-as-a-service company focused on customer experience and customer and employee feedback programs, where he had been CEO and a director. Previous positions included senior partner in Accenture's CRM practice, CEO of ReedGroup (now part of Alight), and a cabinet member in Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper';s administration.

CRM: With your background, you could have joined any number of different companies. Why did you join SugarCRM?

Roberts: I grew up in CRM. My first 17 years were with Accenture in the CRM practice. CRM has always been something that I've had a lot of interest in and been passionate about.

I think we've got a great product. We've got great customers. I think the thing we need to do better is to focus. I've always described myself as a mechanical strategist. I love strategy, but I need to understand how the mechanics back it all up. And that's something that I think SugarCRM needs right now.

CRM: How are you going to be working with Clint Oram, Sugar CRM's co-founder and chief strategy officer?

Roberts: I spent a lot of time to understand the history of the company. [Oram] has 20 years in leadership roles. Every member of the executive team has played a position on the field, whether it's [Chief Marketing Officer Clare Dorrian] driving our marketing messaging; [Chief Revenue Officer James Frampton] and our go-to-market strategy, or Chief Product Officer Paul Farrell with product. Clint played a really important role with our alliances, partnerships, and strategy, and I think he's going to be really important in helping create the look into the past and into the future for us.

CRM: In an earlier Q&A with Clint Oram and with other executives in the CRM industry, one of the biggest subjects has been artificial intelligence. What is the reality and what is hype?

Roberts: What has changed in the last five years is compute power and the speed at which data can be managed. Compute power is at the core of what's happening with AI.

I lived through 1998 and 1999, when the internet was the answer to everything. It wasn't. AI is not the answer to everything. We will take a very purposeful approach to it. We have a very strong AI engine. But I hope that the sellers who benefit from our product don't even know about the AI because we are helping them understand, for example, what's going on across their accounts. They just want to be able to know where to focus. So we're going to be very, very practical about where we use AI to help sellers know where to focus.

CRM: Many of the dotcom companies from the late 1990s/early 2000s failed, though some became very successful. Are we in a similar hype cycle?

Roberts: The problem was those failed companies weren't focused on the customer. In 2000, the customer wasn't willing to do everything on the internet that they are today. If the customer isn't ready, the technology isn't going to drive innovation. It's not just about the technology and infrastructure. The customer has to be there, too.

CRM: Where is the customer at with AI? There's been a lot of concern, starting with the fiction of the Terminator movies, and now with the very real problem of hallucinations, making some businesses very hesitant about adopting AI.

Roberts: There are data privacy concerns, too. Where I've seen the most traction is using a defined model against a captive data set. Hallucinations have come from using an undefined model against a universal data set. We are using specific algorithms. Our sales model looks for specific patterns within order data. That's what it's trained to do. It's able to do that well. The data set is our custom folder, so it's not going out and accessing all sorts of random information that it hallucinates from. It's a defined level undefined data set.

If you show people how an application benefits their business, then they're all in, as long as their data is protected You need to demo their own data using our model and show them the result.

CRM: At the beginning of 2026, how will SugarCRM be different than it is today?

Roberts: I think it's going to be a lot more focused. If you look backwards, we've tried to be a broad-based CRM platform for everyone. And I think what you're going see over the next couple of days [at the SugarCRM Analyst Summit] is that we are focusing on mid-market customers, not every customer -- customers between 100 to 2,500 employees. We're focused on B2B businesses, not B2C. We're focused on our sales module as our leading strength.

We're going to be picking fewer industries where we invest our marketing dollars and invest our people's time: manufacturing, wholesale distribution. We&'re not going to be trying to be everything to everybody.