Six Top Innovating CRM Companies for 2025: The CRM Conversation Starters

Artificial intelligence remains the center of the CRM world, and no area of AI was hotter in 2025 than agentic AI. It’s no surprise, then, that virtually all of this year’s Conversation Starters had AI agents front and center in their new product lineups. ServiceNow, for instance, introduced CRM AI Agents, which can orchestrate and complete tasks across the customer life cycle, all on their own. Other firms earning Conversation Starter status, given to the vendors that generated the most activity and earned the most buzz in the past year, include Outreach, which launched agents to automate account and prospect discovery, create meeting briefs and tailored talking points, and compose answers to customer questions; and repeat winner Klaviyo, whose AI Shopping Assistant is a conversational AI agent with the smarts of an in-store salesperson. Read about these and other headline-grabbing (and agentic AI-infused) achievements below.

Bloomreach has long been an industry leader in e-commerce personalization, but its moves into other areas of CRM in the past few years have captured the attention of retailers, analysts, and the industry as a whole. The company, which was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., was a 2024 Conversation Starter and receives that honor again this year for continuing to expand its existing products and adding quite a few new ones that show it has a firm grasp on the latest industry trends and technologies. Read more here.

Klaviyo was founded in 2012 and has primarily offered technology for email and text marketing, but its moves this year have expanded the company’s reach into many other platforms, channels, and business units. The Boston-based company also underwent an expansion beyond retail to support a diverse range of businesses, from content creators to web developers. Klaviyo was a CRM Conversation Starter in 2024 and repeats again this year based on those moves. Read more here.

The business mantra this year is “Work smarter, not harder.” And few companies understand that or enable it as much as NIQ. NIQ is the one of the world’s largest consumer intelligence companies, with operations in more than 100 markets, covering more than 90 percent of the world’s population. It delivers a complete understanding of consumer buying behavior and new pathways to growth powered by advanced analytics and state-of-the-art platforms. Read more here.

Most sales tools today primarily help with outreach, but, ironically, that’s not the main focus for Outreach, the Seattle-based sales execution platform provider. Instead, Outreach offers revenue intelligence and operations features to help sales teams increase efficiency and effectiveness across the entire sales cycle. And though that sales execution platform is among the best in the business, Outreach built on it a few times this year and worked tirelessly to improve it. Read more here.

Starting at the top with CEO Bill McDermott, ServiceNow’s whole messaging has changed. Its whole positioning has changed. The company has, over the past few months, expressed a strong desire to become a serious CRM player again. Though it came as a surprise to many, this new focus isn’t really a shock. After all, at last year’s Knowledge event, the company revealed that its customer workflows business had overtaken its IT support business as its main revenue driver. And if you look at some of the key moves ServiceNow has made in the past year, it seems to be putting the CRM talk into action. Read more here.

Talkdesk is generally well-received for its ease of use and solid integrations with other business tools. If there’s been one knock on the company, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., some customers and industry analysts and consultants have argued that it might not be the best fit for all businesses, especially those needing extensive customization. It has worked tirelessly over the past year to address that, creating a number of purpose-built industry solutions while at the same time building on its cloud-native, generative artificial intelligence-powered customer experience platform and extensible AI offerings. Read more here.