The Rise of AI Twins: Why Agentic Automation Will Put the CR Back In CRM
For three decades, CRM systems have promised to connect companies with their customers. Yet for many customer-facing employees, and the IT teams that support them, CRM has become an onerous modus operandi focused on internal processes rather than external relationships.
This internally focused approach suffers from low user adoption, poor data hygiene, and end-user work arounds that add friction to customer relationships and hinder the customer interaction tracking CRM promises to enable. In other words, the traditional CRM playbook pursues the M at the expense of the CR and then ends up fumbling the M anyway. That’s customer relationship madness.
But something fundamental is shifting. We're entering an era where AI agents, what some are calling "AI twins," are emerging as digital teammates capable of learning, acting, and adapting across the entire customer relationship. This isn't about doing more with less or replacing headcounts. It's about transferring the arduous M activities to AI agents so people can focus the majority of their efforts on the CR. AI will finally fulfill the 30-year-old promise that CRM is the enterprise connection to the customer.
Beyond the Efficiency Trap
The traditional CRM value proposition has been straightforward: automate repetitive tasks, generate more leads, close deals faster, streamline customer service, and measure everything. A sales rep spends less time entering data. A service agent handles more tickets per hour. Marketing sends emails to more prospects with less manual effort.
These are worthy business goals, but they miss the point entirely. The problem is that most organizations stop at automation and call it transformation. They celebrate the efficiency gains without asking the harder question: now that people have more time, what could they be doing with those hours? The answer is growing the business by focusing on building more and better customer relationships.
Enter the AI Twin
AI agents, or twins, represent a fundamentally different paradigm. Unlike traditional automation that is programmed to work behind the scenes, AI twins can work alongside people, respond to natural language, learn work patterns, and adapt their behavior in real time. Think of them less as robotic process executors and more as digital colleagues who handle the operational details while humans focus on strategy and relationships.
In practice, this means CRM users don’t need to learn how to use the system, because AI agents learn the way the CRM user works. For example, AI agents can identify when a high-value client might be at risk, summarize the complete interaction history, suggest the next best action, coordinate a set of tasks across teams, and even draft personalized outreach. But it doesn't stop there. When a sales professional engages with that customer, the AI twin can work alongside and learn from the interactions and the outcome. Did the suggested approach work? What nuances did the human bring to the conversation? Over time, these digital teammates become more attuned to each organization's unique customer dynamics.
Reimagining CRM Maturity: From A Focus on Management to a Focus on Customer Relationships
AI twins and agentic CRM invite companies to rethink what CRM maturity means. The old path to maturity progressed through productivity stages – streamlined and automated processes lead to some level of efficiency gain. But the real transformation happens when organizations move beyond efficiency and aim their CRM maturity goals at creating remarkable customer experiences. AI agents make this shift possible if organizations choose to focus on using AI agents and people in unison to achieve the kinds of experiences that turn customers into advocates.
As AI twins take on the mechanical side of CRM, the role of human employees evolves. Consider how this new paradigm plays out across the customer journey. In sales, AI agents can handle lead qualification, meeting scheduling, proposal generation, and pipeline forecasting. But the salesperson's job isn't eliminated; it's elevated. Instead of spending hours on administrative tasks and data entry, they're spending those hours working with their AI twin to understand the client's business strategy, understand their needs on a deeper level, and co-create solutions that address complex, nuanced business goals. And all the while, the company is benefiting from tracking all the interactions between the sales agent, the AI agent, and the customer because the sales agent is engaged with the technology, not avoiding it because it’s in the way of the relationship.
Reimagining the Role People Play in Customer Relationships
The most profound impact of AI twins isn't technical; it's human. When organizations embrace agentic CRM, they're not just adding a new capability to their CRM systems. They're redefining what it means to work in sales, marketing, and service. The future of CRM is not human versus machine; it’s the best efforts of people amplified by digital intelligence and a digital partnership that finally fulfills the promise of customer relationship management.
The rise of AI twins means that CRM is finally living up to its decades-old promise. And it also means the promise itself is evolving. We're moving from systems that help companies manage customer relationships more efficiently to systems that enable customers to experience relationships with companies more meaningfully. That's a subtle but crucial distinction.
Getting there requires more than implementing new technology. It requires reimagining what customer-facing teams should actually be doing with their time, what success looks like when humans and AI agents work together, and how organizations can govern these powerful new capabilities responsibly. The most successful organizations will use the efficiencies gained through automation to deepen customer understanding, strengthen trust, and design experiences that feel distinctly human.
John Arnold is the head of strategic CRM advisory at Creatio, a global vendor of an agentic CRM and workflow automation platform with no-code and AI at its core. A recognized expert in CRM strategy and digital transformation, Arnold brings enterprise-level experience helping global organizations turn emerging technology into a driver of measurable business outcomes.