What is CRM in 2026? 12 Vendor Executives Weigh In

For the fourth year in a row the CRM Playaz hosted a group of leading vendor executives,  industry analysts, startup an institutional investors, and thought leaders for an unscripted, organic conversation to discuss what direction CRM/CX goes in the year ahead.  And over the course of two days, four panels, and 5+ hours of lively conversations, we covered a great deal of ground.

While there's no way to cover everything in this article, a good start is to share a six minute clip of vendor executives answering the one scripted question we asked everyone - What is CRM in 2026?  The following executives from some of the leading brands in the space participated, in order of appearance:

• Anthony Leaper - SVP, Sales and Service Cloud Product Management. SAP
• Marco Casalaina - VP Products, Core AI and AI Futurist at Microsoft
• John Taschek - Chief Market Strategy Officer, Salesforce
• Brett Weigl - Vice President, Product Management, Service Cloud and Field Service Cloud, Oracle
• Adam Justis - Sr Director Enterprise Marketing, Adobe
• Terence Chesire - VP Product Management, ServiceNow CRM & Industry Workflows
• Shalini Mitha - Head of Product Marketing at Netomi
• Maksim Ovsyannikov - Chief Product Officer at SugarCRM
• Tara DeZao - Sr. Product Marketing Director, Madtech SME at Pegasystems
• John Bruno - Vice President, Strategy at PROS
• David Singer - Global Vice President, Go-To-Market Strategy at Verint
• Vijay Sundaram - Chief Strategy Officer at Zoho

Below the clip is an edited transcript of their responses, as well as a analysis of their answers provided by Gemini.  

There will be a number of posts with content from the series in order to focus on different aspects of the overall conversation but if you want to check out the the whole series go to:

• What is CRM in 2026 - Day One
• What is CRM in 2026 - Day Two

Paul Greenberg and I would like to send a BIG THANK YOU out to all the executives and vendors who participated in this year's convrsations.  We know it's a little different participating in a totally unscripted conversation where we go wherever the discussion takes us, so we definitely appreciate the trust you put in us to make sure we don't get lost along the way.

Edited Transcript

Brent Leary : We start with a simple question: What is CRM in 2026 to each of you?

Anthony Leaper (SAP): I think it's around the intelligent orchestration of that lead to long-term value journey of our customers. It isn't all gonna be in chat. It's gonna be a blending of the right type of information and the right type of modeled experience at the time it needs to be delivered in the journey.

Marco Casalaina (Microsoft):  CRM has traditionally been in its kind of island, and then your email tool's over there, and your, you know, your messaging tool's over here, and your meetings are over there. It's becoming more and more integrated through the use of AI. You have a meeting with a customer, the transcript feeds right into your CRM, and the summary of that conversation goes in there and that kind of stuff.

But in 2026, we're really gonna move from pure summarization and, and, you know, those kinds of things, into a place where these agents are gonna start doing stuff for you, filling out your RFPs, making meeting appointments for you. I think that's what we're gonna see in the coming year.

John Taschek (Salesforce):  I agree in part with Marco, because I think that the agents will not be passive as they are now, like where you're enacting an agent that's doing a workflow and it's doing something for you. They're going to be more like a person. It's going to start coming soon. I would disagree on like it's being as part of the side, it's actually going to be more central.

The more that the agents are effective, the more that the CRM tool is going to be used. CRM is not just like a scheduling a calendar or doing a contact management, it's huge company workflows. It's going to be CRM kind of as we know it. The agentic part will be a little bit more invisible to us so that it will be used a lot more. And then the agents will start being treated more as a human part of the workforce.

Brett Weigl (Oracle):  Agents in a way raise boundaries between apps. You know, we've had sales, service, marketing, things like supply chain management, finance. You have a problem from a service perspective, it's about billing. Well, where does that really live? It's over in ERP or in some finance app. So as we have these different apps, different app owners, these have been divisions that have been hard to navigate within most enterprises.

I think AI agents become not only more active in the process, more proactive, but they also enable sort of the removal of boundaries. We're seeing a lot of collaborative things where the agent team, if you will, is actually multi-vendor, and that's a huge unlock for an enterprise.

Adam Justis (Adobe):  People are starting to identify those high-value use cases, the places where they're actually going to be able to go from concept to execution in the workflows to observed value. And within the next 18 months, the vast majority of these workflows are going to be transformed by agentic. And I think the fact that we're starting to see some real meaningful high-value use cases show up and be validated with success stories, et cetera, is going to be a pretty big unlock in 2026.

Terence Chesire (ServiceNow):  For the folks who are not completely in this game, they're just like, "What does it actually do for me?" And I love all the conversations around it goes end-to-end, it goes across systems. The disruption of channels, the voice and image and other ways of interacting in addition to classical workflow, which is another word I love. I think we go back to the basics: What does it do for the customer and how does it prove its business value?

Shalini Mitha (Netomi):  For us, agentic AI, it's about how are we helping customers, but how can we have the traceability, transparency, and observability of how an AI agent is answering a question? What knowledge sources is it using? Is it staying within the topic guardrails, brand safety, governance? Guardrails are important today, but it's gonna be the same going into 2026, and even more important.

Maksim Ovsiannikov (SugarCRM):  In the next year, CRM can finally deliver on bringing good leads to sellers. Let's help them identify risks and opportunities. Let's help them be as prepared as they can walking into any type of interaction that they have. Let's help their managers and leaders in the sales organization coach them along the path of the seller journey so that they can be as effective as they can. We can finally deliver on those things because we could never do that without the power of AI.

Tara DeZao (PEGA): By 2027, over 40% of agentic AI projects are gonna be canceled due to things like having no clear strategy, going for the hype, unproven ROI, bad governance. We're really going to see the folks who are picking the tools that are holistic, have structured workflows behind their AI, kind of take off.

John Bruno (PROS):  We lived in a very volatile 2025: tariffs, uh, global trade policy changes, the geopolitical landscape being, really, really, really volatile. Companies now need to address all the things they put on the back burner in 2025, right? They ate a lot of the cost increases and they can't do that going forward.

And so when you look at 2026, it's, you know, are you putting credible information in front of your customers? How are you engaging with them? Obviously, AI plays a critical role in, in trust, but it can either be advantageous or work against you.

David Singer (Verint):  I was trying to think of a way to be counter-market and say, "I don't think agentic AI is going to impact anything," but I couldn't do it.

This year, there's so much more data, both unstructured around interactions, structured around the transactions, and and the demographics. And I think the AI is both going to allow, you know, organizations, CRM to take advantage of that data better, and that, you know, data will allow AI to perform better.

Vijay Sundaram (Zoho):  In a sense, there's no other business system that can claim the right to do this other than the CRM today. That's where we see things going. And to do that, it takes a different mindset on how CRM itself is evolving because now you're dealing with multiple parties, different organizations, a business process that is definitely not linear. So where we see an evolution of the CRM is one that encompasses all these parties, but it changes the way it does certain things.

It has to be deep in customization. It has to be able to enable very complex orchestration. And last but not least, get user acceptance because these are users who are not used to CRM. So you're not sales, marketing, a kind of customer service people who are typically used to this. These are lawyers. These are government agencies. They don't want to learn another system. So, how do you do this with a light touch and with a focus on value?

Summary by Gemini

The vendors highlighted several key themes for the future of CRM, with Agentic AI and the integration of data and workflows being the central focus.

Here is a summary of the main points:

The Rise of Agentic AI

The most significant theme is the shift from passive, data-reporting CRM to a system powered by proactive, autonomous AI agents.

• Proactive and Invisible Action: Agents will go beyond summarization and start doing work, such as filling out RFPs, scheduling meetings (Marco Casalaina), and generally acting as a more human-like, active part of the workforce (jtaschek, Adam Justis). The core CRM tool itself will become more central, while the agentic part may become more "invisible" to the user, simply executing tasks in the background (jtaschek).
• Workflow Transformation: The vast majority of company workflows are expected to be transformed by agentic AI (Adam Justis), going from a concept straight to execution and observed value (Adam Justis).
• Business Value and Simplification: The fundamental question remains: what does the agentic CRM do for the customer, and how does it prove its business value? (Terence Chesire). For sellers, this means finally delivering on bringing good leads, identifying risks/opportunities, and coaching them along the seller journey (Maksim Ovsiannikov).

Data, Integration, and Orchestration

CRM in 2026 is seen as the central orchestrator that connects disparate parts of the business.

• Intelligent Orchestration: CRM will focus on the intelligent orchestration of the customer journey, from lead to long-term value (Anthony Leaper).
• Breaking Down Silos: AI agents will help remove boundaries between applications (Brett Weigl), connecting CRM to systems like ERP, Supply Chain, and Finance, which have historically been separate (Brett Weigl).
• Better Data Utilization: AI will enable CRM to take advantage of significantly more data—structured and unstructured—from interactions, transactions, and demographics, which in turn allows the AI to perform better (David Singer). The evolution of CRM must encompass multiple parties, non-linear business processes, and be deep in customization and complex orchestration (Vijay Sundaram).

Governance, Trust, and Risks

While the potential for AI is huge, several speakers brought up the critical need for governance and a focus on proven value.

• Traceability and Governance: The increasing autonomy of AI requires high levels of traceability, transparency, and observability to know how an AI agent is answering a question, what sources it is using, and that it is staying within guardrails for brand safety and governance (Shalini Mitha).
• Avoiding Failure: A key concern is that a large percentage of agentic AI projects will fail or be canceled due to a lack of clear strategy, unproven ROI, bad governance, and simply chasing the hype (Tara DeZao).

Trust and Credibility: AI can be either advantageous or work against a company, especially in volatile markets (John Bruno). Success hinges on putting credible information in front of customers (John Bruno) and implementing tools that are holistic with structured workflows (Tara Dezao).