Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is nearly a $119 billion global market today (Statista), and Salesforce is the undisputed leader in the category today. But just as Salesforce once disrupted the likes of Oracle and Siebel, AI is now ushering in new players and new rules of engagement that are decisively shifting the battleground.
Data has become ground zero for the AI wave, and customer data is among the most valuable data out there given its proprietary nature. This makes CRM a natural place for AI to play. As a result, what used to be a competition over features and market share is now a fight over something much deeper: access to that data and the intelligence, revenue and differentiation that can be derived from it.
Everyone is asking themselves: Will AI interfaces and agents render the CRM software category irrelevant? Will companies even need a CRM at all if they can move to an AI user interface on top of some structured data source? Will Salesforce be able to fight off these AI-native competitors?
Our take? CRM isn’t going anywhere. And it would be a mistake to underestimate Salesforce.
However, the competition for incumbent CRM players is getting intense, and buyer expectations here are evolving quicker than ever before. All of which is putting a lot of attention on these vendors and their service partners.
Rise of the AI-native CRM players
Bessemer’s State of AI 2025 report highlights the move that’s happening across many segments from systems of record to systems of action, calling it a once-in-a-generation shift. It’s no longer enough to just store customer data and function as a “single source of truth”. It’s part of the job, but modern platforms are expected to allow humans and AI agents to act on that data, proactively and intelligently.
More and more experts believe CRM will look more like an invisible orchestration layer, updating itself automatically, interpreting customer signals across channels, and recommending (or taking) the next-best action before a rep can even open a laptop. With tools like this, productivity should skyrocket, and customer-facing teams can focus on higher value interactions.
It’s already starting to happen as AI-native CRMs introduce faster, cheaper, and more agile workflows:
- Sierra, co-founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, helps companies automate customer support across chat, email, and voice while keeping humans in the loop.
- Aurasell markets itself as an AI-native GTM platform that aims to collapse different tools such as data enrichment, forecasting and coach-agents into a single intelligent platform.
- Day AI bills itself as a system of record that reasons and a GTM chief of staff all in one, promising to eliminate manual entry and maintain pipeline in real-time.
- Attio positions itself as an AI CRM and system of action for modern GTM teams that is highly customizable to specific types of businesses.
At the same time, a growing class of adjacent players are building intelligent layers that sit on top of core platforms like Salesforce. They’re not trying to replace the system of record, but rather to extend or automate parts of the CRM experience where the core platform may lag. These solutions tend to do things like automate setup and configuration (Sweep, Swantide), provide process and organizational intelligence (Hubbl), enforce data hygiene and governance (Clarify.ai), or accelerate GTM operations (Vellora).
Ideally, all these solutions help make CRMs stickier, more intelligent, and better aligned with business needs.
Existing platforms expand
It isn’t just the AI-natives that are putting pressure on the incumbents. Vendors that traditionally focused down-market or in areas adjacent to sales and marketing (e.g. commerce or business operations) are also capitalizing on the AI disruption and buyer skepticism, and making moves into Salesforce’s territory.
SMB players, most notably Hubspot, are beginning to take share in the enterprise by both expanding their platform and promising customers simplicity, affordability and AI productivity.
Platform players like Shopify and ServiceNow are expanding into CRM territory by building out their platforms and layering in AI-driven workflows. Shopify, for example, is transforming from a pure-play e-commerce solution into a holistic commerce platform that incorporates crucial aspects of CRM such as customer segmentation, personalized marketing, and post-purchase engagement.
ServiceNow, traditionally a leader in other internal workflows like IT and HR, is aggressively moving into the space with acquisitions like Logik.ai and Moveworks and are making a concerted effort to build out their partner ecosystem here. We’re seeing a number of traditional Salesforce partners moving into this space.
This convergence means that the CRM Wars are no longer confined to the historical rivalry between established CRM vendors. They now involve broader platform battles where the winners will be determined by the ability to offer the most unified, intelligent, and workflow-centric customer engagement solutions.
The dark horse: The AI platforms
And then there are the broader AI platforms that are quickly making their way into nearly every business process, including CRM.
OpenAI has trained millions of users to treat ChatGPT like a universal interface, from writing basic emails to asking for medical advice to doing business-level research. We are quickly being trained to see conversational AI as the default starting point for information retrieval, content generation and task completion and agents (autonomous AI) will soon automate much of this.
Anthropic’s introduction of Claude Cowork, an agentic product that plugs into existing tools and platforms to complete multi-step business tasks, triggered a SaaS selloff in recent months as investors worried about the application layer becoming commoditized. And while we believe the ‘SaaSpocolypse’ is overblown – especially when you look at the continued growth for many of these SaaS companies – it’s clear that LLMs are starting to shift user behaviors and how enterprises think about internal processes.
As these models and workflows become more sophisticated, it stands to reason that many business users will prefer to transact directly inside an AI chat interface without bothering to log into CRM or ERP at all. However, anyone who thinks that this is the death knoll for a category and vendors as deeply entrenched as CRM and Salesforce, likely hasn’t worked inside a large, complex enterprise recently. These vendors are deeply entrenched in business processes and change happens slower than most pundits predict.
Salesforce is under pressure but not out of the game
Once the disruptor, all this means that Salesforce is now surrounded by threats from every direction.
Yes, Salesforce is surrounded, but don’t count them out. The CRM giant has reinvented itself many times before
Salesforce’s annual R&D investment stands at $5-6 billion a year, and that spend is primarily going toward rebuilding itself around AI. The company’s vision for the Agentic Enterprise, its moves with AgentForce, and relationships with large AI and data vendors are keeping Salesforce at the forefront of AI conversations with customers. And its extensive service partner ecosystem presents a solid moat (although we’re hearing many partners expanding their relationships with the AI-natives and direct competitors like ServiceNow.) However, Salesforce’s biggest moat of all might be the customer data they currently sit on.
The real battle moves to the experience layer
The CRM winners in the long run will be those that leverage their strengths to stay innovative at the experience layer, where customers and employees actually interact with the system. That’s where AI’s value becomes most visible. A sales rep doesn’t care if their CRM has the cleanest schema in the world; they care if it helps them close deals faster. A customer doesn’t care about the underlying data model; they care if their service request is resolved in seconds.
This is why agentic AI and orchestration tools are so disruptive. They shift the focus from records to results, from storing data to delivering outcomes in the exact moment of interaction. The winners will be defined not by who owns the record, but by who can orchestrate the action that makes the experience a success.
For services firms, that means having a deep understanding of not just tech platforms and how they work, but how data flows and agents work across systems and within processes. It also means having the ability to build experiences around platforms, which requires industry expertise and domain knowledge. .
See more trends impacting SoRs and emerging software vendors in the 2025-2026 Tercera 30.