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With the arrival of AI across the modern business landscape, every aspect of the enterprise is poised for innovation. Conversations on becoming an AI-first organization often focus on data infrastructure, model training, and algorithm sophistication. However, there’s a fundamental question most revenue leaders neglect to ask: “Is our CRM AI-ready?”
CRMs as they exist today are rearward-looking tools existing in an era that demands a deeper level of insight and intelligence. While companies invest millions in AI, they’re building on foundations designed in and for the past with CRMs built to capture historical views of accounts. They give details on who you’ve talked to, what you’ve sold them, and contracts they’ve signed. They don’t offer a forward-looking, deep understanding of a customer, where they’re trying to go, and how you can help them get there. (At Poggio, we call this a tailored POV, or point of view, and it’s critical to sales success.)
Your CRM tells you where your customer has been. Modern revenue teams need to understand where the customer is trying to go.
This misalignment is a crucial challenge for enterprises today with GTM teams selling and supporting customers without a shared, informed POV on each customer’s business—including their priorities, needs, and challenges, and how the organization uniquely solves them. The negative impacts are amplified at scale with pipeline shortfalls, stalled deals, and team members who show up sounding like vendors selling commodities versus strategic partners with solutions.
Imagine that in the world that’s fast approaching with thousands of AI agents operating alongside your human talent, each with their own POV on your customer, and ask yourself, “Is our CRM AI-ready?”
The answer is unequivocally “no”. At least, “not yet.”
There is a path forward to bring your CRM—and your revenue organization—into the intelligence age. One that supercharges your CRM and GTM for the modern AI era to both delight your customers and accelerate growth.
Problems in Your Rear View Mirror are Bigger Than They Appear: What Your CRM Really Tells You
CRMs serve as repositories for customer interactions, transactions, and touchpoints. They capture contact information, communication history, purchase records, support tickets, and engagement activities, creating what once appeared to be a comprehensive view of each customer relationship. They provide valuable context about past behaviors and outcomes.
CRMs excel at answering "What did this customer buy last quarter?", but struggle with answering questions that create a deep understanding of the customer’s future, like: “What’s changed in the customer’s business since we last sold to them?”, "What is the customer trying to achieve now?", and "How can we proactively help them reach their goals?"
This historical bias creates reactive rather than proactive customer engagement and an “inside-out” rather than “outside-in” view of the customer. As a result, GTM teams don’t have a place to go to truly understand their customers—a trusted authority on their organization’s POV for each customer—and it shows in their disjointed interactions with prospects and customers.
Sales responds to expressed needs rather than anticipating requirements. Customer Success addresses problems after they manifest rather than preventing them. And each individual interacting with the customer approaches it from their own, siloed POV, rather than a shared perspective on how best to enable customer success and create lasting value.
This is a challenge that hasn’t truly been solvable until now. The time, complexity, and skill required of someone to uncover all the relevant information about a customer across thousands of sources, synthesize it, and contextualize it into a tailored POV is challenging. Doing it for one account is hard. Doing it across an entire book of business is really hard. Trying to keep it constantly updated for every account isn’t humanly possible.
The Forward-Looking Imperative: CRMs Augmented with AI-Powered Account Intelligence
The future of CRM systems combines that rear view with forward-looking intelligence via AI-augmentation of the data available in the CRM itself. This AI-augmentation makes the data better and more dynamic because it isn’t constrained to the types of information that traditionally fit into a CRM’s structured data fields.
Instead, AI agents uncover, synthesize, and contextualize all of the unstructured data available on the customer across thousands upon thousands of sources. This includes what’s available in first and third party systems (e.g. Gong, Demandbase, Github, proprietary systems, and many other systems), throughout the Internet, and multimodally across Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. When combined with the historical view currently available in a CRM, the AI-augmented intelligence creates a much more dynamic, comprehensive, and valuable view of an account and customer; one that is far more granular with greater depth and essentially infinite scale.
In this way, AI-powered account intelligence augments CRMs, transforming them from systems of record into systems of action with forward-looking insights tailored to each account. The result is a fundamental shift from GTM teams asking "What happened?" to knowing "What should happen next?"
Like a winning POV, the best AI tailors the intelligence to the account, aligning the entire GTM motion around helping each customer achieve success. It uncovers everything to know about the customer—from what executives are saying in earnings calls and reporting in 10-Ks and 10-Qs, to the latest industry and company news, evolving market conditions, new competitive threats, changes in leadership and their priorities, and more—for a view that reflects the customer’s actual current state and the desired future state of where they want to go.
AI agents then apply your unique GTM motion, value framework, positioning and messaging, competitive differentiation, case studies, proof points, and more. Those same AI agents constantly update and refine the intelligence so your GTM team always knows what the customer’s priorities are, and how they help achieve them. And because it’s available in your AI-ready CRM, all customer-facing team members have access whenever they need it, freeing up time wasted on research to spend with customers.
Paving the Way to the Agentic Future with an AI-Ready CRM
As AI agents are increasingly deployed alongside your human talent, giving them access to the shared POV ensures they operate with the same view of the account, reinforcing and enhancing your team’s efforts to enable customer success. With your AI-powered account intelligence platform feeding your modern CRM, it becomes the place for your people + AI agents to go for far richer context and a deeper understanding of your customer, in real time and at scale.
This real-time account intelligence enables dynamic, AI-powered orchestration of go to market activities, especially when paired with internal data on customer engagement patterns, product usage, support sentiment, and more. AI systems synthesize these diverse streams of first and third party data to create a current, relevant, and comprehensive picture of the customer, their trajectory, and intention.
When AI systems detect expansion opportunities, they automatically trigger coordinated responses from sales, customer success, and marketing. When risk indicators emerge, AI systems escalate to appropriate teams with comprehensive context and recommended interventions.
But for all of these motions to be successful, they have to be rooted in a unified, tailored POV for each customer. That has to be universally available to your people + AI agents. And it makes sense that would be within the place your teams already manage customer relationships: your now AI-ready CRM. This capability becomes even more critical as AI agents are tasked with greater and greater responsibility for customer engagement, like owning those coordinated responses end-to-end and mitigating that risk without human involvement.
As a result, these systems require constantly updated context to deliver relevant interactions that advance relationships rather than create friction. Just like with your human talent, without always current and relevant intelligence, AI agents risk providing outdated recommendations or missing critical context that leads to missteps and poor customer experiences.
The Competitive Reality and the Urgent Path Forward
Organizations anchored in legacy CRM approaches will struggle against AI-first competitors who modernize their CRM to enable deeper account intelligence and new engagement approaches for their people + AI agents. Those that transform their GTM motion and augment their CRM with AI-powered account intelligence will create significant competitive advantage in customer acquisition, expansion, and retention.
This transformation requires strategic commitment from revenue leaders across the entire GTM motion, including CROs, Chief Growth Officers, Chief Customer Officers, Sales and Customer Success leaders, plus Heads of RevOps and Sales Enablement. With more and more organizations creating centralized AI Councils responsible for building the strategy and stewarding the journey to an AI-first enterprise, these revenue leaders must serve as champions among their council peers to illuminate the path forward.
Success means viewing AI not as an addition to CRM capabilities, but as a fundamental transformation of traditional customer relationship management from reactive record-keeping to proactive success orchestration. Your CRM might store your customer data, but unless it's helping you understand where your customers are going and how you can help them get there, you're not ready for the AI-driven future that’s already at your doorstep.
