Written by: Miles Fichtner
After the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, we have seen the emergence of a subscription-based, general-purpose chatbot; this same business model has been adopted by companies such as Microsoft with Copilot and Claude with Anthropic, and Deepseek’s r1 model. Throughout the past years, we have seen fundamental changes to how we search and filter information with a critical restructuring of the traditional search engine. However, other uses for Large Language Models (LLM) as tools for companies to integrate into their operations, will likely shift the current search tool business model of an LLM, to instead, a specialized and sometimes autonomous “agent”. One industry in particular, Customer Relationship Management, has invested heavily in these LLM agents; there will be a major focus on SalesForce, as the market leader in CRM with an estimated 21.8 percent of the market share (Dean, 2021). However Adobe, Oracle, and Microsoft provide CRM related services likewise. CRM’s provide the glue and backbone of many other industries such as retail and sales, and more generally technology and IT; therefore, the rise of these “Agentic AI” systems, will likely provide fertile grounds for productivity gains and reduced labor costs in other industries, markets, and sectors holistically.
What is a CRM?
A CRM service could be a single application, or a suite of tools, whose purpose is to streamline and automate connections for a company and their clients. For example, a CRM service would provide the management and framework software for automating leads with clients, ranking priority for outreach and follow ups for those clients, and providing data analytics and profiling to maintain the relationships. Therefore, these tools are used as key indicators of strength in relationships with clients. Retail and service industries in specific are some of the largest users of CRM tools (Ruby, 2023). An example use case in these industries could be automated SMS messaging or email generation for leads and cold calling (suretysystemss, 2023). These systems would also provide data collection tools for monitoring and tracking of the responses from outreach. (Kell, 2025), as well as comprehensive customer profiling systems useful for marketing and targeted advertising for further outreach (Grand View Research, 2018). The tech industry is also heavily integrated with CRM. This natural relationship comes from the need for scalability, and cloud integration from companies using CRM services. SalesForce integrates with cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. This makes Salesforce an attractive option for automating, collecting, and analyzing all data related to a company’s customer base, as SalesForce software integrates so easily with storage methods from the cloud providers, regardless of the company size. The use cases in retail and service industries, as well as the integration with cloud providers in tech and IT capture the extent to which CRM providers reach into many types of markets and industries.
How will AI affect CRM services?
Current LLM’s like ChatGPT are trained on large amounts of very general data, sources like wikipedia articles, scholarly papers, and other forms of common sense and world knowledge data. This makes them useful as a searching tool, but it also makes them very expensive to train. In comparison, using an agentic approach would be to train a much smaller model on customer data such as client data like name, region, race, or operational data like inventory, pricing. The agents are then given the ability to reference the data and make decisions on it.
For example, consider a helper agent that supports a sales representative with lead engagement. The agent will automatically create, send, and personalize emails to potential customers. It will schedule meetings and hand off leads to a human salesperson with a relevant summary (Lam, 2024). SalesForce released Agentforce on October 29, 2024, a suite of agent tools to integrate into their platform for business owners. AgentForce provides templated agent systems. One example shows an inventory manager who checks product availability, a front-line service agent handling a customer query, and a logistics and billing agent handling past transaction history, timelines and shipping. All being orchestrated by a manager agent (Savarese, 2025).
The key takeaway being the systemic and autonomous layout that SalesForce provides for an operational necessity to any commerce or retail company. This agentic approach to business operations, coupled with heavy investment in cloud infrastructure makes companies like SalesForce a necessary piece of the puzzle for a variation of company sizes and operational needs.
Recent Developments in CRM
In March 2025, Salesforce announced a $1 billion investment over five years in Singapore (Park, 2025). In January 2025, they pledged to invest $500 million over five years in Argentina and Saudi Arabia separately (Reuters Staff, 2025). All of these deals stem from an investment in AgentForce and other forms of digital intelligence infrastructure. Salesforce’s investment and integration in AI generally, provides a roadmap into how these Agentic services could be implemented. They mark Agentforce as a transition away from human centered workflows, allowing for 24/7 productivity and with it, reach into global markets for small to medium sized businesses. (SMB’s).
Industries such as retail and commerce show the most immediate productivity gains from agentic use cases, and integration with tech and IT will likely continue as the need for technical understanding of the services moves into SMB’s. CRM services like those provided by Salesforce and other smaller industry leaders, and the investment in agentic systems will likely gain traction and interest as we will start to see productivity gains across the global economy.
Citations
Dean, B. (2021, March 31). Salesforce 2021 Revenue and Market Share Statistics. Backlinko. https://backlinko.com/salesforce-stats
Grand View Research. (2018). Customer Relationship Management Market | CRM Industry, 2018-2025. Grandviewresearch.com. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/customer-relationship-management-crm-market