We’ve seen AI on the rise now for the broad society for over two years now.
It’s been a huge hype topic, a lot of pros and cons. Plenty of great use cases in so many different areas.
I’ve spoken to many clients, friends and other users and learned so many interesting cases, theories, expectations etc. - a great time, with plenty of conceptional shifts.
I’m curious about the relationship to business software / CRM and SuiteCRM especially:
We’ve seen the recent drop in stock prices for Salesforce, SAP and others.
“AI is eating software” …
What’s your take on it?
Where are we heading?
Do we need CRM in the near / mid future? Or just agent teams with access to our DB?
What is your company doing? Did you leave / decide against (Suite)CRM with AI in mind?
I think we are heading inevitably towards world where AI is used everywhere.
This changes things, but it also opens a whole bunch of opportunities for projects like SuiteCRM.
We have open platform, which has a long history and a lot old code. The structure is mature, but changing things require a tedious task of research in code, a comprehensive testing and then you can provide the changes. All things that AI can help a lot.
We need CRM in future, in form or another. But we should really start thinking how to evolve faster. The view for business data should be as complete as possible. The default SuiteCRM deployment should be faster, easier and more complete.
If all SuiteCRM users would combine their effort somehow, what could we achieve? How could we have a platform inside the production CRM for sharing ideas and fixing problems? What if we had a support channel inside SuiteCRM, maybe even AI driven?
The futurists are saying we no longer need a CRM, just a database with an AI front end. I can see how that’s possible, but not functional or plausible. Fundamentally CRM is about “relationships” between people and companies. AI can definately help with data mining but fundamentally, you need a person that deals with another person to get most business transactions moving (I’m talking B2B here, I get there peopleless transactons like financial transactions and B2C ecommerce that doesn’t “need” people").
I want to “see” the data, the last call report, what else is going on in account easily and in a dashboard that tells the story. I can get a “feel” (that AI can’t get from pure data) on what the next best approach is to the person or persons making the decsion. I get AI can summarize this and that is sometimes useful, but I still see the need for a data→human interface (a CRM!).
What would pure AI CRM look like? I guess I can envision alot of the things it already does. Create call and meeting summaries, ID contacts and companies based on data/trends and targetting that would be high priority leads, maybe even start the outreach process with cold emails. These are all great!
At some point (for most B2B anyway) a human being is going to have to connect with another human being and one human being is going to have to trust the other human being enough to sign a contract.
AI can definately help with that, can even summarize the meeting, prep the demo, write the propsal (all great uses of AI) but unless the future holds that AI is making the buying decision and I guess my AI could just talk to your AI. If that doesn’t happen you still need a human or two in the loop. That human is going to need a CRM to organize and display data in a human way.
A future proof CRM must be that graphical and usable interface between the data and the person.
The future seems to be based around AI as a Core and that handles all the requests, being the Front End for all the data/records which are being used. Just like the Comet Browser, there would be Visual Interface to show records, draw reports or notify the users, but the core backbone is apparent to be Based on LLMs. With Manual Call Handling, Email Messaging or Reminders setting going away, AI would take over most of the “Admin” stuff.
With Customer Services Domain disrupted, health care and finance are what the AI Companies are targeting now. The Trend to develop custom softwares has greatly reduced ecp for New Custom Softwares. Those who are still running the show have a moment of their past connections or a product they have been working on for so long.
On the contrary if AI Subsidies are reduced, the actual cost of Using AI would skyrocket, thus demanding companies to utilise a human resource instead of the Costly Agent for solving an problem.
For now, AI is a companion for boosting Performance 10x. Adapting it has become necessary and we follow wherever the wind blows.
Great thread . We all love technology, and we all love humans in this group, I would say. Thus, a perfect combo to ‘get AI right’.
I think everyone’s points above are fair, but I’m very hesitant to trust a bot with sensitive customer data, for one, but if that can be dealt with, and everyone be happy with that part, then I’m open to consider things. For example, I’ve already started dabbling with letting N8N do something with an API so really, probably that’s not any safer…but at least you can probably control the level of permission on a granular level with APIs.. but I digress…
What I would envision, if AI were used, would be to ‘enhance the human experience’, not replace it. So, what I would see is something like this:
Normal, full visibility dashboard, GUI - for all the reasons mentioned above.
* Prompts to follow certain actions, that subsequently contain useful automations, with the following example:
start typing “John Doe”
“Do you want John Doe from ABC corporation, or from DEF Ltd?”|
“DEF”
“Got it . You are logged in as a sales rep so would you like to look up your last task and notes you have on John Doe from DEF Corp?”
“Y”
“Sure, here’s that task. Would you like to communicate with him?”
“Y. Email”
“Sure, here’s a blank email. Do you want to build the email from a template? You have a few templates with customizable blocks in them.”
“y. long time no talk email”
“Sure, here’s the customizable “Long time no talk email set up and ready to customize for John”
Click send
“Ok that’s sent but do you want to set up a follow up on this?”
“Y, 90 days’
“Done. You will get an email from SuiteCRM in 90 days when it’s time to check in on John Doe”
Something like this would be awesome in my opinion and keep us in more control of our data (I think?) while taking advantage of ‘enough’ AI?
Definitely I would not hand full control of our customer data over to a bot without having crazy strict guard-rails.