The Forrester Wave™: Customer Relationship Management Software, Q1 2025, our latest evaluation of CRM providers, shows a market on the cusp of change. Agentic AI reshapes the value of CRM as we know it. Looking a decade or more into the future, the landscape of front-office jobs will likely be significantly transformed.
At this point, agentic AI — not humans — will be the first touchpoint for all customer interactions. The front office will be dedicated to supporting and optimizing automations. Of course, there will still be a need for human engagement — for consultative sales, for relationship building, or for addressing customer issues that carry emotion. But the number of these roles will lessen as much of customer operations shifts to the middle and back office. There will also be a need for new roles such as AI supervisors that manage the success of AI to business goals. Also, AI agents will get stuck mid-process and will require human intervention in real time to make a simple decision, which paves the path for a “bot unblocker” job.
The CRMs Of The Future Will Embrace Agentic AI
CRMs themselves will change — and they are already doing so today. For example, CRMs will contain:
An agentic layer. CRMs will package AI agents for predefined tasks and actions. They will include an AI agent studio to create agents. They will include integration frameworks to access data from other apps. Also, they will include orchestration and observability capabilities to manage and govern AI agents toward business goals. Vendors will offer marketplaces for AI agents, such as what Salesforce is doing today.
A data layer to access real-time enterprise and customer data.
A low-code platform to create custom workflows and extensions. The quality of this platform will be one of the major decisions in selecting a CRM.
CRM workflows. Gone will be the days of monolithic CRM clouds. CRMs will be deconstructed into resuable components and will be accessible via AI agents and other business apps. Industry workflows will retain value. Also, end-to-end workflows will be more valuable than the ones constrained to the front office.
Trust, security, and compliance. CRMs, like they do today, must comply to industry regulations and must ensure governance, trust, fairness, and protection for all data used in AI models.
New UX. Experiences will be role-based — for example, a relationship manager may engage with customers via video, with augmented-reality overlays, while automation supervisors work in dashboards. The user experience will also be primarily conversational. Screens will contain less data and fewer options for the user. CRM data and workflows will be embedded into and accessed via other business applications.
We already see signs of this transformation. Every CRM vendor in the Wave has released AI agents, as well as developer tools to manage AI agents. What has to happen now is a refactoring of current CRM capabilities for this agentic future.
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