By Jim Lundy
The CRM Market is Now Intelligent
In the webinar that I delivered yesterday, Aragon Research announced that the Customer Relationship Management market also known as CRM is now intelligent.
We are the first research firm to proclaim this and there are profound impacts on the market going forward.
We planned this webinar to take place during the Salesforce Dreamforce conference which is taking place in San Francisco this week. This blog provides a few highlights about why We will be calling CRM intelligent CRM from now on.
There Is No Dedicated AI Market
In 2021, Aragon announced its new offer called Aragon Foresight which includes market forecasts. In the five years since the bottoms up forecast was developed using a brand new methodology, there is a critical findings that we came to the conclusion on after doing all that work.
The key finding is that there is no large AI market. What is known is that AI coming into existing markets and disrupting them. This is also true for the CRM market.
Why Is the CRM Market Becoming Intelligent?
Applications are becoming more aware because of the ability of algorithms to recognize patterns and data. Over seven years ago, Aragon identified some of the key capabilities that eventually become part of intelligent CRM. Those capabilities were predictive leads predictive opportunities and predictive forecasts.
So the reason why the CRM market became intelligent is because it is much easier to add data and algorithms to an existing product category to allow it to do more of the work that humans try to do by looking at data independently.
How Does the Idea of Intelligent CRM Change the Market Forecast?
It is true that Aragon Research now has a market forecast and we have a forecast that has the implied value of adding AI to the existing CRM market. Because so many competitors watch Aragon so closely, we’re not going to disclose the size of the market Forecast increase.
However, what we will say is that our forecast for CRM is larger than some of the other industry analyst firms out there. It isn’t significantly larger, because our forecast tends to be conservative. However as adoption starts to increase for intelligent CRM, the forecast will grow
Who Offers Intelligent CRM Products and Services Today?
Today, the majority of the major CRM providers already offer Intelligent CRM. These include c3.AI, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce. The one provider that many not may not know is c3.AI. The founder of C3.AI is Tom Siebel who really helped to start the CRM category when he ran Siebel systems.
Are Providers Aggressively Marketing Intelligent CRM?
The answer is they are not. Part of the reason is that these products were announced several years ago, they were not ready for prime time.
A case in point is Salesforce Einstein. Four years ago when it was announced the pricing was not complete and neither was the product. So that there was great fanfare during that time the adoption really never happened.
However, Einstein is now a good product and it completely changes house sales per sales cloud works. The same can be said for the other providers which offer similar capabilities around leads opportunities and forecasts.
Out of all the providers, C3.AI is the one to watch. They have a very compelling demonstration. However, too many enterprises are heavily invested in Salesforce, so they have a tough challenge to get people to migrate.
Bottom Line
The bottom line is that the CRM Market is now intelligent and that means that many providers who have been trying to add best of breed AI on top of CRM may be threatened.
As I mentioned in the webinar, the Sales Enablement Market is still healthy and growing because it focuses on sales contact management and sales communications. Sales enablement works closely with CRM which still is the system of record for prospects and customers.
Editor’s Note: To see a sample of Aragon Research’s Visual Forecasts, which are part of our new Aragon Foresight offering, signup for a free trial by joining the Aragon Guest Network.
This blog is a part of the Digital Workplace blog series by Aragon Research’s CEO, Jim Lundy.
Missed the previous installments? Catch up here:
Blog 1: Introducing The Digital Workplace Weekly Blog Series
Blog 2: Application Proliferation – Building out Departmental Tech Stacks
Blog 3: Invest in Sales Coaching and Learning Now
Blog 4: The Slow Return to the Office vs the Fast Return to Events
Blog 5: The Shift to Industry Clouds is Here
Blog 6: The Race to Intelligence and Why Future Revenue Streams Depend On It
Blog 7: The Common Design Component Contributing to Apple and BMWs Success
Blog 8: The Art of Sales and Why It Is the Secret to Fast Growth