It also means that I get asked again for my outlook for CRM, CX and AI, and what are relevant industry trends to observe. As said, last year everything revolved around generative AI and I consequently looked at what’s going to happen on the front of CX and generative AI. Let’s look at how good my glass ball did work before looking at 2025.
In summary, I postulated that there will be
- More success stories (partly right)
- more sophisticated use cases (partly right, although I didn’t really look at agentic AI)
- a flurry of more specialized models (yep)
- more companies starting to look at the ROI of implementations (partly right again, as there is still a lot of experimentation going on)
- a strong platform play going on (spot on, but this, frankly, wasn’t too hard to postulate)
But what will come in 2025?
What do some of the big dogs say about gen AI?
As a little side note to the adoption and ROI topics, there are two interesting studies, one from the Wharton School and the Forrester Research predictions. The Wharton study basically indicates that 2024 has been a year of experimentation while 2025 will more be a year of adoption and deployment, with rather slowing growth of investment. The study authors suspect that this is a sign that companies are still looking for the ROI of their investment and on continuing with the right ones. Forrester Research, in several of their predictions for 2025 cautions that companies with a fixation “on AI ROI will scale back” investments prematurely. Similarly to what Wharton School suspects, Forrester recommends to “pick differentiating use cases leveraging company-specific data and expertise, and create a roadmap that balances short-term and longer-term business ROI”.
Not wanting to brag, but this is what I already wrote in my CustomerThink column in March, 2023. It’s always good to get some confirmation ;)
“Formulate KPIs that you want to improve and build a case around them. One of the KPIs needs to be the accuracy of the responses given by the system. There is no point in causing rework.
After this, identify the most pressing scenarios and build a prototype. Measure the outcome and take it from there, one step after the other.
A bit more enterprising? Try personalized marketing messages that are created by generative AI, in combination with generated content like easier blogs and product descriptions. Again, do this in a controlled environment, defining and measuring KPIs that you want to improve.
The technology emerged and will be there to stay. Use it with a think big — act small mindset and regularly re-prioritize.”
So, what’s really up for CRM and CX in 2025?
So, here comes. Agentic AI will become a major force especially in service scenarios in nearly no time. Vendors will continue their story line of human augmented by AI but especially call center operators that are under constant price pressure will opt for a strong automation. In doing so, we will see a number of high-profile setbacks, but eventually, the implementations will work out for them and for their customers (which is not the end customer). Vendors willing to go for outcome-based pricing like Zendesk, Salesforce’s Agentforce ROI calculator, and a 2024 commissioned Forrester study on The Total Economic Impact™ of Salesforce Service Cloud strongly, as well as other case studies, hint into this direction.
In summary, we will see more service automation – not only on the customer side, but also towards employees.
In general, (generative) AI beyond the fairly simple use cases that we see so far will be more and more ingrained into CRM and CX solutions also to reduce the time to value and increase the ROI of advanced capabilities but also to reduce the total cost of ownership. This does require two things, namely a strong data foundation for the whole enterprise and secondly, a consistent software infrastructure.
Given this, scale and platform will become even more a topic, or else it will be increasingly hard to deliver value.
Talking about ROI and time to value, one also needs to talk industry solutions. We see industry solutions (or industry clouds) for quite a while now. This trend will increase, also in combination with preconfigured systems that require less time and investment for getting them up and running. Implementation timelines and cost for system integrators are more and more challenged in times of time to value.
In combination with this, there will be more of what I would call blurring of the lines between front- and back office. Whether this blurring eventually leads to a vanishing of this largely artificial concept remains to be seen – although I doubt it as it can be and is used as a positioning statement. Still, vendors will focus more on the corporate value chain, as standalone CRM implementations are largely a thing of the past in established businesses. This is also evidenced by the increased deployment of “corporate data platforms”, be they called data cloud or datasphere or ODI or something entirely different.
Last, but not least, one of my favorites: The conversation will become the new UI. We increasingly see the need to support more and more channels, including messengers and collaboration tools like MS Teams, or Slack, or Zoho Cliq. We also for quite some time see the demand for the CRM being where the user is, literally as well as digitally. The former is catered for by mobile apps, the latter by an increasing ability to interact with the system via querying it in human language via collaboration tools or messengers. This is powered by the capabilities of language models and a very important advancement.
So, these are my predictions. What are yours? Let me know.
Whether you do or don’t, have a peaceful season, get some rest and let’s continue to improve the world of CRM and CX next year.
Comments
Post a Comment