aheadCRM

Every so often a vendor conversation earns the word "useful," and this one flirts with it. On CRMKonvo #309 , Pega 's Matt Healy walked into a room of skeptics and, refreshingly, did not try to sell AI as pixie dust. He sold governance. Let me explain why that is the interesting part, and where the pitch still needs a second look. First, the setup, because it is absurd. According to Matt, ninety-five percent of Fortune 500s still run a mainframe in some capacity. Roughly thirty thousand organizations are still on Lotus Notes. Healy mentions a government claims system running on hardware funded by a grant from the JFK administration, and a separate agency contracting retirees back out of retirement homes to keep the thing alive. This is the installed base that every "AI-native transformation" slide ignores. TL;DR If you want to watch the full CRMKonvo, please go ahead here (optimized for smartphones) or here (optimized for tablets/computers). Else, be my ...

The Ghost of Cluetrain In 1999, the Cluetrain Manifesto famously declared that "markets are conversations." It was an inspiring, romantic notion that promised to democratize commerce, wresting power from faceless corporate monoliths and handing it back to a sovereign consumer. Fast forward to today, and that conversation has been thoroughly co-opted. What was supposed to be a bilateral dialogue has devolved into an automated, highly-optimized monologue. The emergence of agentic AI, which features autonomous software agents supposedly operating on our behalf, promises a return to that original democratic vision. But let us be honest: is this actually a revolutionary shift, or is it just another iteration of vendor-controlled slop designed to monetize our decisions before we even make them? The dream of conversational commerce was simple: technology enables humans to speak to other humans at scale. Instead, the vendor community realized that humans are expensive, inconsistent...

For years, the enterprise software complex has sold us on a beautiful fairytale: the single source of truth. We were told that if we just poured enough capital into our CRM systems, and if we just badgered our front-line sales representatives enough to log every transactional interaction, absolute operational clarity would emerge. Now, the enterprise technology industry has found its next silver bullet: generative artificial intelligence. Every major software vendor is frantically bolting an AI copilot, a generic conversation summarizer, or an automated opportunity scoring engine onto their legacy applications. They promise that these shiny additions will magically transform messy, unlogged data into executive-grade operational insights. But let us be completely clear here: it is mostly marketing fluff designed to protect legacy vendor stock prices rather than solve foundational architectural bottlenecks. The recent conversation on CRMKonvo with the co-founders of Brief Executive In...