aheadCRM

Vendor keynote season has left us with a great story: autonomous agents run the front office, orchestration layers make everything talk to everything, and trust layers keep it all compliant. As we discussed in our CRMKonvo with Jon Reed , co-founder of Diginomica , the view from the ground is less glossy. Customers and vendors are having different conversations, and the gap is not a messaging problem. It is a conflict of interest, and the buyer is paying for it. 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 guest and continue to read. Or do both … Tokenmaxxing Is a Symptom, Not a Strategy Tokenmaxxing probably peaked about six months ago, Jon reckons, and the wake-up call followed. One of his recent stories covered yet another per-user cap on AI spend, and the pushback he got on X captures the muddle: a $29 cap might be short-sighted, while $10,000 per user might be a good in...

The easy story about NIS2 goes like this: it’s yet another bureaucratic Brussels regulation; the CISO handles it, a consultant delivers a binder before the auditors arrive. Executives could hide behind a corporate veil. If their company suffered a data breach, the organization paid a fine, the PR team issued a hollow apology about how seriously they take customer privacy, and life moved on. Done and dusted. NIS2 destroys that comfortable illusion. In our recent CRMKonvo with Claus-Michael Sattler we discussed how this story collapses on contact with three simple facts. There is no certificate to buy. The obligations travel down the supply chain. And the people who sign the budget now answer for the outcome with their own money. For organizations that call themselves data-driven and customer-centric, the last fact changes who cares about the CRM. TL;DR If you want to watch the full CRMKonvo, please go ahead here (optimized for smartphones) or here (optimized for tablets/compute...

A day after getting mere two minutes on SAP’s main stage, customer experience made its case in an hour, to the people who run the systems. The News On October 7, SAP’s customer experience organization held its own SAP Connect keynote to put products and substance behind what it calls Autonomous CX . CMO Jessica Keehn opened with a survey SAP conducted among 4,800 customers, CX practitioners and CX decision makers. In the survey, comparing price and value is customers’ top priority for AI in buying but ranks seventh in business investment. More than nine in ten CX leaders surveyed said they were prepared for agentic buying, while 22% said they could fully connect customer tools to the operational systems behind them and 3% reported a true end-to-end connection. One of her opening messages was that businesses need to invest to deliver on their customers’ priorities to be successful. Hold that thought. CX President and Chief Product Officer Balaji Balasubramanian described Autonomou...