aheadCRM

Somewhere in your organization there is a slide claiming that agentic CX is about to get cheap. I bet, there is. It has a line heading down and to the right, it cites the collapse in token prices, and it is not lying about the collapse. Token prices really have fallen off a cliff. Still, the slide is wrong, Why? Because what you are buying is not tokens. It is workflows, and workflows have learned to consume tokens faster than tokens get cheaper. That is the inference paradox that Gartner Group talks about: the unit price falls, the invoice climbs, and neither number is a mistake. The Price Collapse Happened Somewhere Else Start with the part the vendors get right. Compiled inference-cost data from a16z, Epoch AI and Stanford's AI Index puts GPT-3-equivalent quality at roughly $60 per million tokens in late 2021 and about $0.06 by late 2024, a thousandfold drop, with price-performance improving at a median 50x per year and closer to 200x per year since the start of 2024. Goldm...

Every hype cycle produces its own comfortable silence, and this one has a good one: almost everybody is doing AI, and almost nobody will say out loud whether it worked. In our recent CRMKonvo with Jon Reed , co-founder of diginomica , we spent an hour poking at that silence, with Ralf Korb doing the poking alongside me. Jon is one of the analysts who actually tests the thing before writing about it, which makes him tiresome company for vendors and excellent company for buyers. The conversation did not land on whether AI works. It landed somewhere considerably more uncomfortable: most enterprises cannot say what working would look like, and they started spending anyway. 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 … Sixty Percent, And Nobody Is Blushing Jon opened with numbers rather than opinion, a habit more of us should copy. McKin...

Gartner rewrote the CRM rules this year. It was probably right to. Buyers still need to read the fine print. Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for CRM Sales Platforms is likely the most consequential edition in years . But it isn't because of the vendor movements. It's because of the rule changes that caused these movements. Let me start with the part that deserves credit. Gartner correctly saw the market shift and acted. The report was renamed from Sales Force Automation Platforms to CRM Sales Platforms, and the substance moved with the name. The old report was defined around records: leads, accounts, opportunities, pipeline, quotes, partner portals. The new one is defined around orchestration and composite AI, whether predictive, generative and agentic capabilities actually feed each other, and whether one can see, govern and correct what those systems do. It is the right call. Anyone who has sat through a vendor demo in 2025 or 2026 knows the gap between "we have AI...