aheadCRM

Every wave of customer-facing technology arrives with the same promise: this time the balance of power shifts toward the customer. As we discussed in our recent CRMKonvo with Dan Miller , founder and analyst emeritus of Opus Research , voice AI is making that promise again, and this time both sides of the counter are armed. The more interesting questions are where the customer's weapon is kept, who pays its rent, and who gets to whisper to it while it works. 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 … Automated Voice Was Never Built for You Dan has watched this market almost from its beginning, and he is blunt about its origin. Automated voice entered the contact center " almost entirely for cost savings ". Everything after that was repair work: better speech recognition, task-specific tuning for finance and travel, and...

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...

The e-commerce industry has been pushing the exact same shopping cart down the exact same digital aisle for the better part of two decades. We have endlessly debated the optimal color for a checkout button. We have deployed massive Customer Data Platforms (to track users across the web. We have implemented traditional Customer Relationship Management tools and a full-on MarTech stack to send personalized emails that usually find a direct way into the spam folder. Yes, despite all this expensive digital plumbing, the average conversion rate stubbornly hovers around a meager two percent. Enter the industry's latest shiny toy: agentic commerce. The vendor pitches are certainly alluring. We are moving away from the tedious "click and wait" era into a frictionless "talk and buy" reality. On the surface, it sounds like a massive leap forward. However, any technology analyst worth a grain of salt must ask the difficult questions. Is this actually revolutionary, or is i...

The digital commerce industry has spent the last twenty-five or so years optimizing a single, unit of measurement: the session. We built cathedrals of conversion rate optimization (CRO), obsessed over pixel-perfect hero images, and deployed armies of "customer success" bots that were little more than glorified FAQ routers. We tracked users from the moment they landed on the homepage, watched them struggle through navigational hierarchies, and celebrated when 3% of them actually bought something. Anywhere else, a 97% failure rate would be grounds for executive termination. In e-commerce, it was the benchmark for success. We can safely say that the era of the session comes to an end, thanks to conversational and then agentic commerce, which put the "homepage" on life support. What comes more and more into the foreground is the intent, which is what the session was supposed to help derive. And crucially, the entity expressing that intent is increasingly likely to be ...