The CRM market is no longer just about contact management and sales funnel systems. The largest providers are attempting to take over a much larger part of the process: customer data, marketing, sales, customer service, pricing, renewals, and, increasingly, invoicing and payments. What is at stake is a position as close as possible to revenue.
The timing is right for such expansion. Gartner forecasts that global IT spending will reach $6.31 trillion in 2026, whilst the software market alone will grow by 15.1 per cent to $1.44 trillion. Spending on AI is set to increase by as much as 47 per cent, to $2.59 trillion. At the same time, companies continue to prioritise funding tactical AI applications over broad-scale transformation. The problem, therefore, is not access to the technology, but proving its value.
This explains Salesforce’s move. In the first quarter of the 2027 financial year, the combined ARR of Agentforce and Data 360 approached $3.4 billion and grew by over 200 per cent year-on-year. More than half of the bookings came from existing customers. The company has also changed the way it reports on its business, splitting subscription revenue into Agentforce Apps and Data 360, Headless Platform & Other. CRM, data and AI agents are becoming a single architecture, rather than three separate product categories.
Microsoft is seeing a similar shift in its billing model. In the quarter ending 31 March, Dynamics 365 revenue rose by 22 per cent, but the company highlighted weaker contract renewals as customers balanced traditional per-user licences against a model combining licences and usage. This is a significant shift in the economics of SaaS. The cost of CRM is becoming less dependent on the number of employees alone, and increasingly dependent on the number of operations performed by the software and agents.
HubSpot has taken this a step further. Customer Agent costs $0.50 per call resolved, whilst Prospecting Agent costs $1 per lead recommended for contact. In June, the company launched Revenue Hub, covering quotes, contracts, billing and payments. The CRM thus integrates directly into the quote-to-cash process.
However, the market is not embracing this transformation unconditionally. In the second quarter, HubSpot increased its revenue by 20 per cent to $911.7 million, but lowered the midpoint of its annual sales forecast by $22 million. Following the publication of the results, the share price fell sharply. One of the issues raised by analysts was the impact of free trial periods, lower entry barriers and performance-based billing on the pace of AI monetisation.
Adobe is tackling the same area from the perspective of marketing and customer data. Adobe Experience Platform handles over a trillion customer experiences annually, whilst CX Enterprise Coworker is designed to integrate data, analytics, content and agents across processes ranging from campaigns to retention. The boundary between CRM, CDP and marketing automation is becoming increasingly blurred in functional terms.
However, it is the processes, rather than product labels, that speak volumes. Following the consolidation of its sales and marketing operations in Dynamics 365, Sony Europe reduced the number of custom attributes by 79 per cent, cut lead processing time by 84.7 per cent, and reduced offer approval times from several weeks to less than five days. Avantor, for its part, reports that following the implementation of Adobe Real-Time CDP, revenue from digital marketing increased by 120 per cent over 18 months. Both examples are taken from the suppliers’ own materials, so they do not constitute a neutral benchmark. However, they illustrate where the economic value of customer data lies: in the speed and effectiveness of the revenue generation process.
As a result, the previous distinction between CRM, CDP, marketing automation, customer service and revenue management systems is becoming blurred. A provider that controls customer data, the business context and the mechanism that executes subsequent actions can handle an ever-increasing portion of the journey from initial interest to revenue.
