Guest post by Paul Turley, Senior Director, ServiceNow Ireland

Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems are becoming increasingly obsolete, leaving brands at risk of falling behind the competitive curve.

Legacy platforms often create fragmented experiences and frustrated teams by operating in silos. Intelligent CRM is now crucial to unify sales, marketing, service, and operations to deliver seamless customer journeys.

To truly transform CRM, organisations must adopt a true AI-first mindset - shifting from digital automation to intelligent, predictive, and proactive engagement. This mindset should be three pronged: rooted in continuous learning, empowered by automation and future-proofed through predictive insight. Business success in the era of AI-driven transformation depends on it.

Your customer has changed, why hasn't your technology?

We're at an inflection point, with the European CRM market expected to grow to $31.51bn by 2030. Businesses hope to modernise, meaning that CRM can no longer sit in the back office. Leaders need to rethink how they manage customer relationships as part of this, grasping AI as the catalyst for competitive advantage.

Sales teams want best-in-class tools that let them self-serve and find qualified leads so that they can quote high-value deals quickly without red tape. At the same time, revenue operations and finance are under pressure to streamline fulfilment, handle contract changes smoothly, and eliminate manual handoffs. Too often though, data silos between marketing and sales systems, challenges with order fulfilment and complex contract changes have stood in the way of this.

C-suite leaders across Europe and EMEA more broadly are starting to recognise that simply digitalisation processes won't deliver the customer experiences that set them apart from the competition. EMEA businesses, particularly in sectors like telecoms, finance, and manufacturing, are increasingly investing in agentic AI-enabled CRM to elevate customer experience and drive loyalty.

Applying an AI mindset in practice

Generative and agentic AI are becoming established as major value drivers in customer relationship management, with measurable impact on key KPIs such as cost reduction, faster resolution times, lower customer effort, and improved satisfaction. With agentic AI, ServiceNow is achieving 84% customer self-service and a threefold improvement in case deflection, saving support teams 400,000 labour hours.

At the heart of this evolution is a shift in thinking, reimagining CRM as a living, learning system of action. This AI mindset is rooted in three core principles:

1. Continuous learning: Rather than remaining static, modern CRM systems are designed to evolve with every interaction. They gather and analyse data over time, enabling the system to become smarter, more responsive, and better attuned to customer needs. This is real-time data that can drive fast decisions and eliminate guesswork.

2. Automation: By removing repetitive and manual tasks, automation allows teams to focus on more meaningful, high-value work. This not only improves efficiency but also enables deeper, more purposeful engagement with customers.

3. Predictive insight: AI gives businesses the ability to anticipate customer needs before they arise, using data-led signals to tailor experiences and services at scale. At a macro level, this enables automatic work order creation, intelligent scheduling and dispatch, proactive service, and AI-driven process mining. At a micro level, this level of personalisation strengthens satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term value with the customer.

Bringing this vision to life requires a CRM platform where AI, data, and workflows are deeply integrated. Agentic AI goes beyond basic automation. It can reason, decide, and act, either with human oversight or independently, delivering richer and more dynamic customer experiences.

With structured workflows in place, agentic AI systems can handle everythi...