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- The future of CRM might not live inside CRM at all.
The future of CRM might not live inside CRM at all.
Salesforce, HubSpot, AI natives, and in-house builds all had defenders and detractors.
Who's going to own the future of CRM?
In a world where switching costs are collapsing, nobody's seat at the table is guaranteed; not Salesforce, not HubSpot, not anyone.
I threw the CRM question into the community and it broke loose.
The debate opened up and didn't close. Hot takes, teardowns, and zero consensus.
First, a question that reframed the whole debate.
Gururaj Pandurangi had been talking to 40 sales leaders and noticed a shift. Most are moving away from using CRM for its UI entirely toward querying and updating via Claude and other tools, and slowly toward using CRM data to drive agentic actions elsewhere. The future of CRM might not live inside CRM at all.
The nuclear hot take!
Pat Hopkins: HubSpot. Full stop. Dharmesh's native vibe coding connected to agents is already disrupting the AI-native players before they've found their footing.
The most complete teardown in the thread.
Paris Picard went through every major player: SFDC, HubSpot, Zoho, Close, Copper/Pipedrive, Attio, GHL. Her read: HubSpot owns mid-market, Salesforce keeps enterprise, and she's rooting for a new player, preferably one that never goes public, because going public kills the product roadmap.
The dark horse nobody saw coming…
Ara Kevonian has been running Twenty; open source, free, Attio/Notion-style UI and hooked his own copilot directly to it. His word for the combo: lethal. His broader take: disruption cycles are shortening so fast that in 3-4 years we could be operating in a completely different reality.
The point that didn't get enough credit.
Evan Dunn used Claude Cowork to run more than half of a CRM migration himself. His prediction: vendors will start packaging skills.md files and context files specifically to lower switching friction. When that happens, the stickiness that's kept Salesforce and HubSpot dominant for a decade starts to dissolve.
Gururaj took an hour, fed the entire Slack and LinkedIn thread to AI, and published a data snapshot of the community's collective take as a slide deck. Titled: Who Owns the Future of CRM?
The thread generated the research. AI did most of the synthesis. One person packaged it.
That's the new content motion right there.
The vibe of the whole thread!
(Accurate)
Where do you land on this one?
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