NewsCRM & Data9 Sept 2026 · 9 min read

Customer Context Becomes CRM’s Next Competitive Battleground

Vendors are competing to make fragmented customer data useful, as AI agents increase demand for trusted, actionable customer context in CRM.

Nicole Willing

Customer context as CRM's next competitive battleground

CRM vendors have spent years adding more customer data to their platforms. Now the harder question is what happens once all that information is there.

The market is becoming increasingly focused on customer context, bringing together the information needed to understand an interaction, make a decision and determine what should happen next.

This is partly being driven by AI, as agents need access to relevant customer information before they can perform useful tasks. But the underlying challenge predates agents.

Customer relationships are spread across customer relationship management (CRM) records, service interactions, marketing journeys, loyalty programs, commerce systems, social channels and communications platforms. The value of the CRM increasingly depends on how effectively it can bring those signals together when they are needed.

That is changing where vendors compete, as the question is becoming more about how much useful context customer data can make available at the moment of decision. Several announcements in recent days indicate this

Salesforce Puts More Context Around the CRM

Salesforce has provided the clearest signal as to the direction of the market. The company introduced new Core, Advanced and Max editions for Agentforce Sales, Agentforce Service and Agentforce Industries. The packages bring together AI, security, analytics, collaboration and support, including Slack, Tableau Next and enterprise data security.

Salesforce is also building more capabilities around the customer record. Its new Sales editions include agents for prospecting, lead qualification, customer engagement and pipeline progression, alongside Momentum for capturing data and keeping CRM records updated. The Service editions bring autonomous agents into customer, employee, representative and supervisor workflows.

A sales agent needs more than a contact name and opportunity stage. It may need previous interactions, account information, relevant communications, business rules and other signals before deciding how to engage.

A service agent faces the same challenge. Resolving an issue requires understanding the customer's history and current situation, rather than treating the latest interaction in isolation.

“The new editions package native AI together with the governance and trusted data foundation customers need to act with confidence, paired with the analytics and semantic understanding agents need to reason across the business,” the vendor stated.

Salesforce's packaging strategy reflects a broader ambition to keep more of the data, intelligence, applications and execution environment within the same platform, giving the vendor a larger role in determining what customer context is available to the software making the next decision.

Hubspot Tackles The Problem From the Other Side

HubSpot's latest update highlights a different problem. The company has rolled out its redesigned Smart CRM index to all customers, covering contacts, companies, deals, tickets, tasks and custom objects.

HubSpot said the redesign is intended to make the CRM easier to customize and keep more information in one place.

“You told us the index was overwhelming and not flexible enough. So we rebuilt it from the ground up to be faster and easier to customize, and keep you in one place instead of jumping around the product or keeping multiple tabs open.”

The change may appear relatively modest compared with Salesforce's AI-heavy announcement, but it addresses the same underlying issue. CRM platforms contain more information than most employees can reasonably process.

Adding another field to a customer record does little if the employee has to search through multiple screens to understand why it matters. The same applies to AI systems, because giving an agent access to a large volume of data does not automatically give it useful context.

HubSpot's approach is about reducing the distance between customer information and the task being performed. The platform is bringing views, settings and insights closer to the records users are already working with.

Creatio Wants CRM and Workflow to Meet In the Middle

Creatio is taking the argument further by combining CRM with workflow automation and AI agents. The company has recently announced three developments, including a partnership with Innowise to accelerate AI-native CRM and workflow automation, alongside the adoption of its agentic CRM by Securityplus Federal Credit Union. Creatio said the credit union is connecting member data and AI to deliver more personalized service.

Once member information has been brought together, the next question is what the organization can do with it. That could mean identifying an opportunity, responding to a request, recommending a product or triggering another workflow. Creatio's proposition is effectively to put the CRM data, workflow engine and AI capabilities close together.

As customer interactions become more distributed, vendors have an incentive to own more of the journey between signal and response.

Iterable Shows Where the Market is Starting

Iterable offers a counterpoint to the more ambitious claims around AI-enabled CRM.

The company has shared feedback from teams evaluating its Nova Intelligence Agents within existing campaign workflows. The strongest early use cases include pre-send reviews and focused performance questions, followed by troubleshooting and personalization logic.

The important point is how narrowly those teams are starting. Iterable said that organizations are generally introducing agents into work they already understand, using existing campaigns and expected outcomes as a reference point. Human review remains part of the process, with agent outputs typically treated as a draft, diagnosis, recommendation or first pass.

“Across these areas, teams are generally treating an agent’s initial output as a draft, diagnosis, recommendation, or first pass. People still apply brand context, technical knowledge, and judgment before deciding what to use,” the company said.

That suggests customer context is valuable even when the AI involved is relatively constrained. An agent reviewing a campaign needs access to the campaign itself, relevant performance data and the logic behind the customer journey but does not need to run the entire marketing operation.

Rather than expecting a platform to hand an agent an entire customer relationship, CRM buyers can start by identifying specific decisions where better context could improve the workflow.

The Data Connections Are Becoming Part Of The Story

An update from Twilio addresses a less visible part of this architecture. The company has moved its Webhook Configuration API into public beta, allowing customers to configure authentication, signatures and delivery behavior for outbound webhooks on a per-URL basis. The API supports OAuth 2.0, Basic and Digest authentication, alongside configurable timeouts and retries.

This is primarily an infrastructure development, but it is relevant to CRM because customer context rarely lives in one system. A customer event might originate in a messaging platform, update a CRM record, trigger a marketing workflow and create an action in a service application.

The more automated those processes become, the more important the connections between systems become. A CRM platform may have a detailed customer profile, but its usefulness depends partly on whether that context can reach the systems responsible for the next step, so APIs, identity, authentication and event flows are becoming part of the customer-data architecture underpinning CRM.

The customer never sees the webhook, but they do see the consequences if the systems fail to exchange the information they need.

McDonald’s Shows Customer Context Becoming an Organizational Issue

The shift is also visible outside the technology vendors. McDonald's U.K. has appointed Calum Johns as Head of CRM, Loyalty, Partnerships and Social, bringing several customer-facing disciplines together under one role. Johns previously led loyalty at Holland & Barrett and has also held CRM and loyalty roles at Costa Coffee, Subway and InterContinental Hotels Group.

Bringing CRM, loyalty, partnerships and social together reflects the same challenge facing CRM vendors, that customer context is distributed across functions as well as technology platforms. The organizational structure has to account for those connections if the technology is going to make effective use of them.

The CRM Market Is Moving Closer To The CDP Question

This creates an interesting problem for the CRM market. Customer data platforms have traditionally focused on bringing customer information together, resolving identities, building profiles and making those profiles available for activation. CRM platforms have traditionally focused more heavily on managing relationships and workflows.

Richard Manthorpe, Director of Product Management at Content Guru, drew a distinction between the two layers in a recent interview with CX Today. “A CRM is a system of record. It tells you what a customer has said. A customer data platform, CDP, tells you what the customer meant by that.”

Those distinctions are becoming harder to maintain.

Salesforce is adding more data and intelligence to CRM. Creatio is combining CRM with workflow automation. Iterable is using customer and campaign information to support AI-assisted decisions. HubSpot is trying to surface more relevant information within the CRM workspace.

The more these capabilities converge, the more enterprises will have to decide where customer context should live and which platform should control access to it.

The problem is increasingly architectural.

If customer information is fragmented across a CRM, CDP, data warehouse, marketing platform, service application and communications stack, an AI agent may still struggle to build a reliable picture of the customer.

“The fundamentals of AI haven’t changed. It’s got to have access to good quality data, whether that’s my simple chatbot or a fully autonomous agentic bot,” Manthorpe said. Organizations need flexible, open connections to bring new data sources and tools into the environment, but must pair that with governance, security and role-based controls over what people and AI models can access.

Customer context could become CRM’s next competitive battleground. The CRM market has plenty of reasons to keep adding AI features. But underneath the agent story, competition among vendors is changing. They want their platforms to become the place where customer signals are gathered, interpreted and made useful, but that does not necessarily mean every vendor needs to own every piece of the technology stack.

Twilio's webhook indicates that connected systems can still play a critical role.

But CRM platforms need to become better at working across those boundaries.

For buyers, this changes the questions worth asking.

How complete is the customer context available to the platform? How quickly can new signals enter it? Can employees and agents distinguish important information from noise? Can that context move securely into the system where an action needs to happen? And can the organisation understand why a particular decision was made?

Those questions will increasingly determine the value of a CRM deployment.

The next phase of CRM competition may have more to do with who can make fragmented customer information useful at the moment it matters. That is where customer context becomes a competitive asset.

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