All This Talk About AI… What Happened to CRM? | phcppros

Everyone rushed toward AI and forgot they still can't find a customer's last three orders without digging through two spreadsheets and a sticky note.

A piece making the rounds in the trades makes a blunt point: the industry got distracted by AI buzz before the basics were even solved. CRM — the unglamorous work of actually capturing, organizing, and acting on customer data — got skipped. Now companies are trying to layer AI onto a foundation that was never solid to begin with.

If you've been in this seat for a few years, that lands. You've watched the pitch cycle go from "cloud CRM" to "automation" to "AI-powered everything" — and each wave left the same mess underneath. Contacts still live in someone's inbox. Follow-ups still depend on one person's memory. The executive team still asks why you can't pull a simple report without a two-day project.

The uncomfortable truth is that AI won't save a broken CRM — it will just make the bad data move faster.

Before any of the shiny stuff matters, the data has to be right, the workflows have to match how your team actually operates, and your people have to trust the system enough to use it. That's not a technology problem. That's a fit problem.

No tool solves fit. That only comes from building something around how your business actually runs — not bending your business to fit the software.

#CRM #SalesOperations #MidMarket #CustomerData #OperationsLeadership

Original Source

Don't Skip the CRM Step. June 1, 2026. iStock-2228738559.jpg. My name is Joe Herkowski, ...