How Australian Businesses Are Rethinking CRM in the Age of AI Agents

A new generation of AI-native platforms is transforming customer relationship management from a record-keeping tool into an autonomous driver of business outcomes — and Australian enterprises are beginning to take notice.

Australian businesses are collecting more customer data than at any point in their history. Sales interactions, support tickets, marketing touchpoints, e-commerce behaviour — the volume of signals that companies now capture would have seemed extraordinary a decade ago. The problem, for many organisations, is not a lack of data. It is the inability to act on it quickly enough.

Customer expectations have shifted accordingly. Buyers in financial services, retail, and manufacturing increasingly expect personalised, timely responses that reflect an understanding of their history and needs. To deliver that experience consistently and at scale, organizations need systems that can process customer signals and respond to them in real time.

That operational gap is driving a significant reassessment of how Australian enterprises approach customer relationship management. The question is no longer simply which platform to use, but what kind of platform is needed for a business environment in which speed and personalisation are baseline requirements.

What CRM Is — And Why It Is Changing

At its core, CRM software is designed to help organisations manage and analyse their interactions with existing and prospective customers. Traditionally, that has meant a centralised database of contacts, deal histories, and communication records — a system of record that sales, marketing, and service teams can query and update.

For much of the past two decades, this model served businesses adequately. The major platforms in the space built large ecosystems around this foundational capability, adding layers of reporting, integration, and workflow automation over time.

The arrival of enterprise-grade artificial intelligence is now changing the underlying logic of what CRM systems are expected to do. Rather than waiting for a sales representative to query a database or a manager to review a pipeline report, AI-native platforms are designed to surface insights proactively, automate routine interactions, and in some configurations, act on customer signals without requiring human initiation.

This shift from passive data repository to active operational system is what analysts and vendors are increasingly describing as the transition from traditional CRM to agentic, or AI-native CRM.

The Rise of AI Agents in CRM

The concept of AI agents, defined as software systems capable of autonomously executing multi-step tasks based on specified goals, has moved from research papers into enterprise software with notable speed. According to Gartner, fewer than 5% of enterprise applications included task-specific AI agents in 2025. By the end of 2026, Gartner projects that figure will reach 40%.

The implications for CRM are substantial. In practice, AI agents embedded in customer management platforms can handle tasks such as lead qualification and prioritisation, appointment scheduling, follow-up sequencing, and case routing, all of which previously consumed significant hours of skilled employee time.

The market response has been correspondingly strong. IDC projects that year-on-year spending on artificial intelligence will grow by 31.9% between 2025 and 2029, reaching $1.3 trillion globally by the end of that period. A significant share of that investment is directed toward agentic AI applications, including CRM automation.

Gartner's 2026 CIO and Technology Executive Survey found that while only 17% of organisations had deployed AI agents to date, more than 60% expected to do so within two years, representing the steepest adoption curve among all emerging technologies tracked in the survey. Analysts note, however, that speed of adoption will need to be balanced against governance maturity: Gartner separately estimated that more than 40% of agentic AI projects risk cancellation by 2027 due to unclear business value or inadequate risk controls.

What This Means for Australian Businesses

Australia's CRM market is currently valued at approximately USD 2 billion and is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of around 10% through to 2033, according to IMARC Group. The sectors driving adoption most aggressively are financial services, retail, and manufacturing, industries where customer volume is high, margins on individual interactions are meaningful, and the cost of losing a relationship to a faster-responding competitor is material.

For financial services organisations in particular, the integration of AI into CRM workflows addresses a specific operational pressure: regulatory obligations demand accurate, auditable records, while market competition demands faster and more personalised client engagement. AI-native platforms that combine workflow automation with compliance-aware governance are increasingly seen as a practical resolution to that tension.

Retail businesses face a related but distinct challenge. The growth of e-commerce has compressed the window in which a timely follow-up or personalised recommendation can influence a purchase decision. Manual CRM processes are structurally unable to operate at the speed required. AI-native systems that can detect a behavioural signal and trigger a contextualised response within minutes are therefore attracting serious evaluation.

Mid-market manufacturers and distributors have historically been underserved by CRM vendors that focus on either large enterprise or SME deployments. The emergence of no-code configuration tools within AI-native platforms is helping to reduce barriers to adoption for this segment. Businesses that previously lacked the IT resources to customise and maintain a CRM implementation can now build and modify workflows without specialist development skills.

One Platform Shaping the Agentic CRM Category

Among the vendors positioning themselves at the intersection of AI and no-code CRM, Creatio has drawn notable attention from industry analysts. The company was recognised as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms for the fifth consecutive year in 2025, and as a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms the same year.

Independent research firm Nucleus Research, which interviewed Creatio customers to assess real-world outcomes, found that the platform's no-code capabilities deliver a 37% reduction in total cost of ownership compared to alternative solutions, alongside a 70% reduction in implementation timelines and a 61% reduction in lead response time for sales teams. Users also reported measurable improvements in organisational agility and the ability to run continuous improvement initiatives without relying on specialist development resources.

Creatio's architecture combines a no-code development environment with natively embedded AI agents, enabling organisations to build and modify CRM workflows without writing code. The company reported 40% year-on-year revenue growth in 2025, continuing its accelerated expansion among enterprise customers across financial services, manufacturing, and the public sector, with organisations including Nasdaq, Allianz, MetLife, and E.ON Next among those selecting the platform.

The platform's real-world impact has been documented across a range of industries. BSN Sports, a US distributor of sporting equipment serving more than 150,000 institutional customers, reported a 60% increase in sales book size per representative over five years following its implementation of Creatio, alongside 100% user adoption across its sales organisation.

What Australian Organisations Should Evaluate

For Australian businesses beginning to assess AI-native CRM options, analysts and practitioners generally point to four criteria as foundational to a sound evaluation.

Integration flexibility is frequently the first consideration. A CRM platform, however capable in isolation, delivers limited value if it cannot connect cleanly with the ERP, marketing automation, and data warehousing systems already in use. Organisations should assess both the depth of available native integrations and the availability of open APIs for custom connections.

No-code configurability has become a significant differentiator as businesses seek to reduce dependence on specialist development resources. Platforms that allow business users to modify workflows, build automation rules, and deploy new capabilities without requiring IT involvement can materially reduce both implementation timelines and ongoing maintenance costs.

AI governance and transparency is emerging as a critical selection criterion, particularly for regulated industries. As AI agents take on a greater share of customer-facing decision-making, organisations need visibility into how those decisions are made, the ability to audit outcomes, and clear controls over which tasks agents are authorised to execute autonomously.

Total cost of ownership over a three-to-five year horizon, accounting for licensing, implementation, customisation, and ongoing support, frequently tells a different story than headline subscription pricing. Platforms with strong no-code capabilities tend to reduce ongoing professional services dependency, which can represent a meaningful cost advantage over time.

Looking Ahead

The shift from traditional CRM to AI-native platforms is no longer a distant prospect for Australian businesses. The transition is already under way across the market segments facing the greatest competitive pressure to deliver superior customer experiences. The organisations that move thoughtfully and early are likely to accumulate structural advantages that compound over time: faster response cycles, more efficient sales operations, and customer data assets that become progressively more valuable as AI capabilities improve.

The technology is maturing rapidly. What has changed is the availability of platforms that make sophisticated AI-native CRM accessible to organisations without large technology teams or significant IT budgets. For Australian businesses still operating legacy systems, that accessibility is both an opportunity and, over a medium-term horizon, a strategic risk if competitors move first.

The question for most enterprises is no longer whether to modernise their approach to customer relationship management, but how quickly they can do so without disrupting the operations they already depend on.

Sources

• Gartner, Hype Cycle for Agentic AI, 2026

• Gartner, CIO and Technology Executive Survey, 2026

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, September 2025

• IMARC Group, Australia Customer Relationship Management Market, 2025–2033

• Creatio, Marks a Landmark Year of AI Innovation and Accelerated Global Growth, January 2026

• Forrester Wave: CRM Software for Financial Services, Q1 2025

• Nucleus Research, Creatio's No-Code Capabilities Reduce TCO by 37 Percent, April 2025

• Creatio, Company News and Investor Announcements, 2024–2025

• BSN Sports / Creatio, Customer Success Case Study, 2024

• Creatio Glossary: CRM Software