How CRMs Are Using AI to Improve Customer Relationship Management

Jewell July Marketing Specialist Last updated on: October 1, 2025

More than ever, the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are a reality instead of the stuff of science fiction novels. From our personal lives to the way we run our companies, AI tools are becoming more available for a range of applications.

Since AI is revolutionizing sales, marketing, and many other aspects of business, many companies are turning to AI-powered CRMs to enhance customer relationship management. The result is time and costs saved: businesses are reporting that using AI saves them up to 13 hours of productive time per week and almost $5,000 in operational costs per month. 

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms help businesses store and analyze contact information, track customers throughout the sales process, and automate certain sales and marketing functions to streamline their workflow. The integration of AI in CRM platforms is revolutionizing customer relationships. AI in CRM platforms enables businesses to streamline workflows and improve customer insights.

Let’s take a look at how CRMs are using AI, whether it’s worthwhile for your business to use AI in your CRM, and which CRMs are providing the best AI-powered features. 

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What is CRM AI?

CRM AI is the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The combination of AI and CRM has the power to transform how businesses interact with customers by interpreting and learning from customer data and predicting future needs.

Bringing AI into your CRM gives you the tools to take a more proactive business approach, fostering deeper and more meaningful customer relationships. It also allows you to automate several processes, helping your team increase its productivity levels.

What are the different types of AI in CRM?

AI Powered CRMs come in various forms, offering different solutions to help you and your team. These are the different types of AI you’re bound to find in modern CRM systems today:

• Generative AI: This CRM AI type uses machine learning to generate various forms of content—like emails, blog posts, etc. With generative AI, you can create sales and marketing communications and materials faster than ever, increasing team efficiency.
• Predictive AI: Sales forecasting, lead scoring, and trend spotting are just a few nifty uses of predictive AI in your CRM. This CRM AI variety can help teams identify leads most likely to convert and give you insights for more effective planning and decision-making. 
• Conversational AI: Think chatbots and virtual agents, and you have conversational AI—a form of artificial intelligence that can understand and respond to conversations when humans interact with it. You can use this form of CRM AI to enhance customer experiences and gather data when your prospects and customers engage with it.

How are CRMs using AI?

Using AI and CRM together is useful for lots of tasks, like automation, data analytics, and prediction-making. Because AI imitates the way humans learn from our knowledge and experiences, it can produce insights and make decisions based on what it learns.

Machine learning is one subset of AI that’s useful for CRMs. ML applications improve themselves through the data that’s given to them — they analyze historical data and identify patterns and trends to make decisions, forecasts, and predictions about future data trends. For businesses, machine learning systems are a game-changer for sales, revenue, and marketing forecasting, and just about anything else that involves data analysis. 

CRMs are leveraging these abilities in a number of ways.

Reporting and predictive analytics 

Because AI can quickly analyze large quantities of data, it can generate accurate and understandable reports with ease, saving your team time and effort. AI can also generate predictions based on the information you’ve been storing on customers, leads, and sales. Whether you want to score your leads or forecast sales, AI is a great tool for predicting trends and empowering organizations to make better data-driven decisions.

Integrating machine learning software into your CRM processes allows for constant sales, marketing, and customer behavior forecasting. With automated data collection through your CRM, you’ll have a continuous flow of real-time, high-quality data being funneled straight to your machine-learning tool.

Writing and email

Generative AI accelerates everyday writing—from sales outreach to nurture sequences and newsletters. Pair an email‑capable CRM with features like AI email reply starters to draft context‑aware responses in seconds, or use an email sequence writer to create multi‑touch campaigns that match your tone. Even marketing teams benefit from built‑in assistants for newsletters and content tweaks via the AI writing assistant.

Note‑taking is another time sink AI eliminates. Voice‑to‑text and summarization can transcribe and condense conversations automatically with AI meeting summaries and seamless Zoom transcriptions + AI summaries, so key points land in the right timeline without manual effort.

Automation 

While automation and AI are two different tools, AI can be used to improve automation within your CRM. Automation is highly valuable for streamlining certain repeatable processes, like moving leads along your sales pipeline and sending marketing emails.

In addition, patterns found in customer engagement levels, purchase history, demographics, and other online behaviors can inform businesses’ creation of effective automated marketing and drip sequences that drive a higher ROI.

Segmentation

Segmenting leads and customers allows you to generate more precise reports, target marketing campaigns with greater accuracy, and use the right sales approach with each lead. AI’s natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) capabilities allow CRM customers to segment leads and customers more accurately based on their interactions and data.

Through customer data analysis, machine learning tools can identify patterns in customer behavior and common characteristics among customers. Through machine learning, businesses can identify customer segments based on criteria like:

• Demographics
• Lead and customer engagement with marketing efforts
• Customer behavior on your business’s site
• And more

Machine learning tools can even give insight into the likelihood of conversions with new leads and automate customer segmentation and customer profile creation.

Customer insights 

Conversation and timeline data are goldmines—if you can parse them quickly. AI can analyze emails, chats, calls, and meetings to reveal sentiment and intent, then distill years of activity into a concise brief with timeline summarization. Pair that with meeting summarization to keep every rep aligned on history, blockers, and next steps.

AI and ML can also analyze conversations with prospects (whether through email, customer support chat, phone call, or video) and generate an analysis of how the customer was feeling during the interaction, providing insights into the customer’s view of your products, services, and company. 

Personalization

Just like customer segments, identifying customer needs through machine learning means you can create more effective campaigns that directly address customer pain points.

The CRM AI analyzes your customer data to determine the ideal products and services for their individual needs. Using AI in this way allows you to anticipate and address each customer’s specific needs, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Additionally, identifying customer needs through machine learning opens up opportunities for more effective cross-selling efforts and more positive customer experiences.

The 6 best AI-powered CRMs with advanced tools

More and more CRM providers are adopting AI in various aspects of their platforms. Here are the six best AI-powered CRMs and how they’re bringing their customers the power of artificial intelligence:

1. Nutshell – Sales Business

Nutshell’s Sales Business plan is an AI-powered CRM tier for teams who want to use artificial intelligence to improve their sales processes. In addition to all of the features available with Sales Pro, Sales Business includes several AI-charged features to give your organization better insight into its customers and leads:

• Timeline summarization: Your Nutshell timelines are thorough records of every interaction you’ve had with a person, company, or lead, which can become unwieldy over time. The timeline summarization feature will provide a summary of your relationship with the contact, including important information like who they’ve interacted with the most, what tends to come up in discussions, and what products or services they’re interested in. Use these insights to better understand customers.
• AI Chatbot: With Nutshell’s AI Chatbot, you can engage website visitors, answer questions, book meetings, and capture details—all while your team is offline. Train your chatbot on your site’s URLs, uploaded PDFs, and more, so it always delivers the correct answer. 
• Nutshell’s AI Agents: Design sales pipelines, draft AI-generated email replies, beat objections, and surface insights using AI Agents in your Nutshell sidebar.
• Zoom transcription summarization: Zoom meeting transcripts are helpful for catching team members up on how a demo, sales pitch, or other meeting went. Use AI to summarize Zoom meeting transcriptions at the click of a button, helping you keep track of conversations.
• Notetaker for voice-to-text transcriptions: With Nutshell’s Notetaker feature, you can skip the keyboard and take notes, write emails, comment on logged activities, and more using voice-to-text.
• Email writing assistant: Craft engaging email messaging fast with the AI writing assistant available to users on Nutshell’s Marketing plans.
• Data enrichment: With Nutshell Intelligence, you can automatically gather additional data related to your contacts from publicly available resources across the web.
• MCP server integration (coming soon): Hey, ChatGPT. Can you tell me what sales activities are most commonly logged for our closed won sales over $5,000? The upcoming MCP server integration in Nutshell lets you link your CRM to your AI assistant with a single click, so you can uncover rich insights into your CRM data that help drive growth.
• Next Action AI Sales Coach (coming soon): With the Next Action AI Sales Coach, you’ll always know the next best action to take with a lead and why. Eliminate guesswork, save time, and transform your pipeline.

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Nutshell’s Business plan gives your team the ability to generate AI-powered timeline and Zoom call summaries — plus do everything else you can with our Nutshell Pro plan.

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2. Salesforce – Einstein GPT

Salesforce has developed Einstein GPT, a generative AI tool that provides insights across the entire Salesforce ecosystem. Einstein GPT’s capabilities include:

• Creating AI-generated emails and conversations
• Delivering data insights
• Making predictions and recommendations for sales reps
• Routing customer service requests to the right representative based on the customer’s tone

Einstein GPT is available in prebuilt solutions for sales, marketing, service, commerce, and data, each of which is priced as a separate add-on to your current Salesforce plan. If you have developers on staff, you can also customize your AI.  

3. HubSpot – Breeze Assistant

HubSpot’s Breeze Assistant is an AI-powered assistant that responds to prompts. Breeze Assistant is designed to help sales, service, and marketing professionals automate tasks. The system can:

• Write and send emails
• Create reports
• Generate other insights 

Breeze Assistant is currently free and open to everyone, even people who aren’t HubSpot customers. However, HubSpot customers will benefit from the tool’s ability to create changes within the CRM, draft content, and direct users around the platform. 

4. Zoho – Zia

With Zia AI CRM software, Zoho customers can access the information they’re looking for in their CRM even faster. Users can chat with or call Zia to get the answers they need however works best for them. Zia is a conversational sales assistant that will:

• Find CRM data on command
• Provide suggestions and insights
• Score leads
• Enrich customer data 
• Create workflow suggestions

Zia is currently available on all Zoho CRM plans. Sales teams can benefit the most from the tool’s predictive insights, sales forecasting, and integration with CRM data.

5. Freshworks – Freddy AI

Freshworks recently released a tool called Freddy AI, which uses generative AI to create personalized interactions with customers. As of now, Freddy AI’s primary function is as a chatbot for handling customer service requests. The feature can: 

• Automate customer support conversations
• Analyze customer sentiment 
• Provide sales trend analysis, revenue forecasts, and other recommendations 

Freshworks customers can also customize Freddy AI to give it the same look and feel as the rest of their site. 

The Freddy AI CRM tool is available as part of Freshworks CRM accounts. Freshworks is also accepting signups for beta testing of other iterations of Freddy AI, like Freddy AI for sales, marketing, and more. 

6. Pipedrive – AI Sales Assistant

Finally, the Sales Assistant from Pipedrive provides recommendations for sales teams to optimize their sales processes. Because it syncs with Pipedrive CRM data, the AI Sales Assistant can:

• Identify the most valuable leads
• Generate data-based recommendations
• Send notifications to keep everyone on the same page

Sales Assistant is most helpful for sales teams, as it uses automation to save time when completing everyday sales tasks. People with a paid or trial Pipedrive account can try the feature for free.

Frequently asked questions about AI-powered software

Hungry for more about AI for CRM platforms? Check out these frequently asked questions:

How can AI be used in customer relationship management?

As in many industries, applying AI in customer relationship management can help teams save time, make sense of large quantities of information, and streamline time-consuming tasks like researching contacts online.

Do you need AI in your CRM?

Although you don’t need AI in your CRM to gain the benefits of a CRM platform, AI can certainly enhance your experience and even help you do business better. In fact, businesses are reporting that using AI saves them up to 13 hours of productive time per week and almost $5,000 in operational costs per month.

Whether you want to improve your customer support, streamline workflows for your team, or get reporting insights faster, AI’s features can provide your organization with several powerful benefits. When determining whether to implement AI features in your CRM, consider your organization’s unique needs and situation. 

Which companies use AI in their CRM?

Major CRM providers like Nutshell, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and HubSpot all incorporate AI in their CRMs. As AI becomes more accessible, more CRMs will likely start developing their capabilities to help customers streamline their workflows and save time.

Are there any drawbacks to using AI in your CRM?

While we’ve already seen all the great ways CRMs are using AI, there is definitely potential for some disadvantages to arise from its use:

• Data bias: AI’s predictions and insights are only as helpful as the data they’re based on. Using inaccurate or incomplete data will lead to suboptimal insights.
• Lack of human interaction: While it might be sufficient in some areas of business, like creating reports, relying on AI to sustain relationships with customers likely isn’t a good idea. Carefully consider how using a chatbot for customer support and relying on AI-generated insights about customers might impact the customer experience and use a human touch when necessary.

What should I look for in a CRM with AI integration?

When looking for a system that combines CRM and AI, search for a tool that isn’t just using AI as a buzzword but provides real value through capabilities like:

• Phone call and virtual meeting summaries and transcriptions
• Summaries of contact records and client relationships
• Voice-to-text that streamlines email writing, note-taking, and more
• Intelligence gathering that provides details you can use to strengthen business relationships

How do I get high-quality CRM data? 

The quality of your data can impact all aspects of your business, from sales to marketing and customer service efforts. High-quality data is identified by four key indicators:

• Timeliness: Your customer data should be up-to-date and timely, or else you risk inaccurate or false industry predictions and sales forecasts.
• Accuracy: Error-free data improves the accuracy of sales, customer behavior, and industry forecasting.
• Reliability: High-quality data collected by your CRM should be reliable and trustworthy. Make sure you’re collecting data from sources you know and trust to be reliable.
• Consistency: To ensure quality, you need consistent data that doesn’t contradict other timely data

With a CRM like Nutshell, data collection is headache-free. CRM systems pull data from various sources and organize it all in one central location.

Take AI for a test-drive in your CRM

By using AI-powered CRMs, businesses can stay competitive by leveraging predictive analytics, automation, and customer insights. If your CRM platform offers AI features and tools, it could be worthwhile to try them out. Whether you’re part of a small team or a large organization, utilizing AI in your CRM can provide you with several benefits, from predictive analytics and reporting to better customer insights. 

AI continues to transform the way the world conducts business, and your CRM needs to be able to keep up. With Nutshell, you can take advantage of AI, sales automation, team collaboration, and more to gain better insights into your customers and leads, improve your efficiency, and enhance your customer relationships. Try Nutshell for free to see CRM AI at work!

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