While Salesforce continues to dominate the traditional CRM market as it’s done for the past 20 years, newcomer Google Cloud is helping to redraw CRM’s borders with new AI-centric solutions that address new customer opportunities for what is becoming a profoundly different global marketplace.
Lest there be any doubt, Salesforce is the unquestioned Big Dog in the CRM space as shown in the graphic below, which Salesforce has quite appropriately showcased relentlessly over the past several years
Now, you might look at the companies shown in that graphic and the headline at the top of this piece and say, “Not so fast, Evans — if Google Cloud doesn’t even make the cut for the Top 5 CRM players, how in tarnation can it be redefining the market?”
That’s a good question, so let me see if I can give you a good answer.
- For the past century, businesses have put themselves at the center of their operational universe: Those businesses determined what customers could order and how they’d pay and how they’d accept delivery. That was all fairly linear, fairly stable, and fairly easy to manage.
- But today and going forward, top-performing companies have reordered their thinking by putting their customers at the center of everything, and giving those customers the ability to dictate what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and where they want it.
- That shift away from sell-centric convenience to customer-centric wish-fulfillment has forced companies in every industry to think very differently about their customer relationships.
- Part of that redefinition has been an acknowledgement that if that customer relationship is going to be managed — a la the promise of Customer Relationship Management–then the entity doing the managing will surely be the customer rather than the seller.
- Online shopping, digital marketing, digital channels, and omnichannel reality have combined to ensure that the balance of power in the buyer-seller relationship will for evermore be in the hands of the buyers.
- And the onset of the AI Revolution and the rise of agentic AI are giving businesses the unprecedented ability to engage with customers more intimately and immediately in real time, and they are using those technologies to expand and enrich the customer engagement and experience rather than attempting to “manage” the relationship.
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A Bigger, Broader, Richer Market
Salesforce is adapting rapidly and forcefully to these new realities and has become one of the world leaders in agentic AI, and I believe it’ll continue to be successful in this new and dynamic CRM marketplace.
But the future of that marketplace is less about doing what’s been done in the past — with a big focus on selling — better than anyone else, and more about creating the future around the terms expectations set by customers (rather than sellers) with advanced insights and capabilities generated by AI.
In that context, look at how Google Cloud described its AI-powered Customer Engagement Suite six months ago at its introduction:
“Since 2018, when we launched Contact Center AI, Google Cloud has helped thousands of organizations deliver better experiences to millions of their customers and employees through AI-powered features. Now, as new generative AI capabilities are demonstrating increasingly larger value for customer service operations, we are combining the rich features of Contact Center AI with our latest generative AI technology to deliver a new application, Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI.”
Now, six months is an awfully long time in today’s AI Revolution, so I think we can very reasonably expect Google Cloud to release more innovations this week at the Google Cloud Next event in Las Vegas.
Plus, it’s definitely worth noting that Google Cloud’s acceleration into this new delight-the-customer is built around applications, which is a relatively new area for Google Cloud and well outside its traditional spaces of infrastructure, security, data analytics, and databases.
And since enterprise apps these days have become inextricably intertwined with agents, it is extremely likely that Google Cloud will unveil at Next some agentic AI innovations around its Customer Engagement Suite.
Final Thought
Beyond the product and tech innovations coming from Google Cloud, the company’s decision to move beyond aiming for “contact centers” and instead tackling the far bigger and broader segment of “customer engagement” is a clear indicator that end-to-end approaches are becoming not just intellectually interesting but operationally essential.
While Google Cloud is fairly new to enterprise applications, it is a well-established powerhouse in business transformation and in pushing IT from an internally focused cost center to an externally focused source of revenue growth and customer loyalty.
That’s why I believe it’s early moves into the CRM space and the ambitious follow-ups it’s sure to roll out this week will usher in an entirely new understanding of what customer relationships are about here in the AI Revolution — and how advanced technology can help businesses optimize those deeply personal connections.
