Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore how Google Cloud is shaking up the CRM space by shifting focus from traditional contact center models to a broader, AI-driven approach to customer engagement.
Highlights
00:26 — For 20–25 years, Salesforce has been the unquestioned CRM space leader. There’s an interesting new model from Google Cloud. Now we’re seeing some big changes across all parts of the industry. Recently, ServiceNow has been doing some things in that area. Certainly, SAP is trying to come up with a different approach, calling it CX.
00:58 — Google Cloud’s now looking at CRM in a way of what you could call customer engagement. Google Cloud launched its Customer Engagement Suite, which comes out of its applied AI team. It flipped its old focus, contact centers. It said, though those are important, the bigger thing is the customer and customer engagement.
02:26 — It gives customers lots more innovation from one of the world’s leading innovation companies. From everything from data to AI, security, how apps work together—it’s going to be quite powerful. There will be lots of ways to look at CRM, how to engage, work with customers. This represents a deeper move for the company into the enterprise application space.
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03:34 — So much innovation pushes the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies to think very differently about what CRM is today, where it’s going to be in the future, versus what it has been in the past. Certainly, Salesforce is making a lot of moves. It’s become incredibly ambitious with its Agentforce. We’re seeing ServiceNow push in with the recent acquisition of a CPQ company.
04:31 — Who’s going to come up with the best forward-looking, high-level strategic model for customer relationship, customer engagement? We’ll see this, no doubt, roll forward here, as always, in the Cloud Wars. Whatever happens here with the vendors in this new customer engagement/CRM space, the biggest winners will be the customers.
