AI CRM: Benefits, Use Cases and Top 10 CRM with AI for 2025
The business application of AI has come a long way, from basic data analysis to AI-powered app development, intelligent chatbots, rich content generation, and more. This rapid technological advancement is bound to transform business operations, including customer relationship management.
According to Nucleus, the organizations leveraging AI are already seeing an increase in productivity, close rates, and average deal size. One way to ensure that your business is ahead of the competition on AI adoption is to implement an AI-powered CRM.
In this article, we will go through the benefits of AI-driven CRM, explain what key features to look for when choosing one, and recommend ten AI CRM systems for SMB and Enterprises.
What is AI CRM?
AI CRM is a customer relationship management software that incorporates Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to analyze customer data and trends, make predictions, recommend the next best actions, and automate routine CRM tasks.
AI in CRM serves as a powerful assistant that utilizes available customer data to improve customer engagement, conversion, retention, and value.
Top Use Cases for CRM with AI
Here are some examples of CRM tasks that can be addressed with AI:
Audience segmentation
By employing techniques like lookalike modeling, AI identifies common traits of top customers, helping companies target potential buyers who share similar attributes and are more likely to engage with their offerings.
Customer journey mapping
AI excels at mapping and analyzing customer journeys to define touchpoints and identify opportunities to improve customer experiences. By leveraging this insight, businesses can create seamless and impactful interactions across all stages of the customer lifecycle.
Marketing campaign design
AI automates the design of marketing campaigns by autonomously designing marketing campaign workflows based on previous successful campaigns, audience analysis, marketing playbooks, and market trends.
An AI assistant offers predefined events that will trigger automated interactions with a potential lead. This ensures timely and relevant communication, enhancing engagement and improving overall campaign effectiveness.
Dynamic content generation
Generative AI enables companies to create highly personalized marketing content tailored to individual customer preferences. By analyzing data like demographics and purchase history, AI generates customized emails, ads, and product recommendations catered to an individual customer.
Lead scoring
AI-powered lead scoring analyzes various datasets, including lead interactions and engagement patterns, to prioritize prospects with the highest conversion potential. This allows sales reps to focus on high-quality leads, increasing the likelihood of successful deals.
Sales forecasting
AI enhances sales forecasting by analyzing vast data sources such as market trends, customer behavior, and economic indicators to predict future sales with high accuracy. Unlike traditional methods, AI models adapt to new data in real time, revealing hidden patterns and providing actionable insights.
Presales research
AI supports presales efforts by conducting in-depth research of publicly available information and designing data-driven pitches. Based on this research, an AI sales assistant provides the most compelling selling points for your sales teams to deliver highly relevant and persuasive presentations.
Next Best Action
AI-powered CRM systems analyze successful past deals to suggest optimal actions for encouraging purchases. These tailored recommendations help sales teams close deals more efficiently.
Upselling and cross-selling
AI solutions analyze variables such as purchase history, browsing behavior, and similar shopping carts to offer personalized upsell and cross-sell recommendations to existing customers automatically.
Customer service chatbots
AI chatbots efficiently handle large volumes of customer inquiries by providing instant, accurate responses to routine questions. They can also perform tasks like order tracking and appointment scheduling, ensuring round-the-clock customer support and freeing up service teams for complex issues.
Case routing
AI optimizes customer service by prioritizing cases and routing them to the most suitable agents. This ensures timely and effective resolution, improving customer satisfaction.
Knowledge base assistance
AI enhances self-service capabilities by recommending relevant knowledge base articles to customers and agents. Additionally, it helps create new articles based on resolved cases, continuously improving the resource library.
Sentiment analysis
AI tools assess the emotional tone of customer interactions so that businesses can tailor empathetic responses, fostering stronger relationships and boosting customer retention.
Smart Insights
AI delivers real-time alerts about data trends, such as peak conversion times, enabling businesses to adapt their strategies for optimal performance. This ensures data-driven decision-making that maximizes results.
AI-assisted CRM development
AI facilitates CRM customization and improvement by aiding in the creation of new automated workflows and business apps. When paired with no-code tools, it streamlines CRM customization, making it fast and effortless while reducing reliance on professional software developers.
It accelerates development cycles and ensures the CRM aligns with evolving business needs.
Top 7 Benefits of AI CRM Software
Improved productivity
The ability to process and analyze customer data in real-time and recommend the next actions to agents greatly increases the productivity of your employees. Let's take one of the most straightforward examples of increased productivity due to CRM with AI — lead scoring.
Without AI, sales teams would be looking at every individual lead and evaluating their readiness to buy, which would take hours every day.
AI-powered CRM software allows you to use ML models trained on the previous sales data to calculate the likelihood of purchase for each lead, flag them for your sales representatives, and even create and send personalized emails to the prospect at each stage of the funnel with AI-powered automation.
In addition to that, CRM with AI can recommend sales materials, schedule a meeting, or compile a proposal deck for a sales representative. A sales process that would take hours and days can now take seconds.
Consistent customer engagement
For global companies, being connected to their customers 24/7 has always been a challenge due to different time zones of operations. AI effectively eliminates the necessity for employees to work unconventional hours or for businesses to establish separate customer service and sales departments in each region. By leveraging AI-powered chatbots equipped with NLP, businesses can promptly address customer inquiries in real time.
This real-time responsiveness ensures that customers no longer need to wait for specific working hours to receive assistance, eliminating negative feelings of neglect. As a result, businesses avoid the risk of losing leads or neglecting critical customer inquiries.
More effective marketing campaigns
AI-driven segmentation and advanced data analysis capabilities, along with Generative AI features of modern AI-driven CRMs, empower organizations to tailor marketing campaigns with unprecedented precision.
Businesses can delve deep into customer data, gaining invaluable insights into individual preferences, behaviors, and purchasing patterns. This understanding enables the creation of hyper-targeted marketing campaigns, resonating more effectively with specific customer segments.
Increased customer satisfaction and retention
Tailored experiences foster customer satisfaction, encouraging repeat business and enhancing retention rates.
In addition to that, by utilizing predictive analytics, businesses can identify at-risk consumers, allowing proactive, personalized intervention to address their concerns. AI-based CRM can flag customers who need more attention and propose content and products that will solve their issues.
As a result, personalized approaches not only mitigate churn but also cultivate lasting relationships, driving sustained business growth and success.
Increased revenue per customer
The implementation of AI-driven personalized content and recommendations yields tangible benefits such as enhanced conversion rates and increased revenue per customer.
By tailoring offerings to individual preferences and needs, businesses can effectively boost sales and maximize the value derived from each customer interaction.
Data-driven decision making
As organizations continue to leverage AI in CRM over time, accumulating rich historical data, the depth and precision of its insights and predictions amplify significantly.
By harnessing this wealth of information, businesses gain a strategic edge, enabling them to make informed decisions swiftly and confidently. Whether identifying emerging trends, predicting customer behavior, or optimizing operational processes, AI CRM systems empower organizations to navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape with clarity and precision.
Cost savings and efficient resource allocation
AI CRM enables dynamic resource allocation by continuously analyzing real-time data. This allows businesses to adapt their strategies in response to changing market dynamics or customer preferences. For example, if a particular customer segment shows increased engagement with a new product feature, resources can be redirected to capitalize on this opportunity, leading to improved ROI.
Additionally, AI-driven CRM helps optimize resource allocation by identifying inefficiencies or areas of overspending. By analyzing customer interactions, sales data, and marketing campaigns, businesses can pinpoint areas where resources are underutilized or allocated ineffectively, allowing for cost-saving measures to be implemented.
How to Choose AI CRM Software?
Most modern enterprise-level CRM systems offer AI capabilities, but it can be hard to know what to prioritize in CRM with AI without extensive research into the topic. This section is meant to give you guidelines on what key features to look for in AI CRM software.
For more information on this topic, check out our comprehensive guide on how to choose a CRM system.
Here are some features to pay attention to when choosing an AI-driven CRM.
- Functionality scope: An enterprise CRM will provide an array of out-of-the-box AI functionality, including prebuilt data analysis models, the next best action recommendations, Generative AI, chatbots for customer service, and sentiment analysis. However, some of these features might be absent in more affordable solutions catering to small and mid-sized businesses. Ensure you understand the primary use cases your organization values and find the appropriate functionality scope.
- AI assistant: This tool enables users to interact with the AI using natural language, similar to conversing with ChatGPT. For instance, a sales manager could simply request the AI assistant to compile a quarterly report that emphasizes the best sales practices and receive valuable insights.
- AI and ML customization: The ability to build your own ML models to analyze data gives you great flexibility and empowers you to gain more insights from AI-powered CRM. Yet, many organizations lack employees with the technical expertise or coding proficiency required for model creation. Therefore, the integration of no-code tools becomes particularly valuable in CRM solutions. CRM platforms empowered by no-code tools allow you to use simple drag-and-drop functionality to train ML models for various business needs.
No-code functionality can be further strengthened by AI-assisted development. When you're building custom business apps, AI can recommend appropriate components or generate data fields and blocks based on a user's description. AI-assisted development enhances customization and empowers users to tailor their CRM systems to meet their specific business needs with ease.
- Integration of closed AI models: Pay special attention to connecting closed models. AI CRM software typically works with open-source or commercial but always publicly available models, such as Meta’s Llama 2. However, in case you want to connect a custom model trained on your own data set or provided by a partner, make sure the AI-powered CRM of your choice supports that.
- Scalability: It's crucial to consider the scalability of your CRM and its capacity to accommodate your business's growth trajectory.
- Powerful governance tools: One of the biggest concerns around AI-driven software is security. Prioritize strong and easy-to-use governance features that enable you to oversee the permissions, no-code development processes, and deployment of custom AI tools. A comprehensive overview of your operations and complete control over them allows you to safeguard your CRM with AI against errors and security threats.
Based on these criteria, we've curated a selection of ten AI CRM solutions tailored to various needs and business sizes.
10 Best AI CRM Tools
1. Creatio
Creatio is the best choice of a CRM with AI for companies prioritizing customization and scalability due to its unique no-code composable architecture. It's an end-to-end AI-powered CRM solution that enables you to automate workflows and CRM with a maximum degree of freedom.
Creatio CRM with AI consists of three products for marketing, sales, and customer service that are built on top of Studio Creatio. Featuring an intuitive no-code UI builder, drag-and-drop business process builder, and various built-in tools for workflow automation, Creatio enables users to create applications for diverse industry workflows.
AI in CRM Creatio combines three key AI patterns:
- predictive AI for data analysis, intelligent scoring and predictions, customer segmentation, case routing, and more;
- generative AI, which generates new marketing content, sales emails, knowledge base articles, etc.
- and agentic AI that can make autonomous decisions and interact with users as an assistant.
Creatio is an AI-native CRM which means that its AI capabilities are built into the platform's architecture. For users, it means that you can utilize AI across all Creatio products and CRM functionality.
Creatio's AI Command Centre offers tools to manage, track, and create AI Skills, i.e., AI-powered autonomous workflows. The platform provides a multitude of pre-built AI skills for sales, marketing, and customer service, but you can also create your own AI skills using no-code tools and conversational language.
Creatio's turn-key capabilities are equally impressive, providing powerful tools for CRM and workflow automation in 20 industries. Its Marketplace boasts over 700 integrations, including an integration with ChatGPT that enables AI content generation inside the platform.
Sales professionals can leverage Creatio AI for intelligent customer scoring, interaction summaries, and real-time coaching tips. Marketers can design optimal campaign flows and target responsive audiences. Customer service agents can automate case analysis and deliver personalized responses and provide 24/7 support with AI bots.
Creatio AI is available to all Creatio users regardless of their subscription plan, which makes CRM with AI accessible to any organization, no matter their budget and size.
Stand-out features:
- An end-to-end platform for marketing, sales, service, and workflow automation.
- No-code tools to enable free customization and business app development with no professional skills required
- Creatio AI that combines predictive, generative, and agentic AI and no-code
- AI sales automation, including lead scoring, sales forecasting, and next-best-action recommendations
- AI chatbots for customer service
- AI content generation for marketing, sales, and service
- Comprehensive AI governance tools
- Transparent pricing with no additional costs for AI features
Limitations:
- Requires some training to fully utilize its capabilities
Customer rating:
- G2: 4.7
- Capterra: 4.7
- Gartner: 4.9
Pricing:
Creatio offers a composable pricing model, allowing users to tailor their purchases to suit their needs. The core platform's pricing starts at $25. Its CRM products – Sales, Marketing, and Service – are individually priced at $15 per user monthly.
2. Hubspot CRM
HubSpot is renowned for its customizable hubs, emphasizing marketing, sales, services, operations, and content management. These hubs can be combined into a unified offering tailored to specific business needs.
In addition to standard CRM features like tracking customer interactions, contact information, next steps, and progress through your sales pipeline, HubSpot CRM incorporates tools to automate repetitive business processes and enhance team productivity. These AI capabilities enable team members to draft content, such as outreach emails, and analyze CRM data in real time. For customer support agents, Hubspot provides an AI-powered chatbot to retrieve support resources on the fly.
HubSpot is well-suited for small and low-complexity businesses with straightforward CRM requirements.
Stand-out features:
- Breeze Copilot – Hubspot's AI assistant that provides data-based insights on request
- Agentic AI for workflow automation
- Generative AI for content generation
- ChatSpot, HubSpot’s AI-powered chatbot, for real-time customer insights
Limitations:
- Pricing catered to Enterprise businesses
- AI features cost an additional $50 a month
Customer rating:
- G2: 4.6
- Capterra: 4.7
- Gartner: 4.9
Pricing:
Hubspot offers a free version of the platform with limited AI capabilities. AI agents and AI-powered content generation are available as a part of premium plans priced at $1300 per month minimum.
3. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM, a fully integrated suite to manage customer relationships. It encompasses sales, marketing, and customer service applications, complemented by project collaboration, business intelligence (BI), and analytics functionalities.
Zia, an AI CRM software tool integrated into Zoho CRM, enhances team productivity alongside standard CRM functions such as contact, deal, and lead management. This virtual assistant streamlines workload management by helping collect customer data, drafting emails and documents, and analyzing sales numbers.
It's akin to having a personal assistant for every team member. Its capabilities extend to providing real-time support, making product recommendations based on customer behavior, and embedding chatbots on e-commerce websites to address customer queries.
Zoho CRM best suits small and midsize B2B and B2C organizations with moderate process management needs.
Stand-out features:
- Zia's AI-driven pattern recognition for automation suggestions
- AI-powered research to provide customer details such as titles and contact information
- AI-driven cross-selling and personalized product recommendations
Limitations:
- Limited integrations compared to other vendors
- AI features are only available in higher-priced plans
Customer rating:
- G2: 4.1
- Capterra: 4.3
- Gartner: 4.4
Pricing:
Zoho AI CRM software offers four plans: Standard at $20, Professional at $35, Enterprise at $50, and Ultimate at $65 per user monthly. AI predicting and analytics are exclusively available in the Enterprise and Ultimate plans.
4. Freshworks
Freshworks' CRM suite, comprising Freshmarketer, Freshsales, Freshdesk, and Freshchat, offers a unified and modern customer experience. The suite encompasses tools for IT, marketing, customer service, and sales, providing a comprehensive solution for businesses.
The notable features are the rule-based process guidance and next-best actions that enhance user experience. Additionally, Freddy, an AI bot, facilitates customer engagement by offering support and directing leads from web pages to the sales team.
However, the suite supports only a small set of prepackaged AI scenarios and offers simple reporting and dashboarding.
Freshworks is ideal for teams with straightforward requirements seeking an easy-to-deploy and user-friendly solution.
Stand-out features:
- Freddy AI Self-Service offers AI bots for customer support
- Freddy AI Copilot automates tasks via requests in conversational language, requiring no coding
- Freddy AI Insights provides real-time analysis and visualization of customer data
Limitations:
- Limited integrations compared to other vendors
- AI features are charged on top of the subscription fee
Customer rating:
- G2: 4.5
- Capterra: 4.5
- Gartner: 4.3
Pricing:
Freshworks CRM offers three plans: Growth at $35 per user per month, Pro at $83 per user per month, and Enterprise at $131 per user per month. Freddy AI is charged an additional $100 for 1000 sessions.
5. Zendesk
Zendesk specializes in CRM software designed for service businesses and sales teams, understanding the intricacies of selling services. Their suite of tools facilitates seamless customer connections and enables your team to engage with more customers effectively.
Powered by Zendesk AI built on OpenAI’s GPT model, these tools streamline workflows and automate repetitive tasks, allowing your reps to focus on more meaningful interactions. Additionally, this CRM provides valuable suggestions to resolve customer issues during interactions.
You can enhance AI functionality further by integrating with ChatGPT.
Zendesk best suits midsize and larger companies with substantial interaction volumes that prioritize customer service automation.
Stand-out features:
- Advanced AI bots for customer service that can solve complex requests and generate personalized responses
- AI-driven performance insights to optimize your operations
- ChatGPT integration through Zapier
Limitations:
- Separate systems for managing tickets and workflows make the UX cumbersome
- Restrictions on the number of steps in chatbots
Customer rating:
- G2: 4.3
- Capterra: 4.4
- Gartner: 4.2
Pricing:
Zendesk CRM prices range from $25 to $149 per user/month. AI agents are available in the Suite Team plan priced at $69 per user/month and more expensive plans. You can purchase an add-on with advanced AI features for $50 per user/month.
6. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a cloud-based CRM platform designed to simplify sales processes, manage deals efficiently, and automate routine tasks. With its visual sales pipeline and AI-driven features, Pipedrive empowers sales teams to focus on closing deals and achieving goals by optimizing workflows and providing actionable insights.
Businesses can tailor Pipedrive by adding custom fields, automating calculations, and adapting pipelines to align with unique sales processes, ensuring the platform fits their needs perfectly.
Stand-out features:
- AI Sales Assistant identifies patterns and recommends high-potential deals and next actions
- AI email generator for sales emails
- AI insights and summarizations for deals, customers, and emails
Limitations:
- Steep learning curve for new users
- Limited AI features for customer service in comparison with other vendors
Customer rating:
- G2: 4.3
- Capterra: 4.5
- Gartner: 4.2
Pricing:
AI features are available in select plans, with pricing ranging from $69 to $129 per user/month.
7. Nutshell
Nutshell CRM offers AI-powered tools designed to enhance sales processes and provide deeper insights into customer and lead relationships. The AI capabilities are limited to the Nutshell Business plan and focus on simplifying workflows, improving team efficiency, and uncovering actionable insights to drive sales success.
Stand-out features:
- AI Timeline Summarization summarizes customer interaction histories for actionable insights
- AI Zoom Transcription Summarization creates instant summaries of Zoom meeting transcripts
- AI Voice-to-Text Notetaker transcribes voice input for notes, emails, and activity logging
- AI Contact analysis and summarization with Nutshell Intelligence
Limitations:
- No in-depth AI automation
Customer rating:
- G2: 4.3
- Capterra: 4.3
- Gartner: 4.1
Pricing:
Nutshell CRM's pricing varies from $13 to $79 per user/month, with more AI features becoming available at $59.
8. ClickUp
ClickUp is a versatile all-in-one productivity platform designed to streamline CRM processes, automate tasks, and track progress with ease. Sales and marketing teams can visualize pipelines using over 15 custom views and access real-time data through interactive dashboards.
When paired with ClickUp Brain, a role-based AI tool tailored to team needs, ClickUp becomes a powerful assistant for generating content, fostering customer relationships, and improving workflow efficiency.
Stand-out features:
- Role-based AI assistance for sales, marketing, and service
- Hundreds of prebuilt AI prompts for CRM automation
- AI sales tools to build territory plans, craft prospecting emails, and create elevator pitches
- AI Workflow tools for summarizing customer interactions and identifying action items
- Generative AI to help service agents write or edit customer responses
Limitations:
- Limited mobile functionality
Customer rating:
- G2: 4.3
- Capterra: 4.7
- Gartner: 4.2
Pricing:
Starts at $10 per user/month with a $7 charge for AI features.
9. Salesforce
Salesforce is a powerful AI-driven CRM platform designed to automate sales processes and enhance productivity.
It integrates robust AI capabilities through its virtual assistant, Einstein, to provide sales teams with predictive insights, automate tasks, and streamline workflows. From lead generation to sales forecasting, Salesforce Sales Cloud helps businesses maximize efficiency and optimize their sales funnel.
Stand-out features:
- Agentforce, a customizable AI agent for customer support
- Generative AI for personalized emails and sales call transcription
- Conversation insights to identify customer objections and offer next-step suggestions
- AI Research Assistant provides detailed information about prospects and qualified leads
- AI predictions prioritize deals and forecast sales outcomes
Limitations:
- Steep learning curve
- Additional charges for AI features
- Cumbersome customization
Customer rating:
- G2: 4.4
- Capterra: 4.4
- Gartner: 4.5
Pricing:
Pricing starts at $25 per user/month with additional charges for AI tools ($75).
See also: Salesforce Alternatives & Competitors and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Alternatives & Competitors
10. Scratchpad
Scratchpad is an AI-driven Salesforce add-on designed to simplify pipeline management for frontline sales reps while enhancing data visibility and accuracy for sales and operations leaders.
Though not a standalone CRM, Scratchpad integrates seamlessly with existing workflows to optimize sales processes and improve data management. It helps identify pipeline gaps, monitor real-time changes, and ensure data is consistently accurate and up-to-date.
Stand-out features:
- AI Sales Assistant for summaries and CRM data updates
- Zero Boards – personalized to-do lists for sales reps and managers to stay on top of leads and pipeline opportunities
- AI-powered sales coaching features
Limitations:
- Only suitable for Salesforce customers
Customer rating:
- G2: 4.8
- Capterra: 4.9
Pricing:
AI features are available in Standard ($24 per user/month) and Business ($49 per user/month) plans.
2025 Trends in AI CRM
AI is a rapidly developing technology with untapped potential for enhancing customer relationships. In the upcoming year, these three AI in CRM topics will be in the spotlight.
Adaptive AI: the next level of personalization
Adaptive AI streamlines CRM by dynamically adjusting to individual workflows, preferences, and communication styles. Acting as an active collaborator, it tailors insights, automates tasks, and evolves with user habits.
In customer service, AI agents handle routine queries and adjust tone based on customer mood, ensuring empathetic interactions. In sales, adaptive AI qualifies leads, drafts proposals, and identifies priorities, allowing teams to focus on relationship-building.
By offering personalized, intuitive experiences, adaptive AI transforms business interactions with technology.
Reevaluating AI ROI: a focus on value
As investments in AI continue to rise, businesses are beginning to critically assess their return on investment. While AI adoption has accelerated, a mere 20% of companies reported significant earnings benefits in 2024.
In response, firms are shifting from experimental pilots to results-driven implementations. Additionally, incidents like the CrowdStrike outage of 2024 emphasize the need for secure and resilient AI systems.
Organizations will face increased pressure to justify their expenditures while ensuring robust operations. This recalibration will prioritize actionable results and sustainable growth.
AI-powered RevOps: streamlining Revenue Operations
Generative, predictive, and agentic AI will be key tools for Revenue Operations teams to optimize processes. Beyond improving workflows, AI identifies opportunities for better collaboration across teams. For example, it might suggest marketing provides sales with content for high-value prospects or recommend sharing customer insights to refine messaging.
AI also tracks cross-team interactions and analyzes customer-facing communication to ensure alignment in goals and activities, fostering a unified approach to revenue generation.
Enhance Your Productivity with AI CRM Software
AI-driven CRM software integrates Artificial Intelligence and machine learning for customer relationship management. They streamline tasks, enhance interactions, and offer benefits like productivity improvement, personalized engagement, and data-driven decision-making.
The perfect CRM with AI offers powerful prepackaged tools as well as the ability to build custom models for data analysis and automation. Try CRM Creatio to experience this balance for yourself and see how AI-powered CRM can transform your business.