The landscape · Sales and marketing
Sales and marketing: what AI is really doing
Brief me in 2 minutes
AI in Sales and marketing.
Vendors say their AI agents already handle customer interactions such as returns, mortgage refinancing and insurance claims, and AI agents draft outbound email and update CRM records under human monitoring. Meta's AI ad suite already carries most of one agency's Meta spend, though brands hold back on its creative tools. The new fight is over who gets to talk to whom: customers have begun sending their own personal agents to book, buy and cancel, and the vendors that serve businesses are racing to write the front door for them. What is still oversold is autonomy: the receipts describe agents that draft, qualify, monitor and update records with a human approving the risky step, and TechCrunch reported in 2025 that one leading vendor, 11x, counted revenue from customers who had left, which 11x partly disputes.
The game: we show you 6 things happening. You call each one real now, early or mostly hype. Then the receipts.
Shift 1 of 6
Customers start sending their own AI agents, and vendors race to build the front door for them
Early
Decagon's gateway and Walmart's gateway are shipping, but the shared protocol is still a draft and no receipt counts agent-completed purchases.
How it works. Personal agents such as Meta's Muse now book, buy, cancel and negotiate on a customer's behalf, and they often have to sign in as the customer and click through pages built for people. Sierra, with Meta, Stripe and Walmart, has published a draft Personal Agent Protocol: a company posts one file at a standard address saying how agents may interact, and the agent identifies itself.
Overstated: The protocol is a draft, Decagon's version is a separate specification, and no source here says how many purchases personal agents actually complete; Amazon, the biggest retailer, is blocking the category.
Shift 2 of 6
Customer support agents move from answering tickets to finishing them
Early
Sierra says its agents already handle billions of interactions and Decagon says its agents now work beyond support, with both raising hundreds of millions in capital; no independent receipt here measures how many tickets they finish.
How it works. Sierra says agents on its platform handle billions of interactions, from refinancing mortgages to processing insurance claims and managing returns. Decagon says its agents, first put to work resolving support tickets, now qualify leads, onboard customers and collect payments.
Overstated: No receipt here gives a resolution rate or a price per resolution: what Sierra and Decagon publish is volumes, customers and funding, so how much of the work is easy FAQ deflection and how much is a genuinely complex claim or refund cannot be told from these sources.
Shift 3 of 6
AI answer engines are eating the click, and AEO/GEO is the discipline built to chase it
Real now
The drop in clicks is measured, in Pew's March 2025 browsing data; the tooling built to respond to it, Profound, Otterly, HubSpot AEO, is brand new and unproven at fixing anything.
How it works. In Pew's March 2025 browsing data, Google users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits that showed an AI summary, against 15% of visits without one, and they ended their browsing session more often after a page with a summary (26% against 16%). Monitoring vendors like Profound and Otterly.ai sell dashboards that track whether and how a brand gets cited in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
Overstated: GEO vendors sell visibility monitoring, not control; no one, including the vendors, can guarantee a model cites a given brand, and Profound raising $180M to build the dashboard says as much about how unresolved the problem still is as it does about demand for the product.
Shift 4 of 6
Meta's AI ad suite is on by default and carries most of one agency's Meta spend; creative is another matter
Early
Advantage+ campaigns carry 60% to 70% of one agency's Meta spend, mostly for audience placement and budget optimization, but the creative tools are where marketers hold back, citing legal risk and weaker results.
How it works. Meta's Advantage+ suite covers creative, targeting and budget optimization, and marketers say they are often opted in by default; Meta says opt-outs are now saved. Hawke Media says Advantage+ campaigns account for 60% to 70% of its Meta spend, mostly for audience placement and budget optimization.
Overstated: The marketers Marketing Brew spoke to say full automation of Meta ad buying is likely much further off, one agency says Meta's creative tools consistently do worse than the third-party systems it uses, and Meta is moving the liability for what its AI makes onto the advertiser.
Shift 5 of 6
AI SDRs promise a fully autonomous rep, the receipts show a human-monitored draft machine
Early
Clay says its enrichment already powers inbound routing and replies for hundreds of companies; the autonomous-rep pitch behind 11x and Artisan has no independent usage numbers, and 11x's were disputed in 2025.
How it works. 11x and Artisan sell AI SDRs that prospect, write and book meetings. Clay supplies the enrichment layer and has previewed its first agentic seller, an Inbound SDR Agent that qualifies leads by voice and demos the product in a sandbox.
Overstated: The pitch is 'AI closes deals'; the receipts show AI nurturing, qualifying, drafting and sending, Clay's seller is still looking for pre-beta partners, and Salesforce's longer-running agents check in for human approval at guardrails the customer defines.
Shift 6 of 6
CRM incumbents and AI-native challengers both want to own the agent that acts on your customer data
Early
The agents are shipped, but the receipts describe monitoring, researching and updating records, not agents left unsupervised at the moment a deal or a customer relationship is actually decided.
How it works. Salesforce used Dreamforce to put its CRM inside the surfaces people already work in, Claude, Slack and its own Agentforce Coworker, all governed by permissions the customer has already set. HubSpot says its Prospecting Agent now handles the full prospecting lifecycle using the CRM history it already holds.
Overstated: Every vendor here describes agents that prospect, research and update records; none of the receipts we found describe an agent unsupervised at the point of an actual customer commitment, and Salesforce's longer-running agents check in for approval at guardrails the customer defines.
The scary part
What happens to jobs in Sales and marketing
What AI is already taking:
- Drafting outbound email campaigns and follow-ups, with human experts monitoring (TechCrunch's description of Monaco) TechCrunch ↗
- Nurturing inbound leads, qualifying them and booking meetings around the clock Salesforce ↗
- Handling customer interactions such as returns, mortgage refinancing and insurance claims processing (as Sierra describes them to TechCrunch) TechCrunch ↗
- Choosing audiences, placements and budgets for Meta ad campaigns (Hawke Media says Advantage+ carries 60% to 70% of its Meta spend) Marketing Brew ↗
What stays human:
Closing an enterprise deal, deciding what an angry or churned customer is actually owed, and standing behind a number when a regulator or a board asks where it came from all still run through a person. Every vendor receipt we found describes an agent that drafts, monitors, updates or resolves, not one left alone at the moment something cannot be undone, and Monaco built its entire product around keeping a human in the actual sales conversation for exactly that reason.
Get better · 15 minutes
The ability to audit an AI vendor's own numbers, resolution rate, reply rate, churn, contracted ARR, against the raw underlying data instead of trusting the dashboard; TechCrunch's 2025 reporting on how 11x counted ARR, which 11x partly disputes, shows why buyers ask.
Try this this week:
Pick one AI tool your team already pays for, a support agent, an AI SDR, an ad platform's auto-creative, pull its self-reported outcome number for last month, then manually recount a sample of 20 tickets, emails or ad variants against the raw records yourself. Budget 15 minutes; if your count and the dashboard disagree by more than a few points, you have found your real number before it reaches a renewal decision.
Your move
The open lane is the front door for customers' agents: telling that a visitor is an agent, checking what its owner authorised, and logging what it did. Sierra and Decagon are each writing a protocol for it and neither is final. The outbound AI-SDR layer is crowded and its numbers are contested: TechCrunch reported in 2025 that 11x counted ARR from departed customers, which 11x partly disputes. The other empty seat is an independent auditor that checks an agent's claimed resolution rate, reply rate or churn against the vendor's raw logs; TechCrunch's 2025 reporting on 11x rested on current and former employees, not on logs.
Watch whether Sierra's Poppy and Decagon's specification converge or split; two drafts from two vendors is a standards fight, not a standard. Also whether Sierra's and Decagon's customers renew at the same volume in year two, the real test for the support category. Red flag in a pitch: a 'contracted ARR' number that counts customers who left on a break clause, the gap TechCrunch reported at 11x in 2025 and 11x partly disputes, or 'agent traffic' figures that do not separate personal agents from scrapers.
Pull your own CRM or support tool's per-agent numbers this quarter, resolution rate, reply rate, meetings booked, and reconcile a sample of 20 by hand against the raw tickets or threads. If the dashboard and the manual count disagree by more than a few points, that gap is your real number. Then decide on purpose how your own site treats a customer's agent: welcome with limits, as Walmart now does, or blocked, as Amazon does.
Learn to interrogate an AI vendor's headline metric instead of accepting the dashboard: ask for ticket-level or contract-level data behind any published resolution or churn rate before signing a renewal. Start with whatever support or CRM tool your own company already has an active contract with.
What's actually changing
- 1
Customers start sending their own AI agents, and vendors race to build the front door for them
How it works. Personal agents such as Meta's Muse now book, buy, cancel and negotiate on a customer's behalf, and they often have to sign in as the customer and click through pages built for people. Sierra, with Meta, Stripe and Walmart, has published a draft Personal Agent Protocol: a company posts one file at a standard address saying how agents may interact, and the agent identifies itself. Decagon shipped a gateway that detects personal agents and gives them a dedicated channel with permissions the business sets, and Walmart opened an agent gateway of its own while Amazon blocks agents from buying.
Why it matters. A company's website, support line and checkout were built for people, so the first businesses to offer agents a sanctioned front door get the orders, and 'is this a person or an agent' becomes a new line in the customer-support and fraud budgets.
What's overstatedThe protocol is a draft, Decagon's version is a separate specification, and no source here says how many purchases personal agents actually complete; Amazon, the biggest retailer, is blocking the category.
MetaSierraDecagonWalmartStripeAmazon
3 receipts
- Decagon says customers are starting to send personal agents like Instinct, Muse and dots to book, buy, cancel and negotiate for them.
Customers are starting to send personal agents like Instinct, Muse, and dots to book, buy, cancel, and negotiate on their behalf.
Decagon, 1 Oct 2026 ↗ - Sierra's draft protocol exists because personal agents often have to sign in as the customer and navigate pages built for people.
Today, when someone asks their personal agent to make a purchase or resolve an issue, it often has to sign in as the customer and navigate pages built for people.
Sierra, 9 Oct 2026 ↗ - Walmart launched an Agent Gateway to manage transactions for customers using AI agents.
Walmart is embracing agentic commerce with the launch of its own Agent Gateway to manage transactions and other new features aimed at customers using AI agents, the retailer announced on Wednesday.
TechCrunch, 21 Oct 2026 ↗
- Decagon says customers are starting to send personal agents like Instinct, Muse and dots to book, buy, cancel and negotiate for them.
- 2
Customer support agents move from answering tickets to finishing them
How it works. Sierra says agents on its platform handle billions of interactions, from refinancing mortgages to processing insurance claims and managing returns. Decagon says its agents, first put to work resolving support tickets, now qualify leads, onboard customers and collect payments. Salesforce answered with Agentforce Contact Center, which puts voice, digital channels, CRM data and agents in one system.
Why it matters. If vendors' agents really finish tickets rather than draft replies, buyers need a way to check what a finished ticket means, and the support budget fight moves to who defines and audits that.
What's overstatedNo receipt here gives a resolution rate or a price per resolution: what Sierra and Decagon publish is volumes, customers and funding, so how much of the work is easy FAQ deflection and how much is a genuinely complex claim or refund cannot be told from these sources.
SierraDecagonSalesforceIntercom
5 receipts
- TechCrunch reports Sierra announced a $950M funding round that pushes its post-money valuation above $15B.
Bret Taylor’s AI startup Sierra is raising a $950 million funding round led by Tiger Global and GV, the company announced Monday, pushing its post-money valuation above $15 billion.
TechCrunch, 4 May 2026 ↗ - Sierra says more than 40% of the Fortune 50 are customers and that agents running on its platform are handling billions of interactions.
Today it claims to have more than 40% of the Fortune 50 as customers, and says the agents running on its platform are handling billions of interactions, from refinancing mortgages to processing insurance claims
TechCrunch, 4 May 2026 ↗ - Decagon raised $250M and says the round tripled its valuation to $4.5B in under six months.
Decagon has raised a fresh $250 million in funding, led by new investors Coatue Management and Index Ventures, tripling our valuation to $4.5 billion in under six months.
Decagon, 27 Jan 2026 ↗ - Decagon says its agents, first put to work resolving support tickets, now qualify leads, onboard customers, collect payments and grow relationships.
Enterprises first put Decagon agents to work resolving support tickets. Those agents now qualify leads, onboard customers, collect payments, and grow relationships.
Decagon, 1 Oct 2026 ↗ - Salesforce built Agentforce Contact Center to unify voice, digital channels, CRM data and AI agents in one system.
the only AI contact center solution that unifies voice, digital channels, CRM data, and AI agents natively in a single system
Salesforce, 10 Mar 2026 ↗
- TechCrunch reports Sierra announced a $950M funding round that pushes its post-money valuation above $15B.
- 3
AI answer engines are eating the click, and AEO/GEO is the discipline built to chase it
How it works. In Pew's March 2025 browsing data, Google users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits that showed an AI summary, against 15% of visits without one, and they ended their browsing session more often after a page with a summary (26% against 16%). Monitoring vendors like Profound and Otterly.ai sell dashboards that track whether and how a brand gets cited in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. The answer box is also becoming an ad slot: OpenAI says more than 100,000 advertisers have now run campaigns on ChatGPT.
Why it matters. Organic clicks fall when an AI summary appears, so marketing teams are shifting attention toward being the source the answer cites.
What's overstatedGEO vendors sell visibility monitoring, not control; no one, including the vendors, can guarantee a model cites a given brand, and Profound raising $180M to build the dashboard says as much about how unresolved the problem still is as it does about demand for the product.
GoogleOpenAIProfoundOtterly.ai
4 receipts
- In Pew's browsing-panel data from March 2025, people clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits with an AI summary and in 15% of visits without one.
Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).
Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025 ↗ - Pew found people ended their browsing session more often after a search page with an AI summary: 26% of pages against 16%.
Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary. This happened on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional search results.
Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025 ↗ - OpenAI says over 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns on ChatGPT and it is expanding ChatGPT Ads into 26 more countries.
It said Wednesday that over 100,000 advertisers have now run campaigns on ChatGPT, and it's expanding ChatGPT Ads into 26 more countries.
Adweek, 22 Oct 2026 ↗ - Profound raised $180M at a $1.8B valuation to build the analytics layer for AI-search visibility.
Profound today announced that it has raised $180 million in funding at a $1.8 billion valuation.
SiliconANGLE, 15 Sept 2026 ↗
- In Pew's browsing-panel data from March 2025, people clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits with an AI summary and in 15% of visits without one.
- 4
Meta's AI ad suite is on by default and carries most of one agency's Meta spend; creative is another matter
How it works. Meta's Advantage+ suite covers creative, targeting and budget optimization, and marketers say they are often opted in by default; Meta says opt-outs are now saved. Hawke Media says Advantage+ campaigns account for 60% to 70% of its Meta spend, mostly for audience placement and budget optimization. On creative, brands hold back: agencies cite legal risk and one says Meta's creative tools do worse than the systems it uses. Adweek reported that under Meta's new terms, then due on 30 October, advertisers are solely responsible for what its AI creates; a day later a Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Meta is extending its updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms to 20 November. Meta's own terms page asked for a login, so we have not read the operative text.
Why it matters. Decisions about audiences, placements and budgets move into the ad platform's own black-box systems (Marketing Brew's phrase), and Meta's new terms, as Adweek reported them, put the liability for what Meta's AI creates on the advertiser; Meta now says its updated terms take effect on 20 November, not 30 October.
What's overstatedThe marketers Marketing Brew spoke to say full automation of Meta ad buying is likely much further off, one agency says Meta's creative tools consistently do worse than the third-party systems it uses, and Meta is moving the liability for what its AI makes onto the advertiser.
MetaTikTok
4 receipts
- Advantage+ campaigns account for 60 to 70 percent of Hawke Media's Meta spending.
Advantage+ campaigns now account for 60% to 70% of the agency's Meta spending
Marketing Brew, 7 Apr 2026 ↗ - One agency, We Scale Startups, says Meta's creative AI tools consistently do worse than the third-party systems it uses.
We do experiment on a regular basis with the pre-existing functionality and just consistently see worse results.
Marketing Brew, 7 Apr 2026 ↗ - Adweek reported that Meta's new terms, then due to take effect on 30 October, make advertisers solely responsible for whatever its AI creates.
Under Meta's new terms coming into play Oct 30, advertisers are "solely responsible" for whatever its AI creates
Adweek, 22 Oct 2026 ↗ - A Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Meta is extending the effective date of its updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms to 20 November.
We are extending the effective date of our updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms to November 20 to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what’s changing and what’s not
Nieman Lab, 23 Oct 2026 ↗
- Advantage+ campaigns account for 60 to 70 percent of Hawke Media's Meta spending.
- 5
AI SDRs promise a fully autonomous rep, the receipts show a human-monitored draft machine
How it works. 11x and Artisan sell AI SDRs that prospect, write and book meetings. Clay supplies the enrichment layer and has previewed its first agentic seller, an Inbound SDR Agent that qualifies leads by voice and demos the product in a sandbox. Salesforce launched Piper, an SDR agent that nurtures inbound prospects, qualifies leads, books meetings and syncs every conversation back into the CRM.
Why it matters. Vendors pitch more outbound volume per rep, but TechCrunch reported in March 2025, citing current and former employees of one leading vendor, that it counted ARR from customers who had left on a break clause, so buyers now have to audit the metrics, not just the demo.
What's overstatedThe pitch is 'AI closes deals'; the receipts show AI nurturing, qualifying, drafting and sending, Clay's seller is still looking for pre-beta partners, and Salesforce's longer-running agents check in for human approval at guardrails the customer defines.
Clay11xArtisanSalesforceMonaco
5 receipts
- Clay previewed its first agentic seller, an Inbound SDR Agent, at its Sculpt conference, and says it already powers inbound enrichment, routing and replies for hundreds of companies.
Finally, we previewed our first agentic seller, an Inbound SDR Agent. Clay already powers the inbound enrichment, routing, and replies for hundreds of companies.
Clay, 8 Oct 2026 ↗ - Salesforce's Dreamforce launch included Piper, an SDR agent that qualifies inbound leads and books meetings.
Piper, an AI sales development agent that works around the clock to nurture your inbound prospects, answering questions over text, voice or video, qualifying leads and booking meetings in real time.
Salesforce, 28 Sept 2026 ↗ - TechCrunch reported in March 2025 that one employee described 11x losing 70-80% of customers that came through the door.
“We were losing 70-80% of customers that came through the door,” one employee said.
TechCrunch, 24 Mar 2025 ↗ - TechCrunch reported that three current and former 11x workers said most early customers used break clauses to stop using the product.
Three current and former 11x workers told TechCrunch that most of its early customers took advantage of “break clauses” in their sales contracts to discontinue using the product.
TechCrunch, 24 Mar 2025 ↗ - 11x says it offers free trials and that some enterprise contracts carry an opt-out after 3 months.
The 11x spokesperson says the startup does offer “free trials” and the “majority of middle market customers” qualify for that, but says that some enterprise customers with “highly specialized” and customized needs “require a 12-month contract with an opt-out after 3 months.”
TechCrunch, 24 Mar 2025 ↗
- Clay previewed its first agentic seller, an Inbound SDR Agent, at its Sculpt conference, and says it already powers inbound enrichment, routing and replies for hundreds of companies.
- 6
CRM incumbents and AI-native challengers both want to own the agent that acts on your customer data
How it works. Salesforce used Dreamforce to put its CRM inside the surfaces people already work in, Claude, Slack and its own Agentforce Coworker, all governed by permissions the customer has already set. HubSpot says its Prospecting Agent now handles the full prospecting lifecycle using the CRM history it already holds. Rox AI sells a layer of agents that plug into the CRM a company already runs and update its records; Monaco sells a new AI-native CRM.
Why it matters. The CRM renewal decision stops being about fields and pipelines and becomes about whose agent gets permission to act on the customer record, which raises switching costs and makes the winner's position much harder to dislodge later.
What's overstatedEvery vendor here describes agents that prospect, research and update records; none of the receipts we found describe an agent unsupervised at the point of an actual customer commitment, and Salesforce's longer-running agents check in for approval at guardrails the customer defines.
SalesforceHubSpotRox AIAttioMonaco
3 receipts
- Salesforce's AIforce puts its data and workflows inside Claude, Slack and Salesforce, governed by permissions customers already defined.
It includes Claudeforce inside Claude, Slackforce inside Slack and Agentforce Coworker inside Salesforce.
Salesforce, 28 Sept 2026 ↗ - HubSpot says its Prospecting Agent now handles the full prospecting lifecycle, drawing on the CRM history it already holds.
Prospecting Agent now handles the full prospecting lifecycle, drawing from your full CRM history and intent signals at each stage.
HubSpot, 14 Apr 2026 ↗ - Rox AI, reportedly valued at $1.2B according to multiple sources, deploys agents that monitor accounts, research prospects and update CRM records.
deploys hundreds of AI agents. These agents monitor existing accounts, research prospects, and update CRM software.
TechCrunch, 12 Mar 2026 ↗
- Salesforce's AIforce puts its data and workflows inside Claude, Slack and Salesforce, governed by permissions customers already defined.
Who's doing it
10 companies to know, 7 with a round we can source. Newest first where dated.
Search these companies in the startup database ↗ · Explore all research tools
Sierraenterprise customer support agents
Enterprise AI customer service agents built by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and ex-Google exec Clay Bavor, deployed by large regulated companies for claims, refunds and account changes.
Latest · 9 Oct 2026Sierra published a draft Personal Agent Protocol, known as Poppy, and named 35 more design partners. Sierra ↗
$950M Funding round (series not stated), 4 May 2026 source ↗
Clayoutbound data enrichment and GTM orchestration
Data enrichment and workflow layer that sales and marketing teams plug over 200 external data sources into, then let AI agents research accounts and draft outreach.
Latest · 8 Oct 2026Clay previewed an Inbound SDR Agent that engages and converts every inbound lead, including the ones reps do not have time to work. Clay ↗
$115M Series D, 9 Sept 2026 source ↗
Decagoncustomer support / concierge agents
AI 'concierge' agents for consumer-facing companies handling support conversations across chat, voice and email.
Latest · 1 Oct 2026Decagon shipped Personal Agent Gateway, which identifies customers' personal agents and gives them a dedicated channel with permissions the business sets. Decagon ↗
$250M Series D, 27 Jan 2026 source ↗
ArtisanAI SDR / outbound agents
Sells 'Ava,' an AI BDR meant to run the entire outbound motion, prospecting, writing, replying and booking, with a large built-in contact database.
Latest · 22 Sept 2026A September 2026 platform comparison confirmed Ava's prospecting database has grown past 300 million contacts. Breakout ↗
ProfoundAEO/GEO brand visibility analytics
Tracks and helps improve how a brand is cited inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers, the analytics layer for AEO/GEO.
Latest · 15 Sept 2026Profound raised $180M at a $1.8B valuation, jointly led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. SiliconANGLE ↗
$180M Series D, 15 Sept 2026 source ↗
Otterly.aiAEO/GEO monitoring
AI-search monitoring tool that tracks brand mentions and citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
Latest · 4 Aug 2026Otterly.ai's own 2026 research found 15% of website traffic already comes from AI agents and bots, with ChatGPT driving over half of that. Otterly.ai ↗
Rox AIAI account management / CRM agents
Deploys agents that monitor accounts, research prospects and update CRM records for enterprise sales teams, plugging into the CRM and other tools a company already runs.
Latest · 12 Mar 2026Rox is reportedly valued at $1.2B, according to multiple sources, as it deploys agents that research prospects and update CRM software. TechCrunch ↗
MonacoAI-native CRM plus prospecting database
AI-native CRM and prospecting database from ex-Founders Fund partner Sam Blond, deliberately built so agents draft outreach but a human still runs the sales conversation.
Latest · 11 Feb 2026Monaco came out of stealth with an AI-native CRM and a built-from-scratch prospecting database. TechCrunch ↗
$35M Seed + Series A, 11 Feb 2026 source ↗
AttioAI-native CRM
AI-native CRM built around a shared context layer, with agents that research accounts, answer questions and run multi-step workflows inside the CRM itself.
Latest · Aug 2025Attio raised a $52M Series B led by GV to build out its AI-native CRM. Attio ↗
$52M Series B, Aug 2025 source ↗
11xAI SDR / outbound agents
Sells 'Alice,' an AI SDR meant to prospect, message and book meetings across channels, the company that came to define both the AI-SDR pitch and its credibility problem.
Latest · 24 Mar 2025TechCrunch reported in March 2025 that one employee described 70-80% churn at 11x. TechCrunch ↗
$50M Series B, 30 Sept 2024 source ↗
Your move
Our read, built on the receipts above.
The open lane is the front door for customers' agents: telling that a visitor is an agent, checking what its owner authorised, and logging what it did. Sierra and Decagon are each writing a protocol for it and neither is final. The outbound AI-SDR layer is crowded and its numbers are contested: TechCrunch reported in 2025 that 11x counted ARR from departed customers, which 11x partly disputes. The other empty seat is an independent auditor that checks an agent's claimed resolution rate, reply rate or churn against the vendor's raw logs; TechCrunch's 2025 reporting on 11x rested on current and former employees, not on logs.
Watch whether Sierra's Poppy and Decagon's specification converge or split; two drafts from two vendors is a standards fight, not a standard. Also whether Sierra's and Decagon's customers renew at the same volume in year two, the real test for the support category. Red flag in a pitch: a 'contracted ARR' number that counts customers who left on a break clause, the gap TechCrunch reported at 11x in 2025 and 11x partly disputes, or 'agent traffic' figures that do not separate personal agents from scrapers.
Pull your own CRM or support tool's per-agent numbers this quarter, resolution rate, reply rate, meetings booked, and reconcile a sample of 20 by hand against the raw tickets or threads. If the dashboard and the manual count disagree by more than a few points, that gap is your real number. Then decide on purpose how your own site treats a customer's agent: welcome with limits, as Walmart now does, or blocked, as Amazon does.
Learn to interrogate an AI vendor's headline metric instead of accepting the dashboard: ask for ticket-level or contract-level data behind any published resolution or churn rate before signing a renewal. Start with whatever support or CRM tool your own company already has an active contract with.
What's next
- 20 Nov 2026 Meta's updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms are due to take effect, moved from 30 October, a Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab on 23 October; Meta's own terms page asked for a login, so the operative text is unread niemanlab.org ↗
- Nov 2026 Salesforce lists agents on its new long-horizon runtime for general availability in November 2026 salesforce.com ↗
Other industries
- FinanceBanks move agentic AI from chatbots to running back-office and dealmaking work
- Software engineeringSpaceX owns Cursor and starts rewiring it: one Grok bundle, and OpenAI's models on the way out
- HealthcareAmbient scribes go from pilot project to clinical infrastructure
- LegalLegal AI vendors go from research assistant to agent that produces the deliverable
- Real estateLeasing AI graduates from answering the phone to acting inside the property system
- Jobs, HR and recruitingAI runs the first-round interview, not just the resume filter
- InsuranceClaims move from adjuster-first to AI-first, humans supervise the exceptions
- CybersecurityAttackers hand whole intrusion campaigns to AI agents, at about $50 a breach
- Consulting and accountingAI-written client reports become a recurring, public Big Four embarrassment
- Retail and e-commerceAgent checkout retreats to a cart, and the banks guard the last tap
- EducationNYC and LA ban AI for students, not for teachers
- Media and creativeAI video's money goes to the app that resells the models, not the lab that trains them
- Manufacturing and roboticsHumanoid robots move from demo livestreams to paid warehouse shifts
- Transport and robotaxisRobotaxis go from demo to metered fare, and Waymo starts borrowing to scale
- Energy and data-centre powerGrid rules get rewritten mid-buildout, state by state
- GovernmentGSA turns AI adoption into a government-wide subscription, then swaps 'free' for metered contracts
- Agriculture and foodDriverless tractors learn to run the tools behind them, through open platforms and retrofit kits