Published on the 13/03/2026 | Written by Heather Wright
Beyond the hype…
Australian and New Zealand organisations are taking a measured approach to adopting AI-enabled CRM, despite growing global momentum and increasingly aggressive vendor rollouts.
Olive Huang, Gartner VP analyst, says with AI products and functionalities in CRM still very new, the majority of local businesses are in the early stage of experimentation and limited pilots.
“Large CRM vendors have sold a lot more AI capabilities than organisations are able to use.”
She estimates only 100 to 150 organisations across Australia and New Zealand have moved beyond pilots, with just 10 to 20 expanding into production use with more than five CRM agents.
She told iStart the region’s slower uptake reflects practical constraints and a market still grappling with legacy systems, rising costs and immature AI tooling.
While AI dominates global discourse around CRM transformation, it accounts for only a minority of issues raised in Huang’s day-to-day client conversations. “In reality, maybe 30 percent of client enquiries have something to do with AI, but the rest, not at all.”
Her comments follow recent research highlighting a challenging path to adoption, with organisations globally struggling to balance business goals, technical readiness and fast-moving AI innovation. Gartner’s 2026 Strategic Roadmap for CRM warns that AI is reshaping customer engagement, workforce structures and CRM processes, but also introducing new operational, data and sovereignty requirements.
Huang says many local organisations are preoccupied with long-standing CRM issues, rather than AI experimentation – issues like merging multiple CRM technologies after M&A activity, how to move off a 15 year old system, whether a CRM is even needed, what to do in the face of rising CRM costs, and how to get sales and service people to adopt systems they hate. European clients, meanwhile, are facing an additional challenge, searching for non-American systems. Then there’s the issue of having vendors pushing AI on them and uncertainty about the value of the offering.
The Strategic Roadmap reflects the same tension, noting that business leaders are struggling ‘to stay focused on on their business goals and customer experience as AI dominates the top trends impacting CRM and strategy discussions’.
It also warns that leaders underestimate the organisational changes AI could bring.
Capability questions
Vendors have been evolving their AI and agentic capabilities at breakneck speed, further complicating the situation.
Huang points to Salesforce’s Agentforce as an example of rapid iteration that complicates implementation planning.
“They announced Agentforce five quarters ago at 2024 Dreamforce, and they have had three releases. If you started using it from the first quarter, what you’re looking at today – the whole development environment would have changed twice.”
Gartner’s Predicts 2026: Will AI in CRM Finally Prove its Worth? Report similarly notes that current agentic capabilities are often ‘significantly oversold’ with many promoted features ‘not enterprise-ready for several years’.
“Large CRM vendors have sold a lot more AI capabilities than organisations are able to use,” Huang says.
The Strategic Roadmap adds that the pace of change in LLMs means ‘assessment and baselines become quickly out of date’ creating further planning challenges.
Huang says current economic conditions across Australia and New Zealand mean AI investment is not the immediate priority vendors might expect.
“They all come with quite a hefty price tag,” she notes. “And the cost is going up to the roof for everything,” she says. “Just to control how you run your business sensibly is a very big deal for every business.”
There are also concerns that the speed of AI innovation may render long-term plans obsolete.
For regulated sectors, technical constraints around data handling limit the applicability of agentic AI. Huang notes some CRM-embedded agentic capabilities require customer data to be passed to external models in unmasked form, something that is incompatible with many regulatory settings.
“Lots and lots of regulated industries absolutely can’t use it because it violates privacy and security in so many fronts.”
Optimistic outlook
Despite current constraints, adoption is steadily increasing. Huang cites Saleforce’s latest financial figures, from last month, showing the company recorded US$800 million in Agentforce bookings globally, with 29,000 deals signed and an estimated 2,500 in production. (The company has 150,000 plus customers globally.)
Across Australia and New Zealand, the company has claimed 125 customers live on Agentforce, including big names like Australia Post, One NZ, Xero, Fisher & Paykel and student accommodation operator Scape.
The vast majority – 75 to 80 percent by Huang’s reckoning – of use cases currently are customer service.
“I’m expecting the number to go up quite quickly in the next 12 months just because Salesforce has sold a lot more than they have delivered. That US$800m AR means a lot of companies have picked up some sort of Agentforce in their subscription to use in the next year.”
Huang says the selling by other CRM vendors as well, of AI capabilities beyond what most companies are currently able to use will also result in a ramp up in adoption this year.
Meanwhile Gartner’s Predicts 2026 report forecasts that by 2030, changing customer preferences will become the number one driver for CRM investment, as more interactions shift to AI-powered channels.
Where to from here?
Huang is urging local organisations to look beyond the initial success from pilots and emphasis vendors’ abilities to support scalable operations, including appropriate tooling to design, build, test, secure and continuously iterate AI agents.
IT teams in A/NZ should also use the next 12 months to focus on transforming internal technology skills required for managing AI-powered CRM systems, she says. “No matter how small your budget is, scrape the bottom of the pan and get a few dollars out to train your admins and developers in the latest stack so that you will be prepared, otherwise the IT department becomes the first obstacle for the whole company.”
And her final piece of advice for local businesses? “Keep pace with customer preferences of using AI through inputs from regular customer research, voice of customer programs and industry thought leaders.”
Voice AI is one area she believes will see big moves before long. While it’s currently dubious at best for the most part – who hasn’t been told ‘sorry I don’t understand you’ – she believes new iterations will see consumer hatred of the systems dissolve.
“In the next 12-24 months people will have a very positive surprise that those technologies get better and as a result the voice channel, which has traditionally been a channel companies want to shrink because it’s very expensive… why would you shrink it when people still use it well.”
