For the better part of the last year, investors have been debating a simple but unsettling question: could artificial intelligence make traditional CRM platforms obsolete? With generative AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic capable of automating sales outreach, research, and marketing content, it’s easy to imagine a future where many of the tasks once handled by CRM software are performed directly by AI agents. That fear has weighed on companies like HubSpot, whose shares have fallen sharply from prior highs as the market reassesses the long-term role of SaaS platforms in an AI-first world.
But there’s an interesting paradox emerging. While AI could reduce the importance of CRM tools within individual organizations, it may simultaneously increase the total number of organizations that need them. AI is dramatically lowering the barriers to starting and running a business. Solo founders, small startups, and niche digital brands are emerging faster than ever, and many still need systems to manage leads, customers, and marketing campaigns. In other words, AI might shrink CRM usage per company while expanding the universe of companies that rely on it.
Below are four dynamics shaping what could become one of the most interesting contradictions in the modern software economy.
AI Is Lowering The Barrier To Starting A Business
Artificial intelligence is quietly rewriting the economics of entrepreneurship. Tasks that once required multiple employees—writing marketing copy, building outreach lists, managing customer support, or designing campaigns—can increasingly be handled by AI tools. This shift is allowing individuals and small teams to launch businesses with far fewer resources than in previous decades.
Platforms like ChatGPT and Claude can now assist with market research, product positioning, email outreach, and customer engagement. As a result, entrepreneurs are launching niche SaaS tools, micro-commerce brands, and specialized service businesses at a pace that would have been difficult to imagine even five years ago. The practical implication is that the number of companies entering the market may rise significantly over time.
This is where the paradox begins to emerge. Even if each of these companies runs with fewer employees and leaner operations, they still need infrastructure to manage their customers and marketing activities. A small startup with two founders still needs to track leads, coordinate campaigns, and maintain customer relationships. In many cases, a unified platform can be easier than stitching together multiple tools.
HubSpot’s own customer growth reflects this dynamic. The company ended 2025 with more than 288,000 customers globally and added over 40,000 during the year alone. These numbers suggest that despite ongoing debates about AI disruption, the pool of organizations adopting customer management platforms continues to expand.
AI Is Replacing Manual Sales Work—But Often Inside The CRM
Another development complicating the disruption narrative. Artificial intelligence is indeed automating many tasks that once required dedicated sales or marketing teams. Prospect research, personalized outreach, support responses, and campaign optimization can now be handled by AI agents that operate continuously in the background.
However, in many cases these capabilities are being embedded directly within existing platforms rather than replacing them outright. HubSpot, for instance, has introduced a suite of AI agents designed to automate common workflows across sales, marketing, and customer support. These include tools that research potential customers, generate outreach messages, and handle support tickets across multiple channels.
Early adoption data illustrates how quickly these capabilities are being integrated into everyday operations. HubSpot reports that more than 10,000 customers have activated its prospecting agent, which helps sales teams identify and engage potential clients. Another AI tool designed for customer service has been activated by more than 8,000 organizations and is already resolving a significant share of support inquiries automatically.
This evolution suggests that CRM platforms may not disappear but rather become the operational layer where AI performs its work. Instead of sales representatives manually entering notes and managing pipelines, AI agents may increasingly handle these tasks while relying on CRM systems to store context, track interactions, and coordinate workflows.
Even AI-Native Companies Still Need A Customer Platform
Perhaps the most surprising data point from HubSpot’s recent commentary is that AI-native companies themselves are adopting the platform to run their own go-to-market operations. Businesses that are building AI products—arguably the most capable of developing internal tools—are still choosing to rely on established CRM infrastructure.
The reasoning is relatively straightforward. While modern AI systems make it easier to build software, constructing a fully integrated customer management system from scratch remains a complex undertaking. A CRM platform does more than store contacts. It handles permissions, workflows, reporting, forecasting, and coordination across marketing, sales, and support teams.
HubSpot’s leadership has emphasized that many organizations prefer to focus their engineering resources on their core products rather than rebuilding operational infrastructure. Even companies that rely heavily on AI coding tools often choose to integrate with established platforms rather than reinvent systems like CRM or ERP internally.
This dynamic highlights a broader distinction between coding capabilities and domain expertise. Artificial intelligence can accelerate software development, but building a system that effectively manages customer relationships across thousands of interactions still requires specialized design and data architecture. For many organizations, adopting an existing platform remains the more efficient path.
The Future CRM May Be Powered By AI Agents
Artificial intelligence is also introducing new economic models for CRM platforms. Historically, these businesses generated revenue primarily through subscription seats or software licenses. As AI agents take on more operational tasks, usage-based models may become a larger part of the revenue mix.
HubSpot has begun experimenting with this shift through a credit-based system that allows customers to scale the use of AI agents across different workflows. As organizations rely more heavily on automation—for example to handle support conversations or generate sales outreach—these credits represent a new mechanism for monetizing the work performed by AI.
In practice, some customers are already treating AI agents as operational replacements for manual labor. Companies testing automated support agents have reported rapid adoption once the systems demonstrate clear value. In certain cases, usage can scale quickly as businesses allocate additional budget to automated workflows that replace traditional processes.
If this trend continues, CRM platforms could gradually evolve from simple software subscriptions into operational infrastructure for automated business processes. Instead of merely tracking customer relationships, these systems may increasingly execute the work associated with managing them.
Final Thoughts
The debate surrounding the future of CRM platforms often frames artificial intelligence as an existential threat. In reality, the picture may be more complicated. AI is undoubtedly transforming sales and marketing workflows, reducing the need for manual processes and changing how companies interact with customers. Yet the same technology is also lowering the barriers to starting and scaling businesses, potentially expanding the number of organizations that need systems to manage customer relationships.
For HubSpot, the financial profile reflects both this opportunity and the market’s uncertainty. Over the past year, valuation multiples have compressed sharply as software stocks broadly repriced in response to AI disruption fears and higher interest rates. The company currently trades around roughly 4.2x LTM enterprise value to revenue and about 20x LTM levered free cash flow, far below levels seen in previous years when multiples reached double-digit revenue valuations.
Forward estimates suggest improving profitability, with projected EBITDA and free cash flow growth supporting more moderate valuation metrics compared with the peak SaaS era. Whether those multiples expand again will likely depend on how convincingly HubSpot demonstrates that its platform remains central to the evolving AI-driven sales and marketing landscape.
The coming years may ultimately reveal that AI did not eliminate CRM platforms but changed their role. Instead of being software used by sales teams, they could become the operating layer where AI agents manage the entire customer lifecycle. If that happens, the real story may not be the disappearance of CRM—but its transformation.
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