Will AI make your CRM more effective?

CRM systems have the potential to help your sales and marketing team improve and drive more revenue. But to date, they haven't done that for most teams.

By ,
Head of Content & Media
February 18, 2026 • 2 minutes read

Table of Contents

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    Your best performers in sales will almost always succeed. The poor performers will always struggle. But there’s a middle ground that contains more than half of the sellers in any given organization, and today’s CRM applications aren’t helping them improve.

    That’s the opinion of David Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. But Roberts has hope. 

    AI has the potential to be a tool that can help improve sales performance, but only if AI is seen as a means to an end, not the end itself. 

    Episode guide

    0:40: Meet David Roberts
    1:57: What’s the state of the CRM market right now?
    3:32: Is the focus on AI across the industry becoming a distraction for vendors?
    6:03: AI is more than the popular LLMs
    7:56: “AI needs more than just data”
    10:20: The difference between the dot-com era and the AI era
    13:36: What will be the hot topics of the year ahead?

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    Mike Pastore
    Head of Content & Media

    Mike Pastore is the Head of Content & Media at Third Door Media, the publisher of the Martech and Search Engine Land websites and the producer of the SMX and MarTech Conferences. In nearly three decades in B2B marketing, Mike has worked as an editor, writer, and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers at some of the best-known brands in B2B tech, creating content for marketing campaigns at both Jupitermedia and QuinStreet. Prior to joining Third Door Media as the Editorial Director of the MarTech website, he led demand generation at B2B media company TechnologyAdvice.

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