From CRM to AI: Why Exception Replaced Salesforce with Something Smarter

Over the past five weeks, we’ve taken a bold step: we replaced Salesforce, one of the world’s most established CRM platforms, with our own AI-powered application and agent.

This wasn’t just a cost-cutting exercise (although we’ve certainly made significant savings). It was about taking control of our data, accelerating how we work, and building something that is fully ours.

Here’s why we did it, how we did it, and what we’ve learned.

The Problem with One-Size-Fits-All.

Salesforce is powerful. But like many enterprise platforms, it comes with trade-offs. Licensing costs are high and tend to scale quickly as your business grows. We found that valuable insights were often locked within siloed data structures, and the system itself lacked the flexibility we needed to adapt quickly. Instead of enabling us to innovate, it began to feel like we were bending our processes around someone else’s idea of how we should work.

Building Our Own AI Application and Agent.

So, we made the decision to build our own solution. In just five weeks, we developed and deployed a custom CRM system designed entirely around the way we work. This included a conversational AI agent that supports our team in real time, helping to streamline activity, reduce manual handovers, and embed automation in the right places.

Crucially, this approach has put us back in full control of our data. It’s our platform, built to our needs, and owned by us, ensuring that every improvement we make becomes part of our own intellectual property.

What really sets the solution apart is the intelligence of the AI agent. It doesn’t just respond to queries; it proactively supports our teams by suggesting next steps tailored to each opportunity, based on live data and context. It helps progress deals through the pipeline by analysing behaviours, highlighting bottlenecks, and scoring opportunities using a readiness framework. This insight means our team can focus on the right activities at the right time, with clarity on where to act and how to move forward.

The Benefits We’ve Seen.

The benefits have been immediate and significant. We’ve removed the cost burden of Salesforce licensing entirely, and we’ve gained a level of speed and agility that simply wasn’t possible with our previous setup. Having full ownership of our platform and data gives us greater confidence and control, and by creating our own solution, we’ve also created long-term value in the form of proprietary technology.

Our teams are working more efficiently, and more intelligently. With the AI agent acting as a digital colleague, they’re guided through tasks, alerted to risks, and prompted with context-aware actions that keep the pipeline moving.

Why This Matters.

This transformation is about more than just software, it reflects a broader shift in how we see enterprise technology. Generative AI is opening the door to leaner, more responsive solutions that can be built quickly and tailored precisely to an organisation’s needs. We’ve demonstrated that it’s not only possible to replace a heavyweight platform like Salesforce, it’s possible to replace it with something better suited, more cost effective, and far more empowering.

We no longer accept rigid systems as a given. If something doesn’t work the way we need it to, we now have the tools and mindset to change it.

What’s Next?

This is only the beginning. With our new platform in place, we’re exploring further use cases, from AI-assisted customer onboarding to realtime performance tracking. The architecture is flexible, and the possibilities are wide open.

We believe this approach, practical, tailored, AI-first, and owned by the business, is the future. If you’re wondering whether you could do something similar, or you’re just curious about how to take control of your systems and data, we’d love to talk.