Total garbage, and I say that as someone who's watched local business owners throw money at these "AI-first" CRMs. The demo looks slick-C-suite loves a 10-minute video they half-watch-but the reality? A pile of verbose markdown files and spaghetti Excel formulas that break the second you type a client's name with an umlaut.
I've got clients who ditched their old enterprise tools for this stuff. "We'll save so much!" Yeah, until the guy who watched it being built in his terminal quits, and you're left with 20 conflicting .md files that say opposite things in consecutive sentences. No one knows what's wrong, where, or how to fix it. The old SaaS tool? One phone call, 24 hours max, sorted. Need to scale from 10 to 100x volume? Congrats, you need a whole new architecture. Oh, you wanted a database? My bad, should've asked. Lead de-duping? Sure, let's add that-and watch your pipeline shrink by 70% overnight. Then the "why is revenue down?" emails start flying.
Favourite part? "Let's get EMEA on this by Friday." Can it handle other languages? GDPR? PII? Nobody thought about that because the people building it have zero CRM domain experience. AI is a tool for data processing and prototyping-not for architecting your entire sales operation. Hand it to someone who's never managed a real pipeline and you're begging for a face punch.
I'd rather take that punch than deal with another one of these house-of-cards systems. And trust me, we're all going to.
