Agentic CRM for SMB Automation - with Sharif Karmally of Salesforce

**Daniel Faggella** (0:12)
Welcome everyone to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast. Today's guest is Sharif Karmally, VP SMB Product Marketing at Salesforce. Salesforce is a global cloud computing company specializing in customer relationship management software. Sharif joins Daniel Faggella, Emerge CEO and Head of Research on today's episode to explain how CRM has become the central operational map of the business, providing the customer stages and context needed for dependable AI-driven work. He outlines how SMB teams are automating lead handling, keeping customer context accurate, and enabling agents to update records directly, reducing human error and administrative drag while unlocking predictive sales and service insights without heavy IT investment. Today's episode is sponsored by Salesforce. In this episode, we cover AI in customer relationship management. To go deeper on AI topics and learn how leading organizations approach AI investment, more like a venture portfolio, download our free PDF report, Beginning with AI, at emerj.com/aik1.
That's emerj.com/aik and the number one. Now the conversation with Sharif.

**Daniel Faggella** (1:39)
Sharif, welcome to the show.

**Sharif Karmally** (1:40)
Thanks for having me, Dan.

**Daniel Faggella** (1:41)
Absolutely. We're going to be flying into the world of SMB. It was so many years where AI in a business context was really locked in the enterprise land, and now it's totally not. And some of this is going to start the conversation around the CRM in general. So SMBs have an idea of what CRM means, that may be what CRM meant half a decade ago, or maybe even for some of them, a full decade ago. So I'd love to get a sense of when you look at the small business world, the people that are running an e-commerce shop, an auto body chain, whatever it is, what they think of CRM now, kind of what's missing, what do you see out there in the market in terms of perception?

**Sharif Karmally** (2:14)
It's a great question. And you're right, very understandably, the view that a lot of small business owners have. I wouldn't say it's outdated. The way I think about it is they view it as a use case, because that is usually how they approach needing a CRM. And it's actually not a single use case, it's a map of your entire business. And importantly in the world of AI, the business processes, the stages a customer goes through, that context that is so much more than just the data that sits in a warehouse or in a spreadsheet. But the way they classically approach it is, the use case is sales management and managing your leads. You do it in a spreadsheet, eventually that spreadsheet breaks. And then they consider, you know, gosh, I'll wait as long as I can before I have to do what I presume is a $100,000 expense. I presume it'll take me a month to set up or two months. And then I have to hire a person to manage the thing. And actually that is also an outdated view. I talked to so many small media business owners who even though we try to market it as best we can, are surprised to learn we have a starter suite for SMBs. It's $25 per user per month, so it's not $100,000 plus. It has the sales, the marketing, you can connect to that full map of your business together. And importantly, it starts to build that foundation when you want to do other use cases than just managing your leads.

**Daniel Faggella** (3:38)
Yeah, so the whole like you do a spreadsheet, you put it off as long as you can. And those of us who started small businesses are like, I did exactly that. Yeah, so certainly the journey, and yes, much more accessible than it was before. I think the super complexity people might have had in mind was maybe a 15 year old thing. But yeah, much more nimble space now.
In terms of, we're gonna unpack a little bit of where this stuff becomes the anchor for our sort of agentic era. But when it comes to what CRM could do then, let's say then is five, 10 years back, and can do now, to your point, it's a map of the business. Even then, it's not quite one use case. It's like, this is really everybody that's paying ya or has paid ya. This is a map of where your revenue lives and who to stay in touch with. There's so much that lives in a CRM. It is more than one use case. But it used to be bounded to, let's say, one specific universe of use cases. And that universe has started to crack open and turn into a lot more capability just within the tech itself. What are those fundamental shifts we should sort of bear in mind?