· Norm Strassner
Using AI in Your CRM: What's Useful and What's Hype
Every CRM is adding AI features. Here's an honest look at which AI capabilities actually help small businesses and which are marketing noise.
Artificial intelligence is being bolted onto every piece of software in the market right now, CRMs included. Salesforce has Einstein. HubSpot has Breeze. Zoho has Zia. The marketing copy promises transformed productivity and magical insights.
Some of it is genuinely useful. Some of it is feature-stuffing designed to justify price increases. Here's an honest breakdown.
AI Features That Actually Help
Email drafting assistance. Having AI draft a follow-up email based on a recent conversation is a real time-saver. You edit and personalize it -- the AI does the boilerplate. This works well when the AI has access to your conversation history and can draft something contextual rather than generic.
Conversation summarization. Long email threads summarized into a few key points before a meeting is legitimately useful. Not groundbreaking, but practical.
Activity suggestions. When the CRM notices a contact hasn't been touched in 60 days and surfaces it proactively, that's AI doing something a human would forget to do. Low glamour, high value.
Data enrichment. Finding a contact's LinkedIn profile, company size, or job title automatically from an email address saves manual research time. This one delivers consistent value.
AI Features That Are Mostly Hype
Lead scoring. AI lead scoring sounds compelling but requires large volumes of historical conversion data to be accurate. Most small businesses don't have that data, which means the model is guessing. You know your leads better than the algorithm does.
"Predictive" deal insights. "This deal has a 67% probability of closing" sounds impressive and feels scientific. In practice, at small business deal volumes, it's not meaningfully more accurate than a human assessment.
Automated relationship summaries. AI-generated summaries of your relationship with a contact can be useful but require you to verify them. Blindly trusting an AI summary before a call is a good way to look uninformed.
The ContactHoney Approach
ContactHoney takes a different approach to AI: bring your own key. Connect your own Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google AI account and use AI capabilities within the CRM with your own API key. You control the model, the usage, and the cost.
This approach is honest about what AI is: a useful tool you can choose to apply, not a magic layer that transforms your business by itself.
The Bottom Line
AI in a CRM is most valuable when it reduces the manual work of logging, drafting, and surfacing. It's least valuable when it's generating "insights" that can't be verified or predictions that require data you don't have.
Use the features that save you time. Ignore the ones that feel impressive but don't change how you work.