The Future of CRM is Autonomous (and it's Already Here)

Clarify x The Signal

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Hey y’all! 👋

There are certain product categories that will obviously be 10x better with AI natively built into them.

CRM is one of those categories.

It's a product that everyone knows should exist in the world. But, there are different approaches that companies are taking to build the winner of this new category.

So, why do I think Clarify has a shot to be a winner in the CRM space?

Their team, their product strategy, and their go-to-market.

They’re answering a simple question: what if your CRM actually worked for you instead of you working for it?

In their words, it’s an “autonomous CRM.”

• AI-native: Describes the underlying architecture—it’s built from the ground up with AI at the core.

• Autonomous: How Clarify wants the CRM to feel—intelligent, proactive, and self-moving.

I’m excited to dig into this topic and share this deep dive on Clarify with you today.

Here’s what we cover in today’s post:

• Why Clarify Stands Out

• An “Autonomous CRM”

• Why This Transformation is Inevitable

• End of Manual Work

• Ambient Intelligence

• The Clarify Way

• Looking Forward

Let's get into it.

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The Future of CRM is Autonomous (and it's Already Here)

Why Clarify Stands Out

The Team

The team is world-class. I've known Patrick for several years now. I first met him when he was building Iteratively, which was acquired by Amplitude. He has deep expertise in the data space—obviously crucial for building a CRM. His co-founder at Iteratively was Ondrej, who is another co-founder at Clarify. And I’ve gotten to know their third co-founder, Austin, more recently. He’s also incredibly impressive. He has run Growth and Operations for some of the fastest-growing companies, led Marketing Technology for Ramp, and has an insane background with advising and consulting.

Their GTM Strategy

Clarify is executing the HubSpot playbook: targeting small companies first—attracting early adopters who will grow alongside them—and avoiding the enterprise functionality requirements that HubSpot, Salesforce (or even Attio) demand today.

On top of this, they’re prioritizing an open developer experience (which is critical in the modern era of software).

Building AI-Native

The best definition I've encountered of “AI-native” is this:

“As models improve, the customer's experience improves.”

Clarify believes the future doesn't belong to those who simply add AI to existing processes. It belongs to those who reimagine the purpose of software from first principles. I believe this wholeheartedly. You can’t just slap AI onto a product as an afterthought. But, they’re taking it to the next level…

An “Autonomous CRM”

When I signed up for Clarify, I started to put in some companies and contacts (like I would any other CRM I’ve set up in the past).

Then, Chris from their team pinged me - “Hey, the first thing you’ll want to do is connect your email and calendar. Clarify will build itself after that.”

“Build itself” sounded cool. So, I connected to Google, made a coffee, and came back 15 minutes later.

Whoa. I had a living, breathing CRM with enriched information about every company and contact (using the power of AI) in my instance. There was no “AI” in my face. It just happened, in the background. Honestly, my mind was kind of blown by this experience.

What's truly underrated about AI: it enables us to spend more time with other humans. The promise isn't constant AI interaction—it's AI working invisibly in the background on our behalf. We don't have to prompt it. We don't have to tell it to update our pipeline for the Friday morning forecast meeting. It knows to do that. All of this stuff eventually is going to be completely abstracted away from us. And I'm looking forward to see how Clarify continues to push the boundaries on this front.

Why This Transformation is Inevitable

Fundamentally, CRMs of yesterday do not support go-to-market motions of today.

So, again, when I think about the CRM of the future, it is very obviously going to be built with AI at its core. And to do that, you have to redesign the data architecture from the ground up. Talking about “data architecture” is not that sexy. But, it’s necessary given it’s foundational to making this new vision a reality.

I felt this pain first-hand, when I was building Groundswell, which was a SaaS company helping companies operationalize product-led sales. Because of Salesforce’s limiting data architecture (rigid data structure), it’s incredibly hard to integrate real-time product data - which is crucial for modern, agile sales operations. It was brutal to get product usage data out of the data warehouse and into the downstream systems where go-to-market teams live (like marketing automation, sales engagement, and, of course, the CRM).

The future of CRM will look very different.

Clarify put out a Manifesto in September of last year, and in it, they state that they’re building this next-gen CRM around three key tenets:

1. Your CRM should be modern, fast, collaborative and a joy to use.

2. Your CRM should be flexible, event-driven and customizable to your workflows and data model to grow with your business.

3. Your CRM should be intelligent and take work off your plate to help you learn and execute better and faster.

The entire Manifesto is worth reading.

End of Manual Work

Clarify is building the way work should be done. Not CRM. Not AI. Work.

I can't really imagine how insane it would have been had I come across an “autonomous CRM” when I was personally selling as an AE back in 2013. I vividly remember so many days where I would be on back-to-back sales calls all day, only to get done at 8 o'clock at night, scrounge for some leftovers in the fridge of the (other) startup we rented desks from, crack open a beer and go through the scribbles on my notepad from my meetings that day. Inputting data into the CRM, sending follow-up emails, multi-threading, finding people who were on calls to add into Salesforce, and building out proposals. All while making sure that my pipeline was squeaky clean for our Friday morning pipe review.

But the real danger? Some nights I was too exhausted to update the CRM or send crucial follow-up emails. I'm certain revenue slipped through the cracks due to this laziness.

Austin talks about the “CRM paradox” which states: if your CRM requires humans to update it, it will always be out of date. And yet, every GTM function relies on this imperfect data. Forecasting. Territory planning. Attribution. Even AI tools built on top of the CRM are only as good as the junk data they’re fed.

In a world where an AI-first CRM exists, all of these tasks are done for you, by agents, autonomously. This is insane.

Clarify starts with a unique premise: the CRM should be built around behavioral truth — what’s actually happening, not what someone claims happened. Every call, meeting, email, deal created, field updated — these are events that can be captured, structured, and layered into a dynamic timeline.

Ambient Intelligence

There's a concept that I've thought about a lot where software is proactive instead of reactive.

I believe this fundamental shift from software being reactive to proactive is finally happening in enterprise software. But we’re still early.

Today's AI (like ChatGPT) function as an Assistant—you ask specific questions and get answers. But the future AI should act as an Executive, proactively identifying strategic opportunities and threats.

For an Assistant, you ask them to do a task. Things like: Will you go get me coffee? Will you take notes in this meeting? Will you book my flight?

On the other hand, an Executive is proactively telling you of opportunities (or threats) in your business. Things like: Hey, one of our competitors just had an outage, let's run a campaign against them today. I found this feature in a deal last week, I think we can go find other companies like them and get a bunch of revenue from this opportunity in the next quarter or two.

Instead of asking for pipeline updates, I could imagine an AI alerting you with something like this: "Based on the trendlines from the last six months, pipeline is down 22% MTD, which means, based on your average sales cycle of 65 days, you'll miss your revenue target in two quarters. Here are the three solutions to implement today to fix this."

Other tangible examples where the CRM might proactively alert you: flag deals that are stalling or missing key personas, suggest next-best actions based on recent activity, highlight exec involvement as a signal to prioritize, auto-generate deal summaries or follow-ups.

Clarify’s team calls their AI “ambient intelligence.” The idea is that their intelligence works quietly in the background—prepping for meetings, updating deals, creating tasks—without getting in your way. I think we’ll see more and more companies building AI products and features in this direction. Where the AI “just works” (autonomously) and the tech (AI) doesn’t matter.

This is the level of intelligence that I'm hopeful that AI gets to and that I'm excited for Clarify to build towards: where technology knows what you need before you ask.

Instead of being a system of record that takes from reps, Clarify becomes a system of intelligence that gives them leverage.

The Clarify Way

Clarify’s vision is to offload all the cognitive overhead from your brain into the CRM itself.

Instead of the usual CRM tabs and tiles, Clarify centers everything around a timeline. It looks more like a social feed than a database.

This timeline shows a stream of events across a company, account, or opportunity — sorted chronologically, augmented with AI-generated insights, and structured so you can slice it any way you want.

You might see:

• A new contact looped into an email thread

• An SDR re-engaging a previously closed-lost deal

• A contract redlined in Google Docs

• A VP joining a pricing call

• AI summarizing the latest call and extracting key objections

All without anyone manually logging a thing.

It’s a living record of every touchpoint, happening in real time — one that doesn't rely on someone remembering to update a field after the fact.

And Clarify just launched “AI tasks.” Now when you come out of a call their AI will autonomously create and assign you tasks with a due date, description, priority level, etc. Reps live and die by their task list, and now their CRM will ensure they don't miss a thing while they are doing their end-of-day scramble to get organized. If I squint, I can see a path where many of those tasks are even executed by agents (with the rep’s approval). Which, again… blows my mind that we’re living in this new reality. What a time.

Here’s what it looks like in (autonomous) action:

Looking Forward

The future of sales isn't about more AI interaction—it's about AI working invisibly to free us for more human connection and strategic thinking. That's the world I'm excited to exist.

And ultimately, it’s about creating technology that reminds us what it means to be human.

I recommend signing up for Clarify and playing around with it. Again, with a couple of clicks, it will fill out a CRM for you. It’s worth signing up, just to see that (AI-enabled) magic moment. Let them know The Signal sent you.

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Thank you for your continued attention and trust—I do not take it for granted.

See you next time,
Brendan 🫡