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Received — 28 October 2026 ⏭ CRM - Customer Relationship Managment

Sales team being forced to beta test AI-driven CRM? Thoughts?

I have a LOT of other issues going on at my work right now but this is the one that is driving me the (most) insane. Our IT Director, who lacks a computer science degree, just replaced our old CRM right before our big holiday season. We work in family entertainment and sell event packages. He cited budget constraints/the old CRM that we loved was "too expensive". (It was not Sales Force). He decided to build his own CRM using Claude that he boasted about creating in "two days." He then set up a “BETA CRM” channel in Microsoft Teams and asked us to post our own individual threads about any issues we come across while also trying to do our usual work which is already demanding, as his exact words the last time I saw him in person were “I haven’t even used it myself yet.” Nothing works. Obviously because it is in beta. He also told me to stop complaining when I said it is now taking us over an hour to build a quote we would normally have done in 5 minutes because our time is spent beta-testing and waiting for him (or Claude) to fix the issue. I do not know much about AI at all but I do not believe it has much of a place in sales or at the very least in this niche. We are a very small company with 3 sales reps (they hired a 4th today for some reason and I found out by accident that their base salary is higher than mine, even though they have no experience in events or sales, while the rest of us do. They just graduated from the same community college and are same age as our very young boss so it raises some eyebrows. My now former coworker who was the top dog for over a decade here just quit because of him and cited potential security concerns as well. I get that companies switch booking systems. I get that they even do it at peak season which is not preferable obviously but this is different.

TLDR - Boss rolled out a CRM using AI in less than a week, wiped our old one while the 3 of us were at lunch (yes this was actually the way it went), gave us no training, and asked us to beta test it for him while we still try to go about business as usual. Obviously no extra compensation for being his guinea pigs.

submitted by /u/kokomi818
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