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.

GITHUB LINK IN COMMENTS

It isn’t fully built, I stopped working on it in pursuit of other projects a while back so I decided to release it.

I moved on to other projects and figured someone might find this useful. It’s called OpenCRM, and it includes a CRM, scheduling app, admin dashboard, and basic marketing website.

The architecture is basically:
React + TypeScript + Vite for the CRM and admin dashboard.

Flutter + Riverpod for the scheduling app.

Firebase for authentication, Firestore, storage, and a shared backend of TypeScript Cloud Functions.

Optional Python services for things like forecasting, sentiment analysis, and route optimization.

The apps share the same backend and business data. Most business-specific records live under businesses/{businessId}, with role-based access for owners, admins, staff, clients, etc.

The clients use repository and service layers to organize data access and business logic.

The main backend lives in the scheduling app’s folder, which is a little awkward now that everything is in one repo. These originally lived in separate repositories, and I kept the folder structure when combining them.

There’s a decent amount implemented around leads, contacts, deals, appointments, staff management, reporting, and workflows.

It’s an unfinished project, some integrations are still stubs, and there’s cleanup and Flutter SDK compatibility work left.

The release uses placeholder configuration, so you’ll need your own Firebase project and provider credentials.

I work at a commercial real estate capital markets firm with approximately 50 employees. We’re currently using Salesforce but have been exploring the idea of building a more customized, AI-driven CRM.

I don’t have a coding background, but I’ve been using Claude Artifacts to build a prototype and have gotten pretty far with it.

Originally, I was considering using Claude Code, GitHub, Vercel, and Supabase to turn the prototype into a full web application with its own database, user accounts, and permissions.

But now I’m wondering if I’m overcomplicating things by trying to build an entire CRM from scratch.

Would it make more sense to keep Salesforce, move to HubSpot, or use another established CRM as the underlying database and build the AI functionality separately?

Some of the features we’re looking to implement:

Automatic email tracking: Connect Outlook to automatically track emails and associate conversations with the correct clients, companies, contacts, and transactions.
AI reminders and follow-ups: Identify when someone needs a follow-up, flag inactive relationships, and generate reminders based on emails, calls, and past interactions.
Deal and client matching: Automatically match active financing or equity requirements with relevant lenders, investors, and companies in our database based on their investment criteria, past activity, and preferences.
AI call preparation: Generate pre-call briefs using previous conversations, transaction history, company information, and recent news.
Call transcription and notes: Automatically summarize calls, identify action items, and update the relevant CRM records.
Market intelligence: Track relevant news, acquisitions, financing activity, loan maturities, and other events, then associate that information with companies and opportunities in our CRM.
AI assistant: Let each employee ask questions about their accounts, relationships, deals, and market activity, with ongoing AI conversation histories.

We would also need individual logins, ownership of relationships/accounts, and different levels of access to confidential information.

Ideally, much of this would run automatically in the background rather than requiring employees to manually update everything.

My main questions:

Is it realistic to build these features externally using Claude’s API and connect everything to Salesforce or HubSpot?
Would it be better to keep the CRM as the source of truth and build a separate AI web app, or integrate the AI features directly into the CRM interface?
For those who’ve done something similar, how difficult is it to maintain synchronization between the CRM, Outlook, and an external AI application?
Are there existing CRM tools or integrations that already handle a significant portion of this?
From a cost, security, scalability, and maintenance standpoint, which approach makes the most sense for approximately 50 users?

I’m comfortable learning the technical fundamentals and using Claude Code to help build the application, but I’m trying to avoid creating a massive infrastructure project that becomes difficult to maintain.

Would really appreciate input from people who’ve built custom AI integrations with existing CRMs or gone down the fully custom route.

What would you do differently if you were starting today?

Hi, I’m Alex, CTO and co-founder of Attio.

I’ve been lurking on r/CRM for a while and the same themes keep coming up: data stuck in one tool, reports you can’t really trust, and what you should expect from your CRM now that agents are in the mix. Historically, software has fallen into two camps: applications that trade speed and scale for a great user experience, and infrastructure that is more complex but provides much better speed and scale. CRM has always sat in the first camp, but the demands of agents mean it now has to be both.

Last week, we launched the next generation of Attio: a hybrid platform that brings together the user experience for humans with the scale, reliability, and complexity of data access for agents. It brings full PostgreSQL-compatible SQL support for Attio workspaces, with no extra steps. Agents, apps and BI tools can now query live CRM data directly, without an ETL tool or data warehouse in between.

A few things I believe about where CRM goes from here:

1. CRMs need to evolve into hybrid platforms

As the shift towards Agentic Revenue begins, we’re going to see agents run at scales that would never have been reached by even the largest human revenue organisations. To support this, CRMs need to evolve from applications that provide UX to humans, into hybrid platforms that also provide the technical infrastructure for agents.

2. Agents should be working from live data

Plenty of agents today read from a data warehouse fed by an ETL tool on a daily or weekly sync, so the data they act on can be a week out of date. Every query on our engine runs against the current state of the CRM with no replication delay. It also means that for the first time, BI tools can point straight at Attio without a warehouse in between.

3. CRMs should speak the native language of agents

Frontier models have been trained on a huge amount of SQL. Our system supports all common PostgreSQL query operators as well as commonly used INFORMATION_SCHEMA and pg_catalog utilities that agents and applications can use to dynamically understand the unique layout of an Attio workspace.

All of this data allows agents running on Attio to answer questions that were previously expensive and unreliable with ease.

I’ll be around over the next few days. Ask me how we built it, or what you’d like to see from us. I’m here to learn as much as I am to share my views, so let me know you’d change about CRM if you could!

Hi, I’m Alex, CTO and co-founder of Attio.

I’ve been lurking on r/CRM for a while and the same themes keep coming up: data stuck in one tool, reports you can’t really trust, and what you should expect from your CRM now that agents are in the mix. Historically, software has fallen into two camps: applications that trade speed and scale for a great user experience, and infrastructure that is more complex but provides much better speed and scale. CRM has always sat in the first camp, but the demands of agents mean it now has to be both.

Last week, we launched the next generation of Attio: a hybrid platform that brings together the user experience for humans with the scale, reliability, and complexity of data access for agents. It brings full PostgreSQL-compatible SQL support for Attio workspaces, with no extra steps. Agents, apps and BI tools can now query live CRM data directly, without an ETL tool or data warehouse in between.

A few things I believe about where CRM goes from here:

1. CRMs need to evolve into hybrid platforms

As the shift towards Agentic Revenue begins, we’re going to see agents run at scales that would never have been reached by even the largest human revenue organisations. To support this, CRMs need to evolve from applications that provide UX to humans, into hybrid platforms that also provide the technical infrastructure for agents.

2. Agents should be working from live data

Plenty of agents today read from a data warehouse fed by an ETL tool on a daily or weekly sync, so the data they act on can be a week out of date. Every query on our engine runs against the current state of the CRM with no replication delay. It also means that for the first time, BI tools can point straight at Attio without a warehouse in between.

3. CRMs should speak the native language of agents

Frontier models have been trained on a huge amount of SQL. Our system supports all common PostgreSQL query operators as well as commonly used INFORMATION_SCHEMA and pg_catalog utilities that agents and applications can use to dynamically understand the unique layout of an Attio workspace.

All of this data allows agents running on Attio to answer questions that were previously expensive and unreliable with ease.

I’ll be around over the next few days. Ask me how we built it, or what you’d like to see from us. I’m here to learn as much as I am to share my views, so let me know you’d change about CRM if you could!

[EDIT: The AMA is now finished. Thank you for all the questions!]

we had over five thousand messy contact records last month after imported signups from a recent webinar campaign got mixed directly into our primary mailing list. reps were constantly complaining that half the newly created company profiles were missing key industry details, headcount numbers, and direct phone lines.

we turned on automatic duplicate merging and built-in company enrichment in hubspot so our database would autofill missing fields, so what tactics do other ops managers use to handle messy contact imports when having background data updates clean up our properties saved us dozens of hours of manual spreadsheet scrubbing?

we had over five thousand messy contact records last month after imported signups from a recent webinar campaign got mixed directly into our primary mailing list. reps were constantly complaining that half the newly created company profiles were missing key industry details, headcount numbers, and direct phone lines.

we turned on automatic duplicate merging and built-in company enrichment in hubspot so our database would autofill missing fields, so what tactics do other ops managers use to handle messy contact imports when having background data updates clean up our properties saved us dozens of hours of manual spreadsheet scrubbing?