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today read from a data warehouse fed by an ETL tool on a daily or weekly sync, so the data they act on can be a week out of date.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!]