Keeping Momentum When Scale Gets Hard
What CRM taught us, what AI now enforces, and why products must stand the examination
Every few decades, organisations reach the same point.
Not because markets fail or technology moves too fast, but because complexity outgrows human capacity. Interactions multiply. Decision paths fragment. What once lived in people’s heads can no longer scale.
When that happens, technology doesn’t arrive as innovation.
It arrives as necessity.
CRM was one such moment.
AI is another.
The mistake we keep making is not overestimating technology, but underestimating the human and product discipline required to use it well.
From CRM to AI: The Same Problem at a Higher Resolution
When CRM systems emerged in the late 1990s, they weren’t introduced because organisations were confused about selling. They appeared because complexity had outgrown human bandwidth.
Markets scaled.
Customer interactions multiplied.
Decision-makers diversified.
Institutional memory became fragile.
CRM was infrastructure — a way to hold relationships, insight, and coordination together at scale. It was never meant to replace judgement or thinking. It was meant to support them.
And it worked — where people were able to work with it properly.
The issue wasn’t misunderstanding CRM’s purpose. It was assuming the system would carry behaviours that only people could supply: interpretation, discipline, curiosity, and relational maturity.
CRM could structure reality.
It could not think inside it.
That distinction matters, because we are now repeating the same moment — at far higher resolution — with AI.
AI, like CRM before it, is being deployed to manage a widening gap between required complexity and available human capacity. It promises speed, coherence, and scale. And it will deliver those — but only if humans understand what they are asking it to scale.
The Uncomfortable Truth AI Makes Impossible to Avoid
Here is the part we tend to talk around:
Products must be able to stand the examination.
For years, many products benefited from limited scrutiny. Information was asymmetric. Messaging could move faster than understanding. Relationships could compensate for weakness.
CRM reduced that shelter by making interactions visible.
AI removes it almost entirely.
AI doesn’t invent scrutiny.
It enforces it.
Claims are checked instantly. Comparisons are automatic. Context is unavoidable. Narrative no longer outruns substance.
AI doesn’t punish weak products.
It simply stops protecting them.
Where Marketing Needs to Tighten Its Discipline
This is not a failure of marketing. It’s a moment of recalibration.
Marketing has been under pressure to humanise, personalise, and build emotional connection — and much of that work has been valuable. But not every product requires the same psychological relationship.
Some products exist to:
reduce effort
provide comfort
offer reliability
quietly do their job
Others genuinely require trust, explanation, or deeper engagement.
The discipline now required is fit, not volume or intimacy.
Traditional products don’t need to become something new. They need to be honest about what they already are. When positioning matches reality, scrutiny strengthens trust rather than eroding it.
AI makes this clarity unavoidable — but also easier to maintain once achieved.
What This Means in Practice
AI will not simplify organisations.
It will demand clarity from them.
Before AI can help, leaders must answer questions no system can decide:
What role does this product actually play in people’s lives?
What level of psychological closeness is appropriate?
Where should we explain more — and where should we step back?
What must remain human judgement, even at scale?
Without those answers, AI doesn’t fail.
It succeeds — at accelerating the wrong things.
This is exactly what CRM showed us earlier. The system scaled visibility, but behaviour had to evolve alongside it. AI will do the same, faster and with less tolerance for ambiguity.
The Quiet Conclusion
Technology doesn’t raise the bar artificially.
It removes the padding around it.
CRM did that.
AI will do it more thoroughly.
The future won’t belong to the loudest brands or the cleverest storytellers. It will belong to products that can sit under sustained scrutiny and remain coherent — and to organisations disciplined enough to let marketing and sales support that coherence rather than perform over it.
That isn’t an AI problem.
It’s a leadership opportunity.
A Direction of Travel:
The point where product and presentation become indistinguishable is, in practice, an unreachable ideal. Organisations are human systems, full of competing ambitions and necessary compromises. But as a direction of travel, it matters. Because the closer those two things move toward each other, the less energy is lost to friction, explanation, and defence — and the more momentum survives the journey to scale.