# Salesforce and HubSpot are taking CRM updates out of the CRM screen

By MarketScale Newsroom · Published 2026-09-24 · Marketing Tech on MarketScale
Canonical: https://www.marketscale.com/industries/marketing-tech/salesforce-and-hubspot-are-taking-crm-updates-out-of-the-crm-screen

> Salesforce, HubSpot, Zeotap and Zendesk are pushing CRM data into AI agents and collaboration tools. The customer record now has more editors.

## Key points

- CRM data is being integrated into AI and collaboration tools by companies like Salesforce and HubSpot.
- This change allows more users to edit and access customer records beyond the traditional CRM screen.
- Across Salesforce, HubSpot and Zeotap, different approaches aim to make customer records more usable: governed CRM actions in tools like Slack and Claude, self-updating records to reduce manual entry, and a lakehouse-native CDP that keeps data in the customer’s environment.

"You may never log in to Salesforce again." Parker Harris, Salesforce's co-founder, said that at Dreamforce 2026 about the product he helped build.

For a RevOps director or CRM owner, that means more places touch the record, and some of the editors are software. Two questions follow. How complete is the data an agent works from? And can anyone trace what the agent changed?

## Salesforce's plan for CRM without the login

AIforce is Salesforce's umbrella name for agentic experiences that carry Salesforce context, permissions, workflows and actions into outside tools, including Slack, Microsoft Teams and Anthropic's Claude. ClaudeForce sits at the center: employees working in Claude Enterprise can pull Salesforce customer data and take authorized actions without switching apps.

Salesforce presented this as a bigger role for itself, not a smaller one. The pitch is that Salesforce becomes the governed system underneath every AI interaction, with records, metadata, business rules and identity controls following the employee or agent wherever they work. Picture a service rep who checks an entitlement, updates a record and triggers a follow-up from one window. For that rep, CRM stops being a chore.

According to CX Today, the tradeoff is a heavier governance burden. Leaders need clear answers on which customer data an agent has access to, what it is allowed to modify, and how each modification is recorded.

## HubSpot goes after the empty fields

HubSpot's Fall 2026 Spotlight came at the same problem from the other side: records go stale because people don't update them. Its new self-updating Smart CRM captures and syncs calls, emails and meetings automatically, so sales, marketing and service teams and AI agents all get a current view of the customer without manual entry. A new Context Home gives teams one place to see and manage the business context behind the platform. Inside it, a Context Score shows where customer and business data is incomplete.

The logic holds up. If a record is missing the latest conversation, an agent can answer quickly and still get it wrong. Duncan Lennox, HubSpot's chief product and technology officer, said customers want results and don't want to choose between AI tools.

Getting the customer context right is the harder job.

## Zeotap keeps the data where it already sits

Zeotap's Open CDP takes on a different question: should a customer data platform vendor hold the customer's data at all? Open CDP is a composable platform that runs on open-source compute and the customer's own lakehouse. Here's how the work is split:

- Apache Spark handles identity resolution, audience computation and activation
- Data stays in Apache Iceberg tables on the customer's own object storage
- Built-in support for identity graphs, segmentation, reverse-ETL activation, consent governance and journey orchestration

Projjol Banerjea, Zeotap's founder and chief product officer, put it simply: customers keep their data, storage and catalog, and Zeotap brings the engine and the CDP intelligence. It fits best for teams that have already standardized on a lakehouse and would rather bring compute to the data than copy the data out.

## More editors on the same record

When people edited records inside one application, governance meant field permissions and validation rules.

Salesforce's answer to the governance worry is to position itself as the governed system underneath AI interactions, with customer records, metadata, business rules and identity controls traveling with employees and AI agents wherever they work. If that works in practice, the extra burden is a configuration project rather than a new system to build. What could decide it is whether edits made from Slack and Claude can be tracked as closely as edits made in the CRM.

## Paying per resolved case

Block Field

Pricing is moving at the same time. A July analysis from CRM Experts Online tracks how Salesforce got here. Agentforce launched at Dreamforce 2024 at $2 per conversation, charged whether or not the problem got solved. Flex Credits followed in May 2025 and per-user licenses in late 2025. Pay-per-resolution arrived when Help Agent went generally available. Salesforce now runs several pricing models side by side, a sign the market hasn't settled on one.

HubSpot had numbers behind its April price cut. Breeze had also cut resolution time by 39%, and HubSpot's chief customer officer, Jon Dick, described outcome pricing as taking the risk off the buyer, because customers pay only when the agent works.

A service leader weighing Zendesk's $1.50 against HubSpot's $0.50 is comparing like with like only if the two vendors count a resolution the same way. That's also where this week's governance question turns into a finance question.

## Sources

- [CRM’s Great Escape: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zeotap, and Zendesk Redraw the Data Battle](https://www.cxtoday.com/crm/crm-news-salesforce-hubspot-zeotap-zendesk/) (CX Today)
- [CRM Is Leaving the CRM: What That Means for Email Campaigns](https://www.logarithmic.com/perspectives/crm-is-leaving-the-crm-what-that-means-for-email-campaigns)
- [The Great CRM Pricing Shift: Why Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk ...](https://crmexpertsonline.com/the-great-crm-pricing-shift-why-salesforce-hubspot-and-zendesk-are-charging-by-the-resolution-not-the-seat/)
- [Claudeforce: official product scope, permissions and pilot/beta availability](https://www.salesforce.com/claudeforce/) (Salesforce)
- [Fall 2026 Spotlight: official Smart CRM announcement](https://www.hubspot.com/company-news/fall-26-spotlight) (HubSpot)

Tags: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zeotap, Zendesk, Dreamforce 2026, CRM, AI agents, customer data platform, data governance, RevOps, procurement, customer service

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