Why Customer Managed Relationships May Replace the Traditional CRM Model
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been one of the defining enterprise strategies of the last three decades. And one of the biggest failures. It promised customer centricity, a unified view of the customer, and better coordination across marketing, sales, and service.
In practice, it has largely failed to deliver on that promise. The core issue is not technology, its structural, political and cultural. Organisations are still siloed by function and incentives are misaligned.
However, the exponential increase in consumer AI may give rise to a paradigm shift. There have been numerous research articles over the past decade exploring the concept of “what happens when your customer is a bot”. But its only now that this idea can potentially truly blossom.
From CRM to CMR: Shifting Control to the Consumer
There is a real potential for the shift from CRM to CMR, or Customer Managed Relationships. In a CMR model, the locus of control shifts away from the enterprise and moves toward the consumer. Instead of companies trying to coordinate fragmented internal systems to present a unified experience, the consumer manages the relationship externally through their own intelligent agent.
Think of it as a personal AI layer, fronted by systems like GPT or Claude-style interfaces, that act on behalf of the individual. For example, instead of a customer engaging with ten different car insurance providers, each competing through marketing, call centres, and comparison sites, the process is inverted. The consumer’s CMR system manages the interaction.
The system might say: Your car insurance is due for renewal in 30 days. Do you want to share the required personal data with the market to obtain updated quotes? If the consumer agrees, the CMR agent securely interacts with multiple insurers, retrieves quotes, evaluates them against predefined preferences, and executes the purchase automatically. The insurer never interacts directly with the consumer. Instead, they interact with the consumer’s agent – and can only do that because the agent has allowed temporarily access to the necessary car-related personal data.
This model fundamentally changes the nature of the “relationship.” Brands no longer manage customers. They manage interfaces with customer-controlled agents that act as intelligent intermediaries.
The End of Traditional Brand Engagement
Extend this across domains such as banking, utilities, travel, telecoms, and healthcare administration, and the traditional idea of brand-to-customer engagement starts to dissolve. What brands we receive campaigns from, when and why, who we transact with and how we seek support when needed all fundamentally change. What remains is a network of machine-to-machine interactions, mediated by consumer-owned intent and permission.
Importantly, this is not purely theoretical. Early signals are already visible. Consumers are increasingly comfortable delegating tasks to AI systems, from research and comparison to booking and decision support. As trust in these systems grows, the scope of delegation will expand from advisory to execution.
The key constraint is trust. A CMR system requires the consumer to trust not only the AI interface, but also the underlying permissioning, data sharing, and financial execution layers. However, this is already beginning to normalize in adjacent domains such as digital wallets, automated subscriptions, and AI-assisted decision making.
Competing in an AI-Mediated Marketplace
Trust will be key – who does the consumer trust more – will it be Microsoft (via a consumer co-pilot?) will it be a new Anthropic app? Or perhaps Google? Apple? Or even Amazon Prime? Take your pick.
If this trajectory continues, CRM may increasingly become a backend system that serves CMR agents, rather than the primary interface for customer engagement. In that world, the “customer experience” is no longer designed by brands. It is curated by the customer’s own system.
And the competitive question for organisations changes completely. It is no longer “How do we win customer relationships?” It becomes “How do we become the preferred option when the customer’s AI decides?” That shift is profound. It moves competition away from persuasion and branding, and toward machine-readable value, structured offers, and frictionless execution.
CRM did not fail because the idea of customer centricity was wrong. It failed because organisations could not structurally align around it. CMR may succeed because it removes that burden entirely and places coordination where it may always have belonged – with the customer.
