What's wrong with Salesforce
Tripty Arya
November 08, 2025
C-Suite Leaders,
Salesforce’s reinvention tells a bigger story: the systems built to unify enterprises have become their biggest bottlenecks. In the AI era, intelligence can’t run on legacy plumbing. The real competitive edge now lies not in dashboards or CRMs, but in re-architecting the data foundation itself — turning disconnected information into a living intelligence layer that drives every decision.
Across the industry, there’s a growing frustration: the systems we built to unify the enterprise have become the new source of fragmentation.
Nowhere is that clearer than with Salesforce. The world’s most familiar customer-relationship management platform has quietly become a cautionary tale. What began as a system to centralise customer data now too often underpins organisational disconnection. In an era when intelligence is the new frontier, the greatest risk isn’t lack of ambition but it’s misplaced architecture.
The Problem Isn’t the Product. It’s the Plumbing
When you peel back the layers, the issue with Salesforce, Inc. isn’t the software so much as the legacy architecture it sits on. Built for structured records and manual workflows, it struggles in the new era of real-time ingestion, flexible modelling and artificial intelligence.
Over years of customisation, firms have created sprawling configurations: disconnected “objects”, multiple org instances, bespoke workflows managed by consultants rather than code. The result? Data trapped in silos, processes brittle, scaling limited. Study findings from Salesforce’s own research lab back this up: one benchmark found state-of-the-art AI agents succeeded in fewer than 40% of CRM tasks, underscoring how fraility in data and structure limits ambition.
Many executives now talk of the “AI-wrapper trap”, layering smart interfaces on top of outdated plumbing. One recent article’s blunt framing: “An AI strategy without a data framework is just a wish list”. Without that foundation, every new “assistant”, “copilot” or “agent” risks becoming another point-integration project rather than a source of enterprise intelligence. And the next problem begins with “tools”. The new agentic universe does not just depend on data maturity but also an inter-connected ecosystem of specialists tools or apps. Without an orchestration layer which is deeply AI native, the impact on any solution is lower than any business projection.
Even Salesforce Sees it
The shift is obvious from Salesforce’s own behaviour. Its “Data Cloud” (or Data 360) initiative signals a strategic pivot: from CRM vendor to unified data-platform provider. In its FY2025 results, Salesforce reported that Data Cloud and AI-related annual recurring revenue (ARR) rose by 120% year-over-year, surpassing the US$1 billion mark. Another report noted Data Cloud now processes 2 quadrillion records per quarter, representing a 147% year-over-year increase.
Salesforce themselves put it plainly: “AI won’t run without clean, connected, and governed data.” The important insight for you: If Salesforce is reinventing its backbone to be AI-ready, your own enterprise must make the same architectural leap and not simply add one more feature.
The Leapfrog Opportunity
This is not unprecedented. In financial services, institutions in emerging markets that never built mainframes moved directly to mobile-first banking, outpacing older peers. The same dynamic is now possible in real estate and other asset-heavy industries.
A firm without sunk costs in outdated systems can adopt an AI platform that ingests financials, market feeds, and operational data directly. Instead of waiting years for infrastructure, executives can immediately deploy use cases that sharpen underwriting, inform capital planning, and identify systemic risks.
We already see this dynamic in housing. Leasing, asset management, maintenance logs, property financials, investor reporting: all sit in different systems, each built for a different era. The hope that dashboards will deliver insight is dashed when nothing connects dynamically.
In practice, deploying an AI leasing assistant without linking maintenance logs, resident feedback, unit performance and asset-financials is akin to applying a Band-Aid to a deep structural wound. The result is either no value or brittle pilots. AI assistants, are handling millions of support task by working directly without the blockers of CRM data. The clean slate is a competitive advantage.
The strategic priority isn’t a new chatbot. It’s re-architecting how data flows across the enterprise so intelligence can emerge. If leasing data never talks to maintenance history, no model will tell you where resident experience is driving renewal, or where cap-ex is best deployed.
A Playbook for Leaders
1. Begin with outcomes.
Select the decision-flows that matter most to your enterprise: lease renewals, maintenance optimisation, cap-ex allocation, investor-reporting speed. Let those outcomes define the architecture not the CRM vendor or module.
2. Build a backbone, not a dashboard.
Prioritise connecting operational (property, leasing, maintenance), financial (asset, portfolio) and investor systems. Modern data platforms now enable ingestion, harmonisation and enterprise-scale modelling without years of warehouse build-out.
3. Skip the wrapper.
Resist tools that promise “AI on top of your legacy CRM”. Instead aim for platforms that integrate beneath the stack— ingest raw data, harmonise models and deliver intelligence across workflows.
4. Govern once, scale everywhere.
Establish a unified framework for data access, security, lineage and model oversight. Create standards that apply across markets, asset classes and functions. A single governance model turns a pilot into enterprise capability.
The Bigger Lesson
The pivot at Salesforce is both a warning and a blueprint. The winners of this decade won’t be those with the most CRM fields. It will be those with the cleanest, most connected data. In the multifamily world, that means turning scattered operational and financial inputs into a unified intelligence layer that powers every decision from leasing to asset management to investor relations.
The fix isn’t another interface. It’s a new foundation.
About This Email Series
This email is part of an ongoing Strategy Saturday series written for C-suite leaders and focused on the strategic shifts required to lead effectively in an AI-driven world. The insights and perspectives shared are intended to support strategic reflection and informed decision-making, rather than prescribe specific actions.
