Vertical CRM Vendors Start Shipping Their Own AI Agents for Industries Salesforce Doesn’t Reach

Unanet has expanded its Champ Agents AI assistant, built on its Wyatt data layer, from the company’s AE ERP product into Unanet GovCon ERP and Unanet AEC CRM, with Unanet GovCon CRM availability planned for later this quarter. The rollout lets business development and marketing teams at architecture, engineering and government-contracting firms query project data in plain language, automate recurring tasks and pull relationship, activity and document context together ahead of client pursuits and proposals.

The move matters because it shows AI agents spreading beyond the horizontal CRM giants and into the vertical software that runs specific, regulated industries. Salesforce and HubSpot have made agentic features a headline race, and CRM vendors broadly are reworking how much write access those agents get to customer data. Unanet’s expansion suggests the same push is happening one layer down, inside the ERP and CRM systems built for project-based businesses that horizontal platforms serve poorly. For RevOps leaders at firms in construction, engineering, defense or other project-driven sectors, that means agent capability may arrive first from the specialist vendor already embedded in daily workflows, not from a horizontal CRM add-on.

The original insight worth noting: because Unanet already owns the full project lifecycle, from pursuit through delivery, financial management and compliance, in one system, it can wire an agent across that whole span without the integration work a horizontal CRM needs to reach adjacent systems. “Project-based businesses do not need AI that sits apart from how their teams already work. They need AI that understands their business context and helps them securely put their data into action,” said Steve Karp, Unanet’s chief innovation officer. Early users report the interface working as advertised: “You don’t have to be a programmer. You don’t have to be a database guru. You just say, ‘I want to see this,’ and it does it,” said Brian Bartholomew, vice president of operations at AGEISS.

Source: Unanet via PR Newswire