Creatio, an AI CRM and workflow platform, closed its first quarter of fiscal 2027 with bookings at 255 percent of the prior year’s level, and the company’s own explanation for the jump is more interesting than the number itself. CEO Katherine Kostereva says customers are not adding AI features to their existing CRM, they are replacing the CRM entirely: “We’re at the beginning of the largest enterprise software replacement cycle in decades.” Creatio’s $1M+ ARR customer count has doubled over the past year, with named enterprise wins including Nasdaq, MetLife, and AMD.
That framing matters for anyone watching the CRM market from outside it. Vendors have spent two years pitching AI as an add-on layer bolted onto legacy systems, an assistant that summarizes calls or drafts an email inside the tool a company already owns. Creatio’s results suggest a chunk of the enterprise market has stopped buying that pitch and started asking whether the underlying platform, not just the AI wrapper, is worth keeping. The company’s push behind AI Studio and AI Twin, tools for building and deploying agents without custom development, is aimed squarely at buyers making that decision.
The original signal here is not that AI is driving CRM growth, every vendor claims that. It is that the growth is concentrated in enterprise accounts replacing incumbent systems rather than expanding within them, which is a costlier, slower sale to win and a much harder one to lose once made. That is the same dynamic already reshaping how CRM platforms handle write access for AI agents: the vendors treating AI as core architecture, not a feature, are the ones pulling replacement budget away from the incumbents.
Source: PR Newswire
