Why it needs AI to finally make a personal CRM work

Before we dive deep into why it needs AI to finally make a personal CRM work, we take a step back and take a look at what exactly is a personal CRM and how it differentiate from a traditional customer relationship management (CRM) tool. There are some reasons we will discover why there is no popular solution in the market yet and how AI plays into role change that.

So when we talk about a personal CRM what exactly do we mean by it? If you want to read a in depth article about it you can check out our dedicated personal CRM post.
To summarise it in a short way, you can think about a personal CRM more like your advanced contact book. It is your central place where you keep track of your entire network and all connections that you made in your private and professional life. The biggest difference in regards to a "normal" CRM is that a personal CRM is not necessarily treading your contacts in a transactional way. The traditional CRM is made to push people or often called "leads" through some steps in a funnel to ultimately convert a few of them into customers of your product or service.

When it comes to managing your personal network you don't want to tread everyone that you met in a transactional way and think about how you can extract value out of this person. Technically you could use these CRM's also for your personal use-case but the downside is that they tend to be more expensive as they are bought by companies. Also if you use the CRM of your company to manage your own network – what happens when you leave the company? You won't take you account with you as it is property of the company. So it need a standalone solution that is tailored for your private use-case – a personal CRM.

The idea of having a personal CRM is nothing new. It just make sense that you have a central place where you store all your contacts and information from people that you meet. Especially if your meet hundreds sometimes even thousands of people during your life it is almost impossible to keep track of everyone without the help of software tools.

An app like your contact app on your phone can't fulfil the requirements and is very limited in its functions. Just think about how many people have you met through email conversation are connected on LinkedIn or other social platforms or had zoom meetings with and you have not entered them into your contact app. It would a hassle to do so and manual enter all the information from your daily interactions with people. A personal CRM on the other hand is connected and deeply integrated to the platforms and places where you have touch points with your network.

So why is there not a market leader in the personal CRM space? In theory this all sounds plausible and make sense. But the reality looks different. Existing solution still require a lot of manual work to get information in and out of the system. It is really hard to adopt a tool in your day to day life where you constantly need to keep in mind to bring in new information from a email conversation, a video call, or the chat from your messengers. And at the same time is it difficult to search and retrieve data if it is more than just someone's email or phone number. Semantic search is not trivial. But speaking of semantic search this is a perfect segway to tackle our initially question.

Why does it need AI to finally make a personal CRM work? The short answer would be –– because it eliminates all the weaknesses of current solutions and automates the process to take the work off your hands. But you are certainly here to learn in depth why this is.

A new paradigm for CRM

AI is here, and its impact on CRM's will be even more exponential, seismic, and revolutionary than the internet itself. Picture a world where your personal CRM isn’t just a static system of record but an autonomous system of action — an intelligent entity that deeply understands your relationships and context within your network and aligns seamlessly with your needs.

More than just the center of your tech stack, your CRM is constantly at work in the background, processing both structured and unstructured data from every interaction. Every email, call, meeting, and in person conversations are organised and surfaced in a way that intuitively is searchable.

Let's bring up some examples to better grasp the potential:

- Let's say you go to an event and meet 5 new people. Maybe you connect on LinkedIn or not. But after this event the likelihood that you sit down and enter these 5 people into your CRM is almost zero. But what if you could send a voice message on your way back home to your AI assistant talking about who you met and what they told you and the AI is creating these contacts for you and enrich them with the information you gave plus information that you can find on the web. This would be super seamless.

- Here is another example: Let's say you have thousands of contacts spread all across different platforms. With some you have connected on LinkedIn but totally forgot that they exist. With others you text via email and with others you jump on zoom meetings. Now you try to figure out who in your network lives in San Francisco because you are traveling for a business trip and want to catch up with some people. With your personal CRM that is build AI first you could just ask this question and get a comprehensive answer back with all relevant contacts in your network that you should reach out to. Even better you could ask the AI to do that for you and schedule a few lunch break.

In the AI ear, CRM's will be data-driven, autonomous engines, handling the heavy lifting for you so it becomes super easy to stay on top of your network.

Here at table we exactly go after this opportunity to rethink how a personal CRM should work and look like. With table we build a personal CRM that is build AI first from the ground up. We got frustrated with the current way and it was always a pain to manage and organize your network in a seamless way. That's why we are incredible excited to change the status quo and think first principle to ultimately bring you the best ever software to keep track of your contacts. Because we beliefe that a strong healthy network is super powerful and accelerates your private and professional life.

Another core believe of ours is that you can't really bolt new AI onto legacy CRM systems. CRM's has become a rigid, incomplete set of data. It was built to store information on business cards and proposals, not generate productivity, insights, and alignment from massive amounts of unstructured conversation data. Anyone who’s had to create custom CRM fields to accommodate meeting notes, or wrestle with properties to be able to get contact summaries, or manual set tags to every contact, knows what we’re talking about. To handle your network, you need to re-think the way you gather, analyse, and share information, and that’s exactly what we’re setting out to do.

If that sounds interesting to you and you wanna give it a shot, sign up to our waitlist. We will launch the first version of table soon!