Beyond Sales: How Zoho's "CRM For Everyone" Changes the CX Game with AI

Zoho has just taken another interesting step in democratizing CRM. “CRM For Everyone” including expanded Zia generative AI and orchestration capabilities is now generally available. What does this mean for the CRM market and how does it stack up against rivals like Salesforce, HubSpot, Freshworks, SugarCRM, Creatio, Monday.com, Pega or ServiceNow?

Zoho’s Strategy and Existing Capabilities

Zoho’s longstanding mission has been to democratize enterprise software, offering a full-stack, affordable platform for SMBs and midmarket customers, and increasingly also targeting the enterprise. Prior to this release, Zoho CRM already included Zia—Zoho's in-house AI —for predictive insights, workflow automation, and conversational analytics.

A Broader, More Inclusive, AI-Driven CRM

With the availability of CRM For Everyone, Zoho is pushing the envelope.

By expanding CRM access beyond sales teams to other teams with customer facing tasks, like legal, onboarding, and account management functions, Zoho addresses a critical gap in the market: For many customers it causes frustration when handed off between departments. The new Connected Workflows and AI-powered Zia capabilities represent more than feature upgrades – they’re architectural shifts toward frictionless cross-functional collaboration.

• CRM For Everyone makes CRM accessible to non-sales yet customer-facing teams—sales, marketing, onboarding, account management, finance, legal, and beyond—at a starting price of just $9/user/month for non-sales roles.

• Zia’s deep generative and agentic AI: Users can now use simple prompts (in natural language) to generate reports, build custom modules, create workflows, and even design visual components via “image to canvas.”

• Connected Records & Workflows: The platform now auto-links records across team modules and orchestrates cross-functional workflows, finally breaking down the silos that have historically limited CRM adoption and real “customer experience” delivery.

• No-code everything: True to the “for everyone” claim, business users can create modules, automate processes, and change permissions without IT support.

Competitive Perspective

• Freshworks and HubSpot have also invested heavily in AI and ease-of-use, but their generative AI is more focused on sales/service automation rather than truly agentic, cross-team orchestration. Neither delivers no-code workflow orchestration at this price point for non-sales teams.

• SugarCRM, Creatio, and Monday.com have solid low-code/no-code stories and some AI, but their cross-team orchestration and natural-language agent capabilities do not seem to be as mature or tightly integrated, and tend to require more IT/admin involvement, although especially Creatio shows very interesting capabilities and results.

• ServiceNow dominates in workflow automation and enterprise orchestration, but is priced for the upper midmarket and enterprise, with complexity to match. Zoho’s entry disrupts the “workflow for everyone” story at a fraction of the cost.

• Pega is a formidable enterprise player, recognized for its unified platform, real-time AI, and deep process automation. Its GenAI Knowledge Buddy brings agentic, generative AI to sales, service, and marketing, synthesizing knowledge and automating tasks across all channels. However, Pega’s complexity, higher costs, and enterprise focus make it less accessible for smaller organizations or those seeking rapid, low-code extensibility.

• Salesforce is the undisputed 800-pound gorilla in the market and has strong generative AI in Einstein Copilot and Flow, as well as a robust process automation ecosystem, but extending workflows across all teams and roles at a low entry price is still a challenge for many customers—especially those with limited IT resources.

Market Impact

Zoho’s move is significant: It essentially commoditizes Einstein by delivering many of Salesforce's AI capabilities at a significantly lower cost. By marrying agentic AI, no-code extensibility, and true cross-team orchestration, all at a very low price, Zoho is likely to accelerate CRM adoption well beyond the sales organization—especially for cost-conscious midmarket and growth-stage enterprises. This will put pressure on competitors to both simplify and broaden access to their platforms, and to do so without hidden “AI taxes.”

But the bigger play is cultural: Zoho is making a bet that CRM must finally break out of the sales silo and become the shared operating system for customer experience, powered by accessible AI—not just for IT or “power users,” but for everyone.

Bottom Line: Zoho is arguably one of the most accessible, AI-augmented CRM platform for cross-team use—delivering generative and agentic AI to the masses. Competitors will need to respond with simpler, more inclusive, and affordable approaches or risk losing the long tail of business users who want more from CRM than just sales pipeline management.

As always, the devil will be in the execution and adoption. But in terms of vision and technical enablement, Zoho just raised the bar.