CRM market: $128 billion in 2024 and what AI changes

The CRM software market reached $128 billion in 2024, up 13.4% from the previous year, according to Gartner’s market share analysis published in June 2025. The figure measures worldwide vendor revenue in current US dollars and is the most recent one the firm has disclosed openly, because the edition covering 2025 only says the market “grew strongly”. Gartner forecasts company spending on CRM to grow 14.4% a year through 2029, driven in part by generative AI and agents. On the buyer side, in the TIC Empresas 2025 survey, 31% of Brazilian companies with ten or more employees said they had used a CRM application in the previous 12 months, and in the European Union the share was 28.51%. Vendors turned CRM into a data and AI platform, and the bottleneck for most companies is still getting the team to use the system and keeping the data reliable.

At Iasbeck&Co we implement CRM and AI agents in B2B operations and train the teams that use these tools. With executive teams, the question about the market almost always comes attached to a decision, such as switching platforms or buying the AI features the vendor is offering. I wrote this piece so that decision starts from sourced numbers, read with the caveats they require.

How big is the CRM market?

The open abstracts of Gartner’s last three annual analyses of CRM, which the firm calls “customer experience and relationship management”, show this sequence: $107.5 billion in 2023, up 13.4% (Gartner, 2024), $128 billion in 2024, with the same 13.4% growth (Gartner, 2025), and a 2025 described without a figure, with strong growth, a fragmented market and a slight loss of share by the large vendors, attributed to competition, AI adoption and cloud migration (Gartner, 2026).

If you do the math, 107.5 plus 13.4% comes to about $122 billion, not 128. Marketing shows the same thing: from $22.8 billion to $29 billion with reported growth of 11%. The gap comes from the taxonomy revision Gartner makes between editions, reclassifying products and categories. Each edition’s growth rate compares the two years on the same yardstick, and that rate is the one to use when reading the trend.

Vendor revenue and company spending are different measures

The $128 billion adds up what vendors billed. The 14.4% annual forecast through 2029 measures end-user spending in constant currency and comes from a November 2025 forecast report that lists generative and agentic AI among the growth drivers (Gartner, 2025). The two measures move together and do not add up. For the executive team, the practical reading is that the sector grew above 10% in both 2023 and 2024 and should keep that pace, with vendors betting on AI to justify higher spending.

How is the CRM market split between sales, marketing and service?

The abstracts of the segment reports make it possible to build the 2024 split, with customer service as the largest piece and the cross-CRM group as the fastest growing.

Segment (Gartner)	2023 revenue	2023 growth	2024 revenue	2024 growth
Total CRM	$107.5 bn	13.4%	$128 bn	13.4%
Customer service and support (CSS)	$37.6 bn	12.4%	$43.1 bn	13.7%
Marketing	$22.8 bn	12.3%	$29 bn	11.0%
Sales	$22.9 bn	13.9%	$25.7 bn	12.2%
Cross-CRM	not disclosed	17.9%	not disclosed	17.7%

Sources: Gartner, total CRM 2023, total CRM 2024, service 2023, service 2024, marketing 2023, marketing 2024, sales 2023 and sales 2024.

Customer service accounted for about a third of CRM revenue in 2024, and Gartner points to contact center software and workforce engagement management among the best performing categories. Marketing was the slowest growing segment, and the firm explains that companies treat marketing software as discretionary spending, more exposed to cuts in a year of economic uncertainty. In sales, the 2024 abstract attributes growth to functional expansion, increased adoption and price rises, underpinned by the return of AI tools that make sellers more efficient (Gartner, 2025).

Why is cross-CRM growing faster?

Cross-CRM brings together software that spans departments, such as platforms that unify customer data. Gartner itself explains the 17.7% growth in 2024 with the argument that understanding the customer and building a rich data profile are foundational requirements for customer experience and for AI adoption (Gartner, 2025). Vendors started selling the customer data layer that feeds AI across every team, and for the buyer the CRM decision became a decision about where that data lives and who looks after it, a topic I cover in CRM data quality.

How much of CRM already runs in the cloud?

Most of it. In its enterprise software as a service report, Gartner put worldwide SaaS revenue at $218.5 billion in 2024, up 16.7%, and CRM accounted for 51.4% of that total, ahead of ERP at 20.2% (Gartner, 2025). That 51.4% is about $112 billion. The two reports use their own scopes and the calculation is approximate, but the order of magnitude shows that most CRM revenue comes from cloud subscriptions, and that CRM is the largest SaaS category in the world. It makes sense that vendors launch AI there first, where the installed base and the customer data sit.

Who leads the CRM market?

Gartner’s abstract on 2023 lists the three largest shares that year as Salesforce, Oracle and Microsoft (Gartner, 2024), and the 2025 abstract notes that the major vendors lost a little share as growth spread across many companies (Gartner, 2026). The percentages by vendor sit in the paid version. IDC also measures the market, and its numbers usually reach the public through a vendor’s announcement. On the page where a vendor reproduces the IDC ranking for 2024, the CRM definition includes advertising and digital commerce applications, in addition to sales, marketing, customer service and contact center (Salesforce, 2025). With a different scope, the market size and each company’s share change, and one firm’s ranking cannot be compared with another’s.

Share measures global revenue and says little about your operation, which depends on size, integrations and the team’s capacity. I discuss how to research tools by context in the best B2B CRMs in 2026.

How much weight does AI carry in CRM vendors’ strategy?

Gartner’s abstracts mention AI in nearly every segment. In marketing, the edition on 2025 opens by saying the segment evolved “as AI became central to execution” (Gartner, 2026). In sales, the February 2024 forecast estimated that by 2027 AI would exceed 10% of sales software spending, with about 60% of that in generative AI (Gartner, 2024). The table gathers the projections from press releases, all of them forecasts by the firm.

Forecast or finding	Horizon	Source
AI agents will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues, with a 30% cut in operating costs	2029	Gartner, 2025
33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024	2028	Gartner, 2025
Over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled due to costs, unclear value or inadequate risk controls	end of 2027	Gartner, 2025
Only about 130 of the thousands of vendors claiming agentic AI offer real agents	2025 estimate	Gartner, 2025
Organizations will abandon 60% of AI projects unsupported by AI-ready data	through 2026	Gartner, 2025

The first two rows show the vendors’ bet, and the next three show the brake. Gartner calls “agent washing” the practice of rebranding chatbots, assistants and process automation as agents. In the same release, a January 2025 poll of 3,412 Gartner webinar attendees shows 19% with significant investments in agentic AI, in a sample that tends to overstate interest compared with the average company.

How many companies use CRM in Brazil and Europe?

The two best public sources on adoption use the same scope, companies with ten or more employees. In Brazil, Cetic.br’s TIC Empresas 2025 interviewed 4,174 companies by phone between February 2025 and January 2026 and asked whether they had used “any CRM application to manage customer information” in the previous 12 months. In the European Union, Eurostat surveyed 157,000 enterprises in its 2025 survey.

Scope	Brazil (Cetic.br, 2025)	European Union (Eurostat, 2025)
All companies with 10+ employees	31%	28.51%
Small (10 to 49)	29%	24.69%
Large (250 or more)	56%	65.43%
Information and communication sector	63%	63.14%
ERP use, for comparison	36%	46.45%

Two patterns show up on both sides of the Atlantic. Large companies use CRM at twice the rate of small ones, and even among large Brazilian companies almost four in ten said they do not use it. And in both surveys more companies use ERP than CRM, which suggests that businesses organize finance and inventory first and leave the customer in spreadsheets and WhatsApp.

What the Brazilian series shows

The Cetic.br series fluctuates: 27% in the 2021 edition, 28% in 2023, 25% in 2024 and 31% in 2025 (Cetic.br, G3 tables). The 2021 base was “companies that use computers”, different from later editions, and a variation of a few points from one year to the next may fall within the sample’s margin of error. I read the series as stable, with no clear upward trend, and Eurostat records a rise of 2.68 points in Europe between 2023 and 2025. Adoption is not keeping pace with the double-digit growth of vendor revenue, which suggests that much of that growth comes from existing CRM users paying more, per module, per user, through price increases or for AI. The reasons so many companies never get to use the system are in why the team does not use the CRM.

What do these numbers mean for CRM buyers?

The first consequence for the executive team is that prices tend to rise. Gartner lists price increases among the growth drivers in sales, and AI arrives as a paid module, a credit pack or a higher tier. Anyone renewing a contract in the next two years will find AI inside the negotiation and needs to know beforehand which process they want to improve with it.

The second consequence is that CRM became the database that AI agents read. An agent that summarizes meetings or answers tickets depends on a complete and standardized customer history. Gartner showed the size of the problem in a July 2024 survey of 1,203 data management leaders: 63% of organizations either do not have or are unsure if they have the right data management practices for AI (Gartner, 2025). If your database has empty fields, duplicates and stages without criteria, the agent will work on that material, as I show in AI agents.

The third consequence comes from the adoption table. If only three in ten Brazilian companies with ten or more employees use CRM, the competitive advantage of those who use it well is still large. Companies with a designed process and a team that records sales in the system reach AI with the input ready. Companies running on spreadsheets have two steps ahead, and skipping the first one tends to be expensive, as the data on CRM project failure shows.

Summary of the research cited

Source	Year	Sample or method	Main finding
Gartner, Market Share: CX and Relationship Management	2025 and 2026	Vendor revenue estimate	$128 bn in 2024, up 13.4%; 2025 with strong growth and a fragmented market
Gartner, segment analyses	2024 and 2025	Revenue estimate by segment	Service $43.1 bn, marketing $29 bn, sales $25.7 bn in 2024
Gartner, Forecast Analysis: CX and Relationship Management	2025	End-user spending forecast, constant currency	CRM spending grows 14.4% a year through 2029, with AI among the drivers
Gartner, Market Share: Enterprise SaaS 2024	2025	SaaS revenue estimate	CRM accounted for 51.4% of $218.5 bn in SaaS in 2024
Gartner, releases on agentic AI and data	2025	Analyst forecasts; survey of 1,203 data leaders; poll of 3,412 webinar attendees	63% without data practices for AI; over 40% of agentic projects canceled by 2027
Cetic.br, TIC Empresas 2025	2026	4,174 companies with 10+ employees, phone interviews	31% used CRM in the previous 12 months; 56% among large companies
Eurostat, E-business integration	2026	157,000 EU enterprises with 10+ employees, 2025 survey	28.51% used CRM; from 24.69% in small to 65.43% in large enterprises

What this data does not tell you

Gartner’s figures are estimates by a private firm, built from vendor information and its own models, and the full methodology sits in the paid version. The firm revises its taxonomy between editions, as the gap between the $107.5 billion for 2023 and the value implied by the next edition shows. The public abstracts also do not break out Brazil, and I found no open primary source with the size of the CRM market in the country. The numbers on “the Brazilian CRM market” that circulate on statistics sites come from consultancies that do not publish their method, and I left them out of this piece.

Adoption surveys measure what respondents declare. A “yes” to Cetic.br can mean a platform with the whole team recording activity or a module that only the manager opens, and neither survey measures intensity of use, data quality or results. They also do not show that using CRM causes better performance: larger companies and tech companies use more CRM and also have more resources, and the correlation with size does not prove an effect of the system. The AI forecasts are analysts’ opinions, and Gartner itself forecasts both the expansion of agents and the cancellation of four in ten projects.

What leadership does with these numbers

1. Separate market revenue from the buying decision. The 13.4% growth shows where vendors invest, and your decision starts from the process you want to improve and the data it depends on.
2. Measure your own adoption before buying AI. Find out how many users log activity every week, how many open deals have a next step and date, and how many contacts are duplicated.
3. Ask the vendor for an AI use case tied to one of your indicators. If the proposal includes agents, require the process, the data source the agent reads, who approves the action and the consumption cost, and be wary of features rebranded with no change in function.
4. Budget for data and for people. A project without database cleanup, field standardization and team training repeats the pattern that leads AI projects to be abandoned.
5. Compare yourself with the right benchmark. A mid-sized Brazilian company should look at Cetic.br’s 50 to 249 employee band (41% usage in 2025), and the leadership of a tech company at the information and communication sector (63%).

How can HR and L&D use this data?

The adoption numbers are the part that matters most to HR, because they show that the barrier to CRM value lies in the team’s routine of recording and consulting customer information. With AI built into the system, training also includes the criteria for reviewing what the agent proposes. To measure the effect, compare in the CRM itself the percentage of weekly active users and the completion rate of mandatory fields before and after the course.

Gartner forecasts spending growing above 10% a year through 2029, with AI in every new release. The company that captures that value is the one with the team using the system and the database in order, and that is the work of the in-company CRM adoption training, built on the company’s process and database. It delivers a CRM best practices guide and a portfolio and database management manual, with the recording and maintenance rules that prepare the data for the agents.

Frequently asked questions

How big is the global CRM market?

According to Gartner, worldwide revenue from CRM software vendors was $128 billion in 2024, up 13.4%. The edition on 2025, published in May 2026, describes strong growth but does not give the figure in the open abstract.

How much is the CRM market expected to grow through 2029?

Gartner’s November 2025 forecast is for company spending on CRM to grow 14.4% a year through 2029, in constant currency. The firm lists generative and agentic AI among the drivers of that growth.

Which CRM segment is the largest?

Customer service and support, with $43.1 billion in 2024, about a third of the total, followed by marketing at $29 billion and sales at $25.7 billion. The fastest growing segment is cross-CRM, which covers software that unifies customer data across departments.

How many Brazilian companies use CRM?

In TIC Empresas 2025, 31% of Brazilian companies with ten or more employees said they had used a CRM application in the previous 12 months. Among large companies, with 250 or more employees, the share was 56%.

Will AI replace CRM?

The data points the other way: vendors are putting AI inside CRM, because agents need the customer history to work. CRM becomes the base that AI reads, and the quality of that base defines the quality of what the agent delivers.

How do I prepare the team for CRM with AI?

Start with the recording routine, with stage criteria, mandatory fields and a weekly portfolio review, because that routine feeds the agents. Then train each team on the process where AI will act, including how to review and approve what the agent proposes, and track usage indicators in the CRM itself.