Infrastructure Briefings

Your CRM Now Wants to Hire Agents. Here's How to Interview One.

By Ed Richards,

Salesforce and HubSpot have both pushed hard into AI agents this year, priced by outcome rather than by seat. Before your sales office switches one on, here are the five questions worth asking first.

What just changed in your CRM

This week Salesforce took Agentforce, its multi-agent orchestration layer, from beta into general availability as part of the Summer '26 release. It is the largest update the platform has had. In practical terms, that means the CRM a lot of venues and agencies already pay for can now hand off tasks like qualifying a lead or drafting a follow up to an AI agent working inside it, not bolted on the side.

HubSpot moved earlier this year. Back in April, its specialised Breeze agents shifted to outcome-based pricing: the Prospecting Agent costs a dollar per qualified lead, the Customer Agent fifty cents per resolved conversation. Not a seat licence. A price per result the agent decides it has achieved.

Put those together and the pattern is clear. A venue sales office, a mid-sized agency, anyone running a CRM from either of these vendors, is about to be offered "an agent" as a feature switch inside a system they already use every day. It will be pitched as a small decision. It is not.

Why this is a bigger decision than it looks

Turning on a seat for a new starter is reversible in a day. Turning on an agent that reads your enquiry inbox, scores leads, and drafts or sends replies is a decision about who, or what, is allowed to represent your business to a prospect before a human ever sees the conversation. The switch is easy to flip. Understanding what you just flipped is the part worth doing properly first.

The five questions to ask before you switch one on

These are worth putting to whoever is selling you the agent, in writing, before go-live, not worked out afterwards from what actually happened.

  • 1. What exactly does it count as a "qualified lead" or a "resolved conversation"? This is the definition the vendor gets paid against, so it matters more than it sounds. A loose definition of "resolved" can mean a conversation the delegate gave up on, not one that was actually answered.
  • 2. What data does it read to make that judgement? Your CRM history, email threads, call notes, previous quotes. Know the scope before it is switched on, not after someone asks why the agent referenced something it should not have seen.
  • 3. What can it send without a human approving it first? A drafted reply waiting for a click is a different risk profile to an agent that emails a prospect, updates a record, or quotes a price on its own.
  • 4. How do we see what it actually did? You want a log, in plain language, of every action it took, not a dashboard of aggregate performance. If a client asks why they got a strange automated reply at 11pm, you need to be able to answer that in minutes.
  • 5. How do we turn it off, fully, not just pause the trial? Know the actual mechanism before you need it in a hurry.

The pricing question nobody asks out loud

Outcome-based pricing sounds like it should align incentives nicely. You only pay when it works. But think through what "it works" means from the vendor's side. The agent is paid, or at least judged as performing well, when it marks a lead qualified or a conversation resolved. That is not automatically the same as a lead your sales team would call qualified, or a conversation your delegate would call resolved.

This is not a claim that either vendor is gaming its own metric. It is a structural point: the system that decides whether the outcome happened is the same system being paid for that outcome happening. That is exactly the kind of thing worth checking rather than assuming, and it is precisely what question one above is for.

A venue sales office in the north west trialled an agent along these lines earlier this year. Its definition of a qualified lead turned out to include any enquiry that replied at all, including a one-line "thanks, not for us." Nobody had misled anyone. The definition had simply never been stated out loud before it was switched on.

Worth noting for the record: the dollar figures above are US list pricing at time of writing. Expect UK pricing and terms to differ, and to ask for them directly rather than assuming a straight currency conversion.

A prompt for the meeting

If you want to walk into the vendor call with the five questions already adapted to your own systems, this is a reasonable way to prepare for it. Paste it into your AI assistant with a short description of your CRM and how enquiries currently flow, and expect back a tailored version of the five questions plus a short list of what "good" and "concerning" answers would sound like for each.

I am about to be sold an AI agent feature inside our CRM (describe: Salesforce Agentforce, HubSpot Breeze, or similar) for our events business. Help me prepare for the vendor call.

Here is how enquiries and leads currently move through our business:
[describe: where enquiries come in, who currently qualifies or responds to them, what your CRM already does automatically if anything]

Using that context, adapt these five questions to be specific to my systems:
1. What exactly counts as a qualified lead or resolved conversation for this agent.
2. What data it reads to make that judgement.
3. What it can send or change without a human approving first.
4. How we see a plain-language log of what it actually did.
5. How we turn it off completely, not just pause it.

For each question, give me one example of a good, specific answer and one example of a vague answer that should be a red flag. Keep this practical, no more than a page.

This week

If a CRM agent has already been switched on somewhere in your business, and for a lot of teams one quietly has been, ask whoever manages that system to answer the five questions above this week, honestly, even if nobody official ever asked them to switch it on in the first place. That conversation is usually more revealing than the sales pitch was. If you want help working through what a specific agent tool would actually change in your business before you commit to it, that is a natural question for a Discovery Lab.

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