Treasure AI's Rafael Flores has articulated a fundamental tension in enterprise CX: legacy CRM platforms were engineered for stability and breadth, not speed and AI integration. The core argument is straightforward—most organisations use roughly 10 percent of their CRM's functionality whilst bearing the full cost and complexity burden of the remaining 90 percent. This architectural rigidity becomes a genuine operational liability when AI-driven personalisation demands rapid iteration, real-time data pipeline fixes, and seamless asset generation. Where a marketer in a legacy environment might wait days for IT to diagnose a broken data pipeline and source creative assets, an AI-native platform could theoretically resolve the same issue in hours through embedded intelligence. The implication for CX teams already managing Zendesk, Salesforce or Freshdesk deployments is uncomfortable: your current stack may be optimised for yesterday's engagement velocity, not today's.
The distinction Flores draws between surface-level AI claims and genuinely embedded AI capability cuts to the heart of vendor evaluation. A chatbot interface or mock-up does not constitute AI-native architecture; the technology must be woven into core workflows, user value delivery and product development itself. This raises a critical question for support leaders and CX consultants: how do you audit whether your current vendor's AI investments represent genuine architectural change or marketing theatre? The data governance dimension compounds this challenge. Without robust data foundations—clear access rules, consistent governance frameworks and cost-aware token management—AI agents become expensive, inconsistent and unreliable. Enterprises investing in AI-native platforms must simultaneously invest in data infrastructure, not as a secondary concern but as the foundational layer upon which all engagement velocity depends.
As AI becomes more central to customer experience, enterprises face a difficult question: are the legacy CRM systems they rely on still built for the pace of modern AI-native engagement? In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Rafael Flores, Chief Product and Growth Officer at Treasur