Customer Relationship Management in the AI Era: A Framework for Intelligent and Ethical Service Management Systems

Customer relationship management (CRM) has progressed from a transactional, data-storage tool to a strategic, service-oriented capability for creating long-term customer value. As artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates the transformation of service systems, CRM is entering a new phase. This paper develops an integrative framework for CRM in the AI era, showing how advances in machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), and more recently generative models (GM) and foundation models (FM), are reshaping the data, analytical, interactional, and governance foundations of CRM. We first trace CRM’s pre-AI evolution, showing how database technologies and analytical tools enabled firms to personalize marketing and manage customer equity. We then analyze how advances in ML/DL and GM/FM have reshaped four core CRM dimensions. Whereas ML/DL enhances prediction, automation, and pattern recognition, GM/FM mark a substantial shift by enabling multimodal reasoning, generative simulation, and adaptive, human-centered interaction at scale. These developments shift CRM toward an intelligent, co-creative system that learns continuously, collaborates with humans, and embeds ethical governance into its core operations. The paper concludes by outlining theoretical, methodological, and managerial implications for building AI-enabled CRM architectures that enhance empathy, transparency, trust, and responsible value co-creation, laying the foundation for future service innovation.