Clarify, Fixing What’s Broken with CRMs through Automation

When I first met Patrick Thompson, the CEO of Clarify, two years ago, he laid out a compelling vision for the future of CRMs, the sales tech stack, and agentic AI. Initially, I was highly skeptical—many startups had tried and failed to disrupt the sales and CRM market. But Patrick is one of those rare visionaries who can clearly articulate the future and persuade you that something seemingly impossible is not only achievable but inevitable.

Clarify immediately stood out by first tackling the root issue of why traditional CRMs suck: they waste sales teams' time. Manual data entry, updating deal stages, and summarising meetings consume valuable hours that should be spent selling. They don’t make the individual productive. Clarify solves this by automating these administrative tasks, keeping data up to date and proactively suggesting the next best actions. 

An autonomous CRM is the foundation of Clarify's longer-term vision to be an all-in-one autonomous sales platform—consolidating multiple sales tools into one intelligent solution that reduces complexity and data fragmentation, unlocking smarter, faster sales decisions.

Clarify isn't merely making a better CRM; it's defining the future of sales by creating a holistic platform that will automate the entire sales process and make it more intuitive, efficient, and intelligent.

The Problem with Traditional CRMs and sales tools

Traditional CRMs suck because they force sales reps to spend hours every week manually entering data, updating deal stages, and summarising meetings. Instead of selling, reps are trapped doing administrative tasks. This can eat up to 30% - 50% of a sales reps time; time that could be spent selling. 

In addition, there is no intelligence built into the platform to suggest next best actions, such as who to contact next. They don’t help users prepare for meetings through deep research. They don’t determine who in the organization to contact or create personalized messages for outbounding.

You can partially do this today with an amalgamation of CRMs, sales tools and AI models. But these solutions tend to be point solutions or poorly stitched together. They lead not only to excessive cost, but data fragmentation across multiple tools losing context at each step. 

The Power of an Autonomous Sales Platform

Clarify tackles this problem automating all of the repetitive, time-consuming administrative tasks sales reps dread. Instead of manually entering data, summarising meetings, or constantly updating deal stages, Clarify handles these processes autonomously in the background.

This automation ensures your CRM data remains constantly up-to-date, freeing sales reps to spend more time on high-value tasks like engaging with customers and closing deals. Clarify proactively suggests the next best actions, turning passive data into intelligent guidance that drives more effective sales decisions.

Moreover, Clarify eliminates the complexity and fragmentation created by multiple productivity tools. By consolidating everything from data enrichment, outbound prospecting, and company research to closing deals into one unified, intelligent platform, Clarify simplifies your sales stack—reducing costs and turning fragmented data into collective intelligence. The more data Clarify consolidates, the smarter and more effective the entire sales process becomes.

The power behind this consolidation is more than efficiency or cost-saving: it’s the compounding intelligence. With all sales data captured and analysed in one unified platform, each action informs the next. Data collected during prospecting enriches insights for qualifying leads, follow-up actions become smarter, and closing deals gets faster and more effective. This creates a virtuous cycle where data, intelligence, and outcomes continuously improve one another.

Clarify’s autonomous sales platform isn’t just streamlining existing processes—it’s reshaping the future of sales through compounded intelligence, driving smarter, faster, and more impactful results.

The Compound Startup: The Future of Application Companies

Clarify also represents the future of application software; sometimes referred to as the compound startup. Unlike traditional application companies that solve a single problem, compound startups bundle multiple applications into one intelligent, unified platform. Enabled by investments made over the past decade in the modern data stack and unlocked by the transformative potential of large language models and agentic AI, this approach allows startups to tackle bigger problems with greater ambition.

This approach sets the stage for companies that are significantly more ambitious and impactful than their predecessors, as they harness compounded intelligence and unified data. Clarify is at the forefront of this shift, leading the way by integrating the entire sales workflow into one autonomous platform. I anticipate many more startups adopting this model—something I'll explore in greater depth soon. 

This is why I'm excited to be partnering with Clarify—expect to hear more from me soon as I continue exploring the evolution of AI and how it will impact the future of the application layer.