258 sales and marketing pros voted across a category Salesforce defines but no longer dominates across every dimension. Here is what the results reveal.
The May 2026 IT Brand Pulse AI Brand Leader survey asked 258 sales and marketing professionals to vote for Market, Intelligence & Innovation, Creativity & Expression, Accuracy & Trust, and Human Empowerment leaders in CRM Platforms, one of 23 products in the AI Sales and Marketing stack. Salesforce was voted Market Leader with 35.66% of votes, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 finishing second at 26.36%. Salesforce was voted Intelligence & Innovation Leader (27.91%). HubSpot was voted Creativity & Expression Leader (27.13%). Salesforce was voted Accuracy & Trust Leader (36.82%). HubSpot was voted Human Empowerment Leader (32.17%).
Salesforce’s command of three pillars (Market, Innovation, Trust) confirms its role as the category-defining CRM, while HubSpot’s leadership in Creativity & Expression and Human Empowerment shows that buyers want different things from different CRMs: enterprise scale and AI sophistication on one hand, accessible workflows and seller productivity on the other. The IT Brand Pulse analyst team expects CRM to converge with AI agent platforms, with future Brand Leader voting rewarding the depth of agentic automation, the quality of AI-driven insights at the deal and account level, and the ability to make CRM useful for everyday users — not just administrators.
What Are CRM Platforms?
IT Brand Pulse defines CRM Platforms as the system of record for customer relationships, sales opportunities, pipeline activity, account histories, and revenue workflows. In the AI era, CRM is evolving from a passive database into an intelligent customer operating system that embeds AI assistants, predictive insights, workflow automation, data enrichment, and next-best-action recommendations directly into sales, marketing, and service processes. CRM Platforms sits within the AI Sales Products sublayer of the Horizontal Business Apps layer in the IT Brand Pulse AI Product Taxonomy, alongside Buyer Intent Data, Call Transcription & Analytics, Conversational Marketing, CPQ (Configure Price Quote), Proposal & Contract Management, Sales Assistant, Sales Compensation Management, Sales Enablement Platforms, Sales Engagement Platforms, Sales Forecasting Platforms, Sales Intelligence and Prospecting, and Website Visitor Identification.
Download the Brand Leader Report for CRM Platforms.
