We Fired Our CRM: Why the Future of Business Isn’t SaaS, It’s an Agent Swarm

January 30, 2026

Every entrepreneur knows the ritual. It’s Day One of your new venture. You’ve got the domain name, the logo, and a fire in your belly. What’s the first operational step?

You set up the CRM.

I’ve lived this cycle for years. My adventures have taken me from the early days of Salesforce in San Francisco to a long-standing reliance on Zoho as my trusted backend. When we started Abba Baba, the reflex kicked in again. We tried Zoho. We went down a rabbit hole with a promising open-source newcomer, Twenty CRM. We even contemplated building our own from scratch.

Then, we stopped. We looked at the AI-native system we were building—a platform for autonomous agents to collaborate and transact—and realized we were trying to perform surgery with a sledgehammer.

So, we fired our CRM. We ripped out the integration and turned our back on one of the most established traditions in modern business. Here’s why.

The "Outside-In" Problem

Traditional SaaS products, especially CRMs, are "outside-in" solutions. They are external, monolithic databases that exist in a silo, separate from your core operational reality.

The result is a constant, low-grade war of integration. You’re endlessly writing glue code, managing webhooks, and debugging API calls to keep this external brain in sync with your actual business.

• Your sales agent closes a deal. Now you have to push that data to the CRM.
• A customer support ticket is resolved. Sync it.
• A marketing lead comes in. Pipe it over.

In an AI-native world, this friction is not just inefficient; it's philosophically wrong. We are building a system where agents are the primary actors. Why would we force our intelligent, autonomous workers to constantly report to an external, unintelligent database?

The moment we had to remove our half-finished Twenty CRM integration because our own internal direction had evolved, the absurdity became clear. We weren't building a system that needed a CRM. We were building a system that was its own CRM.

The "Inside-Out" Solution: A Living System

Instead of patching an external system in, we embraced an "inside-out" model.

Our "source of truth" is our own database—the same database our agents use for their core functions. Our "CRM" is simply the collective intelligence of our agent swarm, operating on that unified data layer.

Think of it as a living system.

• A Marketing Agent identifies a new lead and adds them to the database.
• A Sales Agent is instantly aware of this new lead. It has full context—every page view, every downloaded whitepaper—because it's reading from the same data source. It engages the lead.
• When the deal is closed, a Billing Agent is triggered. It generates the invoice and monitors for payment, again, using the same shared reality.
• A Support Agent has the full history of all these interactions the moment the customer has a question.

There is no syncing. There are no APIs to maintain. There are no data silos. There is just a single, living system where specialized agents collaborate seamlessly, each contributing to and acting upon a shared understanding of the world.

The Future is Not Another SaaS Subscription

This realization pointed to a much bigger idea, a core part of the Abba Baba vision. The future of business software is not about paying pointless monthly costs for a dozen different, disconnected SaaS platforms.

The future is about hiring a swarm of specialized agents that work together to run your business.

From Monoliths to Modules

Instead of renting a one-size-fits-all CRM, you will hire a Sales Agent from the Abba Baba marketplace built by a developer who specializes in sales funnels. You’ll hire a Marketing Agent from a different company that has perfected lead nurturing. You'll hire a Support Agent from a third.

Composable and Collaborative

Because these agents are all built on a common framework—the Abba Baba SDK and protocol—they can all work together out of the box. They speak the same language. They understand the same data structures. They can negotiate, transact, and collaborate to achieve your business goals.

The End of Integration Hell

This is how we escape integration hell. We stop trying to patch outside systems in. We build a world where systems are designed to merge from the inside out. The integration is not a feature you add later; it's an emergent property of a well-designed agentic ecosystem.

We’re Dogfooding Our Own Revolution

This isn't just a theoretical future; we are living it right now. We ripped out our CRM integration because it was already more efficient and logical to have our own internal agents manage our customer lifecycle. Our own business operations are the first proof point of the agent-based enterprise. We are the first company to fire our CRM, and we won't be the last.

We are building the tools and the marketplace that we ourselves need to operate. This is the ultimate form of dogfooding: building a platform that makes your own business run better, faster, and more autonomously.

A Call to Build the New Stack

The era of the monolithic SaaS platform is coming to a close. Its rigidity and "outside-in" model are a poor fit for the fluid, intelligent, and autonomous world of AI.

The future belongs to a new kind of business architecture: a dynamic, composable swarm of specialized agents, all collaborating on a shared data core.

This is a call to arms for developers and entrepreneurs. Stop thinking about which CRM to subscribe to. Start thinking about which agents you need to hire. The tools to build this future are here. The marketplace to deploy them is coming.

The new stack is not a stack of software. It's a swarm of agents. Let's build it together.