Most enterprise CX leaders assume you need a CRM to manage customer relationships at scale. Aurelia Pollet, Director of Customer Experience at CarParts.com, shares a different perspective. Her team handles 43 million annual customers across 1 million SKUs while currently operating without traditional CRM infrastructure, and she explores how this approach might become more common as AI eliminates the integration complexity that made CRMs necessary. The core insight: AI can potentially coordinate data across telephony, email, chat, SMS, order management, ERP, and accounting systems without requiring a central hub to force these disparate systems to communicate. This could address the "left hand not talking to right hand" problem that has challenged enterprise customer service operations for decades. Instead of building expensive integrations between systems, AI could act as the intelligent layer that accesses and synthesizes information from multiple sources in real-time. Aurelia's implementation methodology centers on transcript analysis rather than theoretical workflow design. By examining actual customer service interactions across all channels, her team identifies which requests involve information provision versus complex problem-solving requiring empathy and advisory skills. This data-driven approach enabled them to deploy Spark, their AI assistant with access to the same data as human agents, while preserving human intervention for high-stakes scenarios requiring financial planning or technical troubleshooting expertise. Topics Discussed:  Current customer service architecture serving 43 million annual customers across 1 million SKUs without CRM systems AI coordination exploring alternatives to traditional system integrations between telephony, email, chat, SMS, and ERP systems  Call transcript analysis methodology for mapping information-provision versus empathy-required customer interactions Spark AI deployment with agent-level data access for 24/7 order tracking and account management Dynamic journey mapping replacing static customer experience documentation with real-time touchpoint visualization Cross-functional collaboration framework applying customer service methodologies to internal team management Strategic project prioritization balancing customer value delivery with quarterly company financial objectives AI guardrail implementation after unauthorized order cancellation and refund attempts by autonomous agents Listen to more episodes:  Apple  Spotify  YouTube