How-to· 1 min
AI on a dirty CRM produces numbers nobody believes
AI does not compensate for missing data; it reports it as zero.
AI Tools Hub Editorial · published · updated
What dirty data does
- The same account exists three times, splitting its history
- Blank deal values make the forecast total meaningless
- Lost deals sit in "in progress" because nobody updated the stage
- Contacts who left the company are still the primary
Clean in this order
| Order | Scope | Action |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Open deals | Verify stage and value on every record |
| 2 | Duplicate accounts | Merge |
| 3 | Losses in the last year | Fill in the loss reason |
| 4 | Anything older | Leave it and exclude it from scope |
Delete fields nobody fills
Making a field mandatory produces garbage values. A field that is eighty percent "other" is worse than absent. Use the AI project as the occasion to delete fields that no decision depends on.
Use AI on the hygiene itself
Inferring stage from call records, extracting next actions from email, writing meeting summaries into the CRM — reducing entry effort shrinks the staleness problem at its source. Keep inferred values labelled as inferred, or unsourced numbers start circulating as fact.
FAQ
How long does it take?
For a few hundred deals, two or three days to verify open ones; one to two weeks for merging duplicates. Scoping it to all history makes it never finish.