Q&A: “Beyond the Platform”

Jenny Watkins from Intercloud9 and Matt Dunphy from GetSavi recently recorded a Q&A conversation ahead of a live roundtable with senior trade union leaders.

What emerged goes well beyond the usual platform-selection debate: the governance questions underneath a technology ecosystem, a provocation about whether CRM as we know it will even exist in five to ten years, and what it all means for the skills of the people doing this work.

A union is an insurance policy

The whole conversation rests on one idea. For many members, a union is, in effect, an insurance policy. When something goes wrong, a dismissal, a disciplinary, a crisis, they need a fast, human, supported response from their union at that moment. Everything else the union does, its admin, data and workflows, should serve those moments. The real question for any technology decision is whether the systems are built with that in mind.

Governing an ecosystem is harder than buying one

Most trade unions now broadly accept the direction of travel towards a technology ecosystem rather than a single platform that tries to be all things to all people. Jenny Watkins believes that the hard questions sit underneath that acceptance.

The hard questions are centred around the how. What integration do you need to hold that ecosystem together? Where does data migration fit into that? And what does protecting subscription integrity and reporting mean in an ecosystem model, where reporting and data can become quite fragmented?”

The aim is architecture and governance that let an ecosystem evolve with technology change far faster than a single-platform setup allows. And, crucially, these are exactly the things vendor conversations aren’t designed to answer. Procuring an ecosystem has its complexities, but governing one is the harder question.

So who should own integration architecture? Jenny starts by ruling someone out: not the software vendors, who potentially stand to profit from customisation of the ecosystem. Ownership belongs in-house, with external technical support brought in where needed. The payoff is flexibility.

The governance is really what lets you replace one component of the system without dismantling everything else around it.”

Her practical model is disaggregation: breaking the ecosystem into constituent parts, a core CRM or association management system with case management, mass communications and learning systems around it, and tendering those parts as separate lots.

There isn’t a single CRM system in the market that does everything unions need it to do right now, particularly the larger unions. Ultimately what that gives unions is the flexibility to procure best-of-breed systems, rather than the core CRM having everything built into it, which I believe actually increases cost, risk and time to implement and drives the supplier dependency we’ve seen in the sector over the last 20 years or so.”

The migration risk vendors underplay

Ask Jenny what keeps her awake at night and the answer is data migration. Data is the underlying factor that drives subscription integrity, member engagement and financial data, above everything else. The common failure mode is the lift and shift, where a vendor brings existing data across into the new platform exactly as it stands.

Lift and shift carries with it poor data quality, and therefore undermines everything that comes after it, and especially AI… What I’ve seen get underplayed is the true cost, time and risk, and how much rests on those early data decisions.”

This isn’t a criticism of vendors, who have little alternative when handed a client’s data. The responsibility sits with the union having its own house in order first, above all a clear data retention policy applied consistently over the years. The stakes are also higher for unions: membership is a protected characteristic under GDPR, and vendor approaches to security are often weak here. And there is a cost dimension. Lift and shift 20 years’ worth of data onto a consumption-based platform such as Microsoft Dynamics, where costs follow the volume of data held, and without automated archiving and deletion those costs ramp up very rapidly.

The AI provocation: what if CRM as we know it doesn’t exist?

The conversation then turns to a deliberate provocation: trade unions should start planning for a future where CRM, as we know it, may not exist. Not in 50 years’ time, but potentially within five to ten.

The provocation here is perhaps not quite that CRMs will disappear, but that the model will shift dramatically away from human beings interacting with the CRM through a user interface, updating records, creating records, towards a world where the CRM holds the data, and it’s actually agents that are performing those updates and creating those records.”

Much of what we expect CRM to do today, including workflow management, task assignment and case routing, will increasingly be done by AI rather than inside a screen by a human. As agentic AI matures, the case for a person clicking through an interface gets weaker and weaker.

Which parts of the member journey could agents take on first? Jenny’s answer draws on a framework she has built, the Membership Value Cycle Model, mapping acquisition, activation, engagement and retention as a loop. Almost all of these activities are currently performed by people, yet the technology to deliver them through agents already exists. Activation is a good example: today’s CRM welcome is a fairly vanilla welcome pack and membership card, where an agentic welcome could be personalised to the individual member, the reasons they joined and the value proposition that matters to them. The point is to use technology to serve value to the member at each stage, rather than the other way around.

The ethics of handing work to agents

A future full of agents raises ethical questions, and Matt is candid about them, starting with climate. AI usage contributes to the climate problem, and his answer is alignment: tying an organisation’s responsible use of AI to its net-zero plans and carbon reduction activities, so consumption is managed directly through governance.

He also sees opportunity rather than just risk. AI is being driven by tech giants selling products, which gives leaders in UK trade unions the chance to define their own principles for responsible use, debate them across the organisation, and then practise them in what they implement.

If we’re talking to our professional members or our union members about their rights, and not seeing their careers disrupted or too affected by the advance of AI, then we must make sure our own use of it doesn’t contradict that message.”

Skills: from debate to action

How does workforce adoption of AI actually operate? Matt describes a familiar curve: roughly 18 to 20 per cent adopt early, around 60 per cent follow as the majority, and a final 20 per cent resist or need more support. In a union, the early adopters are typically the IT and digital team plus fast followers elsewhere; the majority covers operational staff such as contact centres and membership teams, along with leaders. Late adopters include staff whose roles have historically been face-to-face rather than technology-focused (“there’s no shame in that”), plus people who resist on political or ethical grounds and need real negotiation rather than being pushed.

On skills, he sets out a simple sequence: skills bytes, short-form e-learning that gives anyone a low hurdle to raise their awareness; in-flow-of-work learning, where training plans meet core systems and unions should ask vendors where AI is truly cutting manual effort; and specialist training, micro-credentials or longer qualifications, particularly for IT and digital leads. The flow-of-work idea also explains the wider boom: tools like ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude have taken off precisely because they solve daily needs.

Where should a leader start on skills gaps? Matt is direct: “we need to move from debates to action now.” Consult the IT and digital teams about what they are already learning, then commission a broader training needs assessment through an L&D team or consultancy.

On urgency, adoption is further ahead in the corporate and private sectors, which makes this pressing for unions. Leaders should be agreeing tangible plans this year and into next, with the more transformative changes landing in a three-to-five-year window. Waiting has a cost: “The further behind you get, the anxiety levels go up, and it’s such a harder win-back campaign to get where you need to be.” Jenny agrees bluntly: these are skills the workforce needs, and lagging affects people’s careers.

How you know adoption is working

The signs of real adoption show up at every level. At leadership level, one or two true champions sit in the senior team, accountable for a genuine rollout plan, and sceptical debate gives way to plans, action and monitoring. At manager level, training plans are actually in progress and the topic is embedded in everyday one-to-one conversations. On the ground, super users appear, visibly instructing colleagues and championing AI inside the CRM. The organisation develops true specialists, particularly in agentic AI. And culturally, vocal resistance reduces as the change becomes business as usual rather than a live debate.

The platform is the last decision, not the first
The conversation ends where it began. A union is an insurance policy for many, and everything the technology does should serve the moment a member needs their union. Get the architecture right, the governance right and the member outcomes clear, and the platform choices flow far more easily and safely from that point.

Matt’s closing reflection puts the responsibility back on people rather than process: have the ethical debates you need, focus on principles for responsible use as leaders, and remember this is an opportunity to give the workforce what they may well need, whether that’s CRM as we know it or something very different altogether.

Jen and Matt are planning a full trade union roundtable later this year to take these questions further with senior leaders across the sector. If anything here prompts a question you’d rather talk through directly, you can reach them at jenny@intercloud9.co.uk and matt@getsavi.co.uk.