Artificial intelligence is changing how firms interpret customer records, support service employees and communicate across commercial channels. Its value depends on the quality of the relationship it helps maintain. This paper examines AI-based customer relationship management through a critical narrative review and descriptive analysis of published evidence. Nine journal articles are considered alongside official enterprise statistics and an AI risk framework. The review distinguishes ordinary CRM adoption from the deployment of AI within CRM. It also separates operational productivity from customer trust and durable commercial value. Two charts reproduce attributed Eurostat observations, while an original conceptual diagram connects data readiness, bounded assistance, human decisions and relationship outcomes. The synthesis suggests that useful deployment requires clear task boundaries, reliable knowledge sources, accessible correction and evaluation beyond response speed. A proposed implementation roadmap and research propositions identify ways to examine these conditions in future field studies. No primary survey, customer experiment or statistical hypothesis test is reported. The paper contributes a practical basis for studying AI-assisted relationships without treating software ownership, automation volume or conversational fluency as proof of customer benefit..
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Swami et al. (2026) studied this question.
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