  With today's savvy and empowered customers, sales requires more judgment and
becomes more cognitively intense than ever before. We argue that Situation
Awareness (SA) is at the center of effective sales and customer engagement in
this new era, and Information Fusion (IF) is the key for developing the next
generation of decision support systems for digital and AI transformation,
leveraging the ubiquitous virtual presence of sales and customer engagement
which provides substantially richer capacity to access information. We propose
a vision and path for the paradigm shift from Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) to the new paradigm of IF. We argue this new paradigm solves major
problems of the current CRM paradigm: (1) it reduces the burden of manual data
entry and enables more reliable, comprehensive and up-to-date data and
knowledge, (2) it enhances individual and team SA and alleviates information
silos with increased knowledge transferability, and (3) it enables a more
powerful ecosystem of applications by providing common shared layer of
computable knowledge assets.
