Salesforce Buys Cresta to Put AI on the Phone Line

Salesforce said on November 2 that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, a company whose AI answers customer phone calls and coaches human agents while they are still on the line. Salesforce did not disclose a price. The Information reported the deal at about $2.7 billion, which would be a sharp mark-up on Cresta's last public valuation of $1.6 billion, set by an $80 million funding round in 2022.

The logic is straightforward. Salesforce sells the software that large companies use to run their customer service, and the contact centre is one of the first places businesses have tried to hand routine work to AI. Cresta's voice agents already handle complex calls end to end for Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines, according to Salesforce, and the plan is to fold that technology into Service Cloud, the firm's customer-service product.

A fortnight of shopping

Cresta is Salesforce's third acquisition in two weeks, after the marketing firm Braze and the defence software company Rune Technologies. It also follows the roughly $3.6 billion purchase of Fin, formerly Intercom, which closed in September. The pace suggests a company trying to buy its way to a lead in applied AI rather than wait to build every piece in house, a contrast with rivals that have leaned on in-house models and partnerships.

The appeal of voice is partly that it is hard. Text chatbots have been bolted onto websites for years, with mixed results. A system that can hold a natural phone conversation, understand an irritated caller and resolve a billing dispute without a human is a stiffer test, and the companies that run millions of such calls a day are willing to pay to automate even a slice of them.

What the deal signals

For Salesforce, the attraction is the data and the relationships as much as the technology. Every call its customers route through Cresta becomes training material and a reason to stay inside the Salesforce ecosystem. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce's fiscal 2028, pending regulatory approval and the usual conditions.

It also fits a wider shift, from AI that answers questions to AI that takes action on a company's behalf. Retailers have begun opening their checkouts to automated shoppers, as Walmart did with its agent gateway, and investors backing these bets have grown bolder, as with the OpenAI-linked purchase of the home-security firm ADT. Cresta is a smaller deal than either, but it points the same way. The value is moving to whoever owns the moment a customer actually gets something done.