Salesforce is swinging for the fences with contact center AI deals, including its plan to buy Cresta.
The company has rapidly expanded its contact center as a service (CCaaS) platform this year, including major releases at Dreamforce in September. While most of the planned $5.66 billion Braze acquisition focuses on marketing, its AI, data and messaging capabilities could overlap with contact center operations. Salesforce’s $3.6 billion Fin acquisition, announced in June and completed in September, focused on customer service agents.
Cresta specializes in voice AI conversation intelligence — handling customer service calls and handing them to humans when needed, as well as offering agent assist features. Its Opera no-code orchestration platform connects contact centers to other systems, such as CRMs like Salesforce.
The company has bona fides many other startups don't: Launched out of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2017, Cresta counts United Airlines, Cox Communications, Marriott and other Fortune 500 companies among its customers. It has more than 600 employees.
Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and principal analyst at Valoir, said Cresta's strength in voice AI fills a gap in Salesforce's contact center offering. The deal could also help bring the context of voice conversations into Salesforce's customer data rather than leaving it with another provider.
Salesforce has not disclosed the Cresta deal price, but The Information reported a value of $2.7 billion. Subject to regulatory approvals, the deal is expected to close in Salesforce's first fiscal quarter of 2028, between February and April 2027.
Salesforce late to the contact center party
Up until this year, Salesforce has been a partner to large CCaaS vendors, mostly letting the partners handle voice and a chunk of customer service AI orchestration as well. Its Service Cloud serves as a front end for agents and, until this year, has mostly counted on partners for telephony.
Contact centers are a mature market, with 42.3% of surveyed organizations owning and operating their contact center platforms, either at their own locations or in third-party data centers, according to Metrigy research published in 2023. Such organizations may face additional integration work before adopting AI tied to data platforms such as Salesforce's Data 360.
Wettemann believes that the Cresta acquisition would, in the short term, bring instant credibility to Salesforce's contact center products with a good, stable roster of customers. It would also give Salesforce a more credible argument for managing a company's cross-vendor AI orchestration for CX, because Cresta brings well-established voice-channel AI to the Salesforce stack, which had been a gap.
"This creates issues for Cresta partners that have taken advantage of Cresta's AI instead of developing their own."
Rebecca Wettemann
CEO and principal analyst, Valoir
A potential snag for partners, however, could be that contact center technology companies that work with Salesforce — and partner with Cresta for voice AI — may rethink their relationships as competition ramps up. Salesforce says Cresta will continue supporting other contact center and telephony platforms after the deal closes.
"This creates issues for Cresta partners that have taken advantage of Cresta's AI instead of developing their own," Wettemann said. "So if I'm a Five9, Nice or even ServiceNow — or any of the other Cresta partners right now — I've got to look at my strategy, given that Salesforce is going to own a big piece of my voice data and my voice analysis."
Benioff's acquisition spree holds up, for now
In late 2022 and early 2023, Salesforce faced pressure from activist investors including Starboard Value and Elliott Management. The company cut about 10% of its workforce, reduced office space, expanded its share-repurchase authorization to $20 billion and disbanded its board's mergers and acquisitions committee. Elliott ultimately abandoned its planned board challenge, averting a proxy contest.
This year, CEO Marc Benioff is back to his acquisitive ways, with more than $10 billion in completed or proposed deals involving Cresta, Braze and Fin, among other acquisitions. The spending raises the question of how investors will respond after Salesforce's earlier activist battles.
"We've seen huge valuations for AI companies, which doesn't make this look like that much to spend."
Rebecca Wettemann
CEO and principal analyst, Valoir
Wettemann believes the sky-high valuations of AI companies play a part in that; these recent acquisitions may seem expensive, but in the grand scheme of Silicon Valley, they appear to be bargains.
"I think he still has to worry about [activist investors]. You're seeing Salesforce spend more conservatively in other areas than it historically has," she said. "Those controls haven't gone away. We've seen huge valuations for AI companies, which doesn't make this look like that much to spend."
Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with over 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.
