Salesforce to Buy Cresta, Betting on Voice AI Agents

Salesforce is buying its way further into the phone call. The company announced on 2 November that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, which it describes as “the voice-first operating system for customer experience.” Cresta’s voice agents resolve customer calls end to end, and its platform coaches human representatives in real time and analyses every interaction. Named customers include Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines. Salesforce did not disclose financial terms; The Information reported the price at about $2.7 billion, according to Crypto Briefing. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal 2028, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions.

Cresta sells three main products. Its AI Agent holds natural, real-time voice conversations, copes with callers who interrupt, and keeps shared memory so context survives a handoff between an AI and a human. Agentic Assist feeds human representatives hints, reminders and source-backed answers during a call and writes the summary afterwards. Conversation Intelligence analyses both human-led and AI-led calls, scores agent behaviour and feeds coaching plans and simulations. The company was founded in 2017 out of Stanford’s AI Lab, has raised more than $270 million and was estimated to have about $100 million in annual recurring revenue as of April 2026, according to Crypto Briefing. Its chief executive, Ping Wu, previously co-founded Google’s Contact Center AI.

Salesforce’s pitch is about connecting calls to the rest of the customer record. It plans to combine its customer history and workflow systems with Cresta’s conversation analysis and voice agents so that Service Cloud can “connect every conversation to the customer and to the outcome it drives: resolution, retention and revenue.” “Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers,” said Kishan Chetan, executive vice president and general manager of Agentforce and Service Cloud. Wu described the goal as building “a single agentic operating system for customer experience.” After closing, Salesforce says, Cresta will keep supporting the contact-centre and telephony platforms its customers already use.

The deal extends an acquisition run. Salesforce Ben counts Cresta as Salesforce’s third acquisition announcement in two weeks, after Rune Technologies and the marketing platform Braze. In June the company agreed to buy Fin, the customer-service software maker formerly called Intercom, for about $3.6 billion to strengthen Agentforce, a deal it expects to close by the end of January 2027. Cresta adds voice to that text-first stack. Salesforce had already given its Agentforce agents names and job titles, and voice is now one of the busiest corners of the agent market, as ElevenLabs’ $22 billion valuation showed.

The promise to keep Cresta working with other telephony and contact-centre systems is the clause buyers will watch. Many large call centres run on platforms Salesforce does not own, and Cresta’s value to them has been that it sits on top of whatever they already have. If the product keeps that neutrality inside Salesforce, Cresta gives Service Cloud a route into contact centres it does not yet serve. If it becomes a Salesforce-only feature, some of the customers that made it worth about $2.7 billion may start looking elsewhere.