THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta on November 2; the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of its fiscal 2028, pending regulatory approvals.
  • Salesforce did not disclose the price; Runtime Wire cites a report by The Information putting it at $2.7 billion.
  • Cresta's voice agents and real-time assistance for human reps will be built into Service Cloud, and Cresta will keep supporting customers' existing telephony platforms.

Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, a company that sells AI software for customer phone calls. The announcement came on November 2. Salesforce expects the deal to close in the first quarter of its fiscal year 2028, which CMSWire places between February and April 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions.

What Cresta brings

Cresta presents itself as a voice-first operating system for customer experience. Its platform does two jobs. Voice agents take complex customer calls from start to finish, including handling interruptions mid-conversation. For human representatives, the software suggests answers in real time, writes call summaries and analyzes every interaction, scoring both human and AI agents so they can be coached and tested against the same quality bar. Unite.AI lists further features such as shared memory across channels, connections to billing and scheduling systems, and support for the Model Context Protocol.

According to Salesforce, Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines use Cresta's voice agents for complex calls. Cresta is led by chief executive Ping Wu.

How it fits into Salesforce

Salesforce plans to embed Cresta's conversation analysis and agents in Service Cloud, its customer service product, so that each call can be tied to the customer record and to outcomes such as resolution or retention. Kishan Chetan, who runs Agentforce and Service Cloud, argued that voice is the hardest service channel to get right. Salesforce also says Cresta will continue to work with the contact center and telephony systems its customers already use, a relevant point because, as CMSWire notes, Salesforce does not sell its own telephony stack.

Neither company disclosed financial terms. Runtime Wire reports a price of $2.7 billion, citing The Information; CMSWire, writing the same day, said no figure had been reported, so the number should be treated as unconfirmed.

A busy year of deals

Cresta is the latest in a long list of 2026 purchases. CMSWire counts agreements for Contentful, Fin (formerly Intercom), Listen Labs and Braze, the last valued at about $5.66 billion in enterprise value, as well as smaller deals such as m3ter and Loops. Taken together, the deals show Salesforce assembling content, engagement, research and now voice tools around its Agentforce agents. How quickly Cresta's technology reaches Service Cloud customers will depend on regulators and on the integration work after closing.