Salesforce to buy Cresta, reportedly for $2.7 billion, to add AI voice agents

Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to buy Cresta, a company whose artificial intelligence answers and handles customer phone calls, the US software maker announced on Monday, 2 November 2026. Salesforce did not disclose the price; several technology publications reported it at about $2.7 billion. Cresta makes "voice agents" that can take a customer call from start to finish, along with tools that coach human call-centre staff in real time and analyse every conversation. Salesforce said it plans to combine Cresta's technology with Service Cloud, its customer-support software, and Agentforce, its family of AI agents. According to one financial news report, the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce's fiscal year 2028, subject to the usual conditions.

Customer service is one of the first big business functions that AI is changing at scale. A customer-relationship management (CRM) system like Salesforce holds a company's record of who its customers are and what they have bought. A contact centre is where many of those customers actually talk to the company. Salesforce describes the deal as bringing the customer, the conversation and the outcome together in one place: an AI agent on the phone that can see the customer's history and act on it.

For businesses, the promise is fewer people needed for routine calls, faster answers and better data on why customers call. Industry analysts have noted that voice was a gap in Salesforce's AI offer, and that the deal fills it. They have also pointed out why Salesforce promised to keep Cresta working with other contact-centre platforms: many of Cresta's existing customers run their call centres on software from companies that compete with, or partner with, Salesforce, and breaking those links would risk losing them.

For India, the deal touches a large industry. India is home to many customer-service and business process outsourcing operations that handle calls for global companies, and to captive centres of multinational firms. Tools that let AI take whole calls, and coach the humans who remain, will shape how those centres are staffed and what skills their workers need. It is also a reminder that enterprise software buyers in India will increasingly be offered AI agents bundled into the CRM and support platforms they already pay for.

Peepals timeline: Salesforce announced the agreement to acquire Cresta on 2 November 2026. Until the deal closes, which one report expects in the first quarter of Salesforce's fiscal 2028, the two companies continue to operate separately, and Cresta keeps serving customers on rival contact-centre platforms. Salesforce has not put a public value on the deal; the $2.7 billion figure comes from media reports. Trade coverage places the purchase within a series of customer-experience acquisitions Salesforce has made in 2026.

Short-term: Nothing changes for Cresta's customers until the deal closes, and Salesforce has said Cresta will keep supporting their current telephony and contact-centre systems afterwards.

Long-term: Salesforce customers are likely to be offered AI voice agents inside Service Cloud and Agentforce, putting more pressure on rival contact-centre software makers and speeding up the use of AI on customer calls.

Who is affected: Companies that run customer-service operations; contact-centre and BPO workers, including in India; Cresta's existing customers; and competing customer-service software vendors.

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