Salesforce is buying Cresta to put voice agents inside Service Cloud

Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, a company that sells AI voice agents and real-time coaching for contact centers. The price was not disclosed, and the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2028.

Salesforce announced the agreement on November 2, 2026. It describes Cresta as “the voice-first operating system for customer experience”. Closing is subject to customary conditions, including regulatory approvals.

What Cresta sells and who uses it

According to Salesforce, Cresta’s voice agents handle complex calls from start to finish in natural, real-time conversation. The platform also coaches human representatives while they are on a call, analyzes every interaction, and tests and improves the voice agents themselves.

Salesforce names Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines as brands that use Cresta at enterprise scale. Those are the company’s own descriptions of the customer base, and no usage figures, call volumes or revenue numbers were published with the announcement.

Cresta will keep supporting the contact center and telephony platforms its customers use today, Salesforce says. That matters for existing customers: nothing in the announcement says they must move to Salesforce’s own stack. The plan, as described, is to pair Salesforce’s customer history and workflow systems with Cresta’s conversation insights and voice agent capabilities, alongside Service Cloud.

Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM of Agentforce and Service Cloud, put the aim this way: “together we’ll bring the customer, the conversation and the outcome into one place.” Cresta CEO Ping Wu said that uniting the platform with Salesforce lets the company realize its full vision at scale.

What the announcement leaves open

Several details a customer would ask about are missing. There is no price, no timeline for product integration, and no word on how Cresta’s products will be packaged or priced inside Agentforce or Service Cloud. Until the deal closes, the two companies remain separate, and nothing changes for current users.

The claim that Cresta’s agents handle complex, high-volume calls is Salesforce’s, repeated from Chetan’s statement. It has not been independently verified, and the announcement cites no accuracy, containment or resolution rates.

A bet that the phone call is the next agent battleground

Salesforce’s customer-service pitch has largely rested on text channels and records stored in its CRM. Voice is a different problem: an agent must respond in real time, tolerate interruptions and hand a caller to a person without losing context. Buying a company that already runs this in production is a faster route than building it.

The purchase also fits a pattern of deal-making in recent weeks. On October 29, Salesforce signed an agreement to acquire Rune Technologies, a defense logistics software maker founded in 2024. That deal also has no disclosed price. Salesforce called it its most significant national security acquisition, citing 80% year-over-year growth in its defense business and a 10-year U.S. Army contract with a $5.6 billion ceiling. Two undisclosed-price acquisitions in four days, in very different markets, suggest Salesforce is buying specialist products to extend Agentforce rather than relying only on internal development.

Cresta’s own history adds context. CX Today reported that Genesys, Five9 and Zoom invested in the company alongside an $80 million Series C in 2022, led by Tiger Global. Techleap’s startup feed lists a $125 million Series D in November 2024. Genesys and Five9 are contact center platform vendors, which makes Salesforce’s promise to keep supporting the telephony platforms Cresta customers already use a practical necessity: many of the company’s customers presumably run on those systems. Valuation figures for Cresta vary widely between data aggregators and no primary source confirms them, so they are not repeated here.

Salesforce is also pushing agents into its other products. Last week it made the Slack code API generally available, letting developers build code channels for their own agents. Cresta would extend that agent push into the call center, where the work is spoken rather than typed.

What customers can expect and when

For now, nothing is available to buy from the combined company. Cresta customers keep their current contracts and integrations, and Salesforce customers cannot yet order Cresta’s voice agents through Service Cloud. Once the deal closes, which Salesforce expects in the first quarter of fiscal 2028, the roadmap, pricing and regional availability will have to be published. Regulatory approvals are the one named condition that could change that schedule.