Salesforce Cresta Acquisition Puts AI Voice Agents on the Phone

Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to buy Cresta, a voice AI company whose agents handle customer service calls, the company announced on November 2, 2026. Salesforce did not disclose terms, but The Information reports the price at about $2.7 billion, which would make the Salesforce Cresta acquisition one of its larger AI deals this year.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2028, which runs from roughly February to April 2027. It still needs regulatory approval and the usual closing conditions.

What Cresta Brings to Salesforce

Cresta builds voice agents that resolve complex calls from start to finish, holding real-time conversations and handling interruptions. The same platform coaches human representatives live during calls and analyzes every interaction, so companies can test and grade voice agents and human staff against the same quality bar.

According to the official Salesforce announcement, Cresta’s voice agents already run at enterprise scale for brands including Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines. Salesforce plans to tie that conversation data to the customer history it keeps in Service Cloud, its customer support product.

“Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers,” said Kishan Chetan, EVP and general manager of Agentforce and Service Cloud at Salesforce. He added that as more service is resolved inside the conversation itself, the combined company will bring “the customer, the conversation and the outcome into one place.”

Cresta CEO Ping Wu said joining Salesforce will let the company “realize our full vision at scale” by embedding real-time conversation intelligence directly into Salesforce’s customer service platform.

Why the Salesforce Cresta Acquisition Matters

Phone calls remain the most expensive and most sensitive part of customer support, and they have been harder to automate than chat. Buying Cresta gives Salesforce a working voice layer rather than building one from scratch, and it arrives only days after the Salesforce Rune acquisition brought AI tools for military logistics into the company.

Notably, Salesforce says Cresta will keep supporting the third-party contact center and telephony platforms its customers use today after the deal closes. That suggests Salesforce wants Cresta’s AI to sit on top of existing call center systems instead of forcing customers onto its own stack.

Cresta was founded in 2017 out of Stanford’s AI Lab and was valued at $1.6 billion in a 2022 funding round. If the reported $2.7 billion figure is accurate, the deal values the company well above that mark.

The move also fits a wider wave of consolidation in voice AI, where infrastructure players are snapping up smaller rivals, as seen when Deepgram acquired Daily earlier this month. For businesses, the practical question is how quickly Cresta’s agents show up inside Agentforce and Service Cloud once regulators sign off.