The Salesforce logo is displayed in their office on Feb. 25, 2026 in San Francisco, California.
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Salesforce On Monday it said it is buying AI customer service Fin for about $3.6 billion as the firm accelerates its agent offering to businesses.
The deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2027, will complement the Agentforce platform, providing additional ways to leverage artificial intelligence, the company said in a statement.
Fin’s main offering is an AI agent that can solve chat, email, WhatsApp, text message, phone, and Slack queries, Salesforce said. The agent is powered by its own AI model known as Apex.
“Together, we will help companies of all sizes seize this opportunity – accelerating time to value with trusted agents that deliver measurable results at scale,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a release.
Like many software-as-a-service companies, Salesforce faces concerns that new AI tools will make its business model obsolete. Against this backdrop, Salesforce shares have shed more than a third of their value by 2026.
At the same time, the rise of agent AI increases competition and forces companies to strengthen and invest in customer-independent technology.
“Over the past few years we’ve been shipping a lot,” CEO Eoghan McCabe wrote in a social media post X. “Including our latest model, Apex, and our paradigm-defining internal agent, Operator. With Salesforce services, this will only accelerate.”
McCabe has publicly endorsed President Donald Trump and posted pictures with the president and his officials on social media.
In 2011 McCabe founded the startup with Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett. It was known as Intercom until May 2026, when McCabe announced a rebranding of Fin, saying that Intercom’s customer software would retain the name.
The Intercom icon, which brings up a customer service chat window, has become a common feature in the lower right corner of product websites, leading other companies to create similar products.
In 2020 McCabe announced that the manager of Intercom, who had been Intuit CEO Karen Peacock, would become the startup’s new CEO. This change happened after the newspaper The Information reported on allegations that McCabe had disguised himself as a female employee.
The company conducted an investigation, and McCabe told TechCrunch that he “pre-empted someone.” The board members asked him to return to run Intercom, which he did in 2022.
“We will be the dominant platform in the customer support space, and redefine that space. We will go head-to-head with Zendesk,” he wrote in an email to employees upon his return. Months ago, a group of investors led by private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and Permira had announced plans to take Zendesk private.
In its nearly three-decade history, Salesforce has made multibillion-dollar acquisitions. The largest was a more than $27 billion deal for chat software company Slack, which closed in 2021.
In its latest quarterly earnings report, Salesforce outperformed Wall Street estimates, but its backlog was short.
Joining “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer following the results, Benioff shot down concerns that the company is being disrupted by AI. He said the company saw “record” transactions in the first quarter, while Slack experienced strong growth thanks to AI.
“We haven’t seen this many large transactions happen, and I think we’ll see in the second quarter – it’s likely to be a slowdown,” he said.
– CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
