- Salesforce is buying AI customer service platform Fin for about $3.6 billion.
- The acquisition helps accelerate Salesforce’s agentic offering in an increasingly competitive environment for autonomous tech.
- The cloud company’s largest acquisition was a more than $27 billion deal for chat software platform Slack
Salesforce on Monday said it’s buying AI customer service platform Fin, formerly known as Intercom, for about $3.6 billion as businesses accelerate their agentic offerings for enterprises.
The deal, expected to close in the fourth quarter of the company’s fiscal 2027 year, will complement Salesforce’s flagship Agentforce platform, offering additional ways to deploy agentic artificial intelligence, the company said in a release.
Fin’s primary offering is an AI agent capable of resolving chat, email, WhatsApp, text message, phone, and Slack queries, Salesforce said. The agent is powered by its proprietary AI model known as Apex.
“Together, we’ll help companies of every size seize this opportunity — accelerating time to value with trusted agents that deliver measurable outcomes at scale,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a release.
Like many software-as-a-service companies, Salesforce is grappling with concerns that new AI tools will render its business model obsolete. The company’s shares have shed more than a third of their value in 2026.
At the same time, the rise of agentic AI is heightening competition and forcing companies to beef up and invest in more autonomous tech for customers.
“Over the past few years we’ve been shipping intensely,” Fin CEO Eoghan McCabe wrote in a post on X. “Including recently our groundbreaking model, Apex, and our paradigm-defining internal agent, Operator. With the resources of Salesforce, this will only accelerate.”
McCabe has publicly endorsed President Donald Trump and posted photos with the president and his administration on social media.
McCabe started Intercom in 2011, with Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett. The company changed its name to Fin last month, though McCabe said in a blog post at the time that the customer service software would continue as Intercom.
Intercom’s icon, which brings up a chat window for customer service, became a common feature in the bottom right corner of brands’ websites, leading other companies to build similar products.
McCabe ran into controversy in 2019, when The Information reported on allegations that the CEO had made “unwanted advances” towards some female employees. In a statement through a spokesperson, McCabe told the publication that he had “demonstrated some poor judgment” in the company’s earlier years and “apologized at the time.”
In 2020, McCabe announced that Intercom’s operating chief, former Intuit executive Karen Peacock, was taking over as CEO. McCabe returned in 2022, writing in a post that, “some of our board members asked if I’d come back and I felt called to finish what I started.”
In its nearly three-decade history, Salesforce has made several multibillion-dollar acquisitions. Its largest was a more than $27 billion deal for chat software developer Slack, which closed in 2021.
In its recent quarterly earnings report, Salesforce topped Wall Street’s estimates, but its backlog came up short.
Joining Jim Cramer‘s “Mad Money” following the results, Benioff shot down concerns that the company is getting disrupted by AI. He said the company saw “record” transactions in the first quarter, and Slack experienced strong growth due to AI.
“We’ve never seen this many large transactions happen, and also I think we’re going to see in the second quarter — attrition is probably coming down,” he said.
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/06/15/salesforce-ai-customer-service-fin-acquistion.html?shem=rimspwouoe,
