Salesforce returns to its acquisitive ways to help fill in agentic gaps

In 2023, Salesforce was reeling. The company was under attack from activist investors with as many as five different firms circling the CRM giant. As activists do, they felt the stock was undervalued and among their demands was to stop spending money on acquisitions.

The company had made a slew of them in prior years including three major ones from 2018-2020, each coming with an increasingly large price tag. Those three deals alone were worth around $50 billion and the activists were fed up. 

The company listened, going so far as to disband its M&A committee, the group charged with keeping an eye out for possible acquisition targets. But that was then and this now, and AI changed everything. By 2024, the company redirected its attention to agents and building Agentforce, but building an agentic tech stack from scratch is hard work. So Salesforce has rolled back the clock to start buying in bulk again, this time with an eye on adding pieces that can build on its growing agentic ambitions.

This week's $3.6 billion acquisition of the Irish company Fin (you probably know them as Intercom) is the latest move in that approach. 

Honey, where's my checkbook?

Every company faces the buy versus build decision at some point, but major enterprise platforms like Salesforce often use acquisitions as a shortcut to add functionality that would have taken time and resources to build on its own. It also gets talent and some new customers in the deal.

IDC analyst Oru Mohiuddin says this was an easy decision for Salesforce. "Fin's proprietary Apex model, validated resolution rates and existing enterprise customer base provide Salesforce with immediate, demonstrable capability in autonomous customer service, a domain where organic development would have carried significant time and execution risk," she told FastForward.

Mohiuddin adds that when viewed in the context of other recent deals, it starts to reveal a pattern focused on filling in gaps in the company's agentic capabilities. "Viewed alongside the Informatica and Convergence.ai acquisitions, a coherent platform architecture is taking shape: unified data management, intelligent workflow automation, and now front-line customer resolution," she said. "Salesforce is systematically constructing the infrastructure layer it believes enterprises will require to operationalise AI at scale."

Getting some bang for those big bucks

They are spending a fair bit of money to get Fin, but Shashi Bellamkonda, research director at Info-Tech Research Group believes it gives Salesforce a leg up in its agentic customer service game.

He points out that companies that used specialized AI tend to get better results at lower costs (and who wouldn't want that kind of formula). "Fin's tech has impressive results in handling 76% of support volume autonomously. They were relying on proprietary narrow models like Apex, purpose-built on billions of real customer interactions, rather than depending on general-purpose LLMs," Bellamkonda said.

Maribel Lopez, founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research agrees. "The Fin acquisition highlights that having agents and a model designed for a specific task and across channels delivers value," she said.

She also thinks it will accelerate Salesforce's time to market with a proven capability, another reason to open up the wallet. Salesforce stock is down around 36% this year, more motivation for Benioff to turn to what works, and in the past buying has (mostly) worked for him. 

Whether this continues to be the case in an age where AI coding makes it easier than ever to spin up new functionality remains to be seen. But Salesforce intends to stick with that tried and true acquisition formula until it doesn't work or the activists come back and force them to stop.