Salesforce to acquire voice-AI startup Cresta

Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, a startup that builds voice AI agents for customer-service calls, the companies announced Monday. Cresta’s technology handles complex customer calls end to end, coaching human agents in real time while analyzing every interaction, and is already used at enterprise scale by brands including Marriott, Comcast, and Alaska Airlines. Cresta also tests and scores its voice agents against the same quality bar it holds human representatives to, a feedback loop meant to make each subsequent interaction better.

The deal folds Cresta into Salesforce’s Service Cloud and Agentforce products, pairing Salesforce’s customer data and systems with Cresta’s conversation intelligence so that voice interactions connect directly to customer history and business outcomes. Cresta will keep supporting the contact-center and telephony platforms its customers already use after the deal closes. “Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers,” said Kishan Chetan, who leads Agentforce and Service Cloud at Salesforce.

Cresta frames the tie-up as a way to scale its own ambitions rather than just an exit: CEO Ping Wu has described the startup’s goal as giving businesses a single agentic operating system that turns every customer interaction into a competitive advantage, and says folding that system into Salesforce’s reach lets Cresta pursue that vision at a much larger scale.

Salesforce did not disclose what it’s paying for Cresta. It expects the deal to wrap up early in its 2028 fiscal year, pending regulatory sign-off and other standard conditions.

Why it matters

The deal adds a voice-native AI layer to Salesforce’s Agentforce push, letting it sell automated handling of a company’s highest-stakes customer calls — not just chat or email — as part of the same CRM platform.