• by Laurie Sullivan , 2 hours ago

Salesforce on Monday announced the acquisition of Fin, an AI customer service platform, as it moves to help companies become agentic enterprises in a next move that ties customer service to media buying.

Under the terms of the agreement, Salesforce will acquire Fin for approximately $3.6 billion, subject to customary purchase price adjustments. The deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of the company’s fiscal 2027 year, will integrate with its agentic AI intelligence platform, Agentforce.

Marketers buying ad media have begun to think about customer service as a way to improve their brand. Ads only generate attention, while customer service protects the media investment by converting that attention into long-term customers. 

Fin offers an AI agent capable of resolving issues through chat, email, WhatsApp, text message, phone, and Slack queries. It also offers first-party data per company to determine past and possibly predict future issues that can be solved prior to challenges occurring.

The technology will track URM parameters, which lets marketers know where online traffic comes from, to identify the campaigns in which customers convert from. It also measures the return on investment by comparing generated revenue with campaign costs, according to its chatbot. It lets marketers filter leads and users by Urchin Tracking Module tag data for marketing analysis to identify the campaign driving the most engaged users that inform media buying decisions. 

The goal is for Salesforce and Fin to give customers more ways to deploy AI agents across their customer service operations, and support customers at each stage of AI adoption, such as deployment of support agents, as well as changes to the enterprise built on data, security, governance, and integration.

Fin’s primary offering is an AI agent capable of resolving chat, email, WhatsApp, text message, phone, and Slack queries, Salesforce said. Powering the agent is Apex, a proprietary model that Fin says is built specifically to support customer service.

The agent closes out roughly 76% of incoming support requests with no need for a human agent to step in, according to Salesforce documentation.

The engine goes through a retrieval process by searching across all available sources such as help center articles, resolved conversations, structured snippets, integrated systems and more, selecting the most relevant information to be used to answer and resolve the query accurately.

The acquisition also brings Fin's technical AI team to Salesforce, along with the company's global customer base of more than 30,000 companies. In a post on Fin's website, the company states it has resolved more than 2 million conversations weekly, and doubling growth year on year, surpassing $400 million in annual recurring revenue.

Founded as Intercom in 2011, founders reinvented the company with the onset of AI to rebuild its products, infrastructure, and team around AI. Now the company employs more than 1,400 people across six global offices.

"We're thrilled to welcome Fin to Salesforce as we enable every company to become an agentic enterprise," stated Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff in a release. "Together, we'll help companies of every size seize this opportunity — accelerating time to value with trusted agents that deliver measurable outcomes at scale."