Salesforce signs agreement to acquire voice AI company Cresta

Salesforce announced a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, a company that describes itself as a "voice-first operating system for customer experience." Cresta's voice agents hold real-time conversations and handle interruptions, and the same platform guides human representatives during live calls, analyses interactions, coaches staff and tests the agents. The company is nine years old and started at Stanford University's AI Lab; its customers include Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines.

Salesforce did not disclose a purchase price. A person familiar with the deal told The Information it is $2.7bn, a figure The Next Web said it had not independently verified. Closing is expected in the first quarter of Salesforce's fiscal year 2028, subject to regulatory approvals. Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM of Agentforce and Service Cloud, said "Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers." Salesforce plans to combine Cresta with Service Cloud, and said Cresta will keep supporting the contact centre and telephony platforms its customers already use. The deal follows Salesforce's $5.7bn agreement to buy Braze, announced on 20 October.

Why it matters for digital humans: Interruption-tolerant, full-duplex voice is the layer every conversational avatar sits on top of, and it is being consolidated into the big CX suites rather than sold as an independent component. Deepgram's purchase of Daily earlier this month pointed the same way. For anyone building a digital human on a third-party voice stack, the practical question is whether the vendor stays available as neutral infrastructure after an acquisition or becomes a feature of a suite you are not using. The $2.7bn figure is a single unnamed source reported by one outlet, not a disclosed number.