Salesforce to buy AI agent platform Fin for $3.6 billion

Salesforce moved to deepen its push into autonomous AI with a roughly $3.6 billion agreement to buy Fin, the customer-support agent platform formerly known as Intercom. The deal sharpened Salesforce’s bid to sell not just software, but AI systems that can answer routine questions, route harder problems and take over parts of office workflow at scale.

The acquisition centers on a product built for customer service across live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, phone and Slack. Fin’s core offering, called AI Agent, runs on its proprietary model Apex, which Salesforce said is purpose-built for customer support and designed to improve autonomous resolution while lowering cost-to-serve. Salesforce also said the combined offering would give smaller and midsize businesses faster deployment and tighter integration with existing systems.

Marc Benioff framed the purchase as part of a larger shift in how Salesforce wants to be seen. He said the goal is to help every company become an “agentic enterprise,” signaling that the company now wants to be judged on how well its AI agents can rework day-to-day business tasks, not just add chatbot features to existing products. Eoghan McCabe, Fin’s chief executive, said joining Salesforce would let the technology move “far and wide” faster than Fin could manage on its own.

The deal also reflects the pressure Salesforce faces in a market unsettled by artificial intelligence. Salesforce shares have fallen by more than a third in 2026 as investors worry that new AI tools could weaken traditional software-as-a-service models. Against that backdrop, the company has been leaning harder into Agentforce, which it said reached $1.2 billion in annual recurring revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2027, up 205% from a year earlier. Salesforce said that momentum shows it can still command enterprise spending even as the market shifts toward automation.

The company said the acquisition would close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2027, subject to customary purchase price adjustments. It follows Salesforce’s $8 billion purchase of Informatica in May 2025 and comes after Slack, bought for more than $27 billion, became the company’s largest prior acquisition. Fin already counted Anthropic, Kalshi and DoorDash among its customers, a sign that its customer-support automation had gained traction with fast-growing technology and consumer companies. Together, the moves show an enterprise AI race moving quickly from experiments to consolidation, with Salesforce trying to own more of the software, data and workflow stack that corporate buyers will need next.