Salesforce’s most recent acquisition

aims to increase profits using AI voice agents.

The change is expected to strengthen Salesforce’s line of voice-based AI customer care solutions.

Salesforce said that it has reached a deal to buy Tenyx, a company that develops AI-powered speech agents. As part of the acquisition, Salesforce will integrate Tenyx’s employees and technology.

After the purchase closes, Tenyx’s technology will be integrated into Salesforce, giving it access to more autonomous agent capabilities within “Agentforce Service Agent.”

Salesforce stated that Tenyx’s experience will assist “advance its AI-driven solutions,” especially in terms of enhancing customer relations by simplifying and streamlining the process of interacting with AI agents.

Notably, as part of the acquisition, Tenyx’s co-founders, CEO Itamar Arel and CTO Adam Earle, will join Salesforce and work with the company to develop new AI-powered Salesforce products.

Salesforce Service Cloud will be able to set new benchmarks for customer experience because to Tenyx’s extensive speech AI expertise, the firm said in a statement.

The transaction is scheduled to close during Salesforce’s fiscal year, which concludes on October 31, 2024, in Q3 2025. There will be typical closing conditions applied.

Salesforce has made similar announcements with other AI developers within the past year or two to bolster its position in the industry; this is not the company’s first move in this area.

Salesforce, for instance, signed a similar contract with Airkit.ai, a business that enables users to create no-code customer support agents, in September of last year.

The following month, the transaction finalized, and Airkit.ai was integrated into Salesforce’s Service Cloud platform, continuing to be run by co-founder and chief technology officer Adam Evans.

Additionally, it has made investments in a variety of AI businesses, including two Series C funding rounds totaling $270 million and $400 million given to Anthropic and Cohere, respectively.

The strategy Salesforce is using to get talent is starting to repeat itself.
Employing personnel from the companies they invest in or purchase is an approach that businesses are increasingly using to emulate Salesforce, as opposed to only absorbing intellectual property (IP).

Microsoft is a good example. Alongside investing in Inflection, Microsoft poached the firm’s chief AI executive Mustafa Suleyman, as well as two of the company’s other co-founders.

Richard Conway, Founder of Elastacloud and Group CTO at Acora, thinks that this attraction to gaining staff through acquisition speaks volumes about the current availability of talent at high levels in the industry.

“Across the tech industry we are seeing a diminishing workforce of skilled and talented individuals. As more experienced individuals retire or move into non-technical roles, and with a hesitancy to invest in junior developers, the skills gap is widening,” Conway told ITPro.

“This growing gap makes acquisitions increasingly attractive for companies seeking to tap into pools of talented developers, engineers, and data scientists,” he added.

Though IP is valuable, Conway said, businesses need a strong skill base to “nurture and grow” IP and ensure that acquired technologies become even more valuable.

While purchasing a company just for its IP is logical, he elaborated, it can be counterproductive if a purchased codebase takes a long time to be fully integrated into existing software.

“Having a team of technically proficient staff who understand product development cycles enables the acquiring company to recreate and adapt IP far more efficiently. In this context, the technical skills are crucial.”.