Salesforce buys Fin for $3.6bn

Salesforce is set to acquire Fin for $3.6bn, giving the CRM giant an AI agent for customer service.

Fin was founded in 2011 as Intercom, with the chatbot maker rebranding as Fin last month. Over the last few years, the company has focused on developing an AI agent using its own Apex model that's built specifically for customer support.

Salesforce has its own agentic AI known as Agentforce, which was unveiled at the end of 2024. Earlier this year, Salesforce unveiled Agentforce Contact Centre, pulling together its AI agent and the company's CRM. Salesforce said Agentforce has reached an annual run rate of $1.2bn in the latest quarter, up 205% year on year.

"We're thrilled to welcome Fin to Salesforce as we enable every company to become an agentic enterprise," said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, in a statement. "Fin brings proven agent technology, a deep commitment to customer success, and an incredible AI team that will complement Agentforce with powerful service agent capabilities."

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter, subject to regulatory clearance.

Salesforce has pushed AI agents as the future of customer service, with CEO Marc Benioff saying his company has slashed 4,000 customer service roles in favour of AI agents so far. But one survey from earlier this year suggests customers don't agree with the AI chatbots for customer service, with more than two-thirds not confident in the way businesses use generative AI to interact with them, and half saying the transactions don't work.

Find a win-win for customers

Fin's AI agent is multichannel with support for chat, email, WhatsApp, Slack, and even the phone, covering all aspects of a customer journey from sales to service, with the company claiming it can update accounts, troubleshoot tech problems, and process refunds.

On its website, Fin claims to have industry-leading resolution rates of 76% across more than 12,000 customers, with that performance gaining a percentage point every month it's in use.

Fin's system is already in use by companies such as Asana and Monday.com – as well as AI developer Anthropic.

"This is a major win for consumers of the world," said Eoghan McCabe, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Fin. "Our technology has defined this category and set the new standards for what great customer service looks like today. By joining forces with Salesforce, we can deploy it far and wide at a rate far faster than we could have ever achieved on our own."

Salesforce said in a statement that the aim was to give its customers more ways to deploy AI agents in their customer service operations, in particular, offering small businesses options with fast time-to-value that are easily deployable and offer measurable outcomes.

Plus, Salesforce gains Fin's AI team and its customer base of 30,000 companies.

From Intercom to Fin

Intercom was started in 2011 by a quartet of founders – Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett – and developed chatbots for companies to offer customer service, with the Intercom window ubiquitous in the bottom corner of websites.

Several years later, CEO Eoghan McCabe was accused of "unwanted advances" towards female employees, and though he apologised at the time, he stepped down the next year. COO Karen Peacock took over as CEO, but only briefly, as McCabe returned in 2022 at the request of the board – keeping the controversy continuing with public support for US President Trump.

Last month, Intercom rebranded as Fin, the name of the company's AI agent platform, though the Intercom brand was continuing as customer service software. "Fin is clearly our future, and the future of this new customer agent category," McCabe said at the time.