Comment by light_triad
7 hours ago
Interesting they agreed to sell after their rebrand to Fin a month ago.
There's increasing competition in the customer support AI agent space: Sierra valued at $15.8 billion, Decagon at $4.5 billion. It looks like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is trying to compete directly with Sierra, which was started by his ex-Co-CEO Bret Taylor. Also about preventing independent AI support agents from becoming a control point outside the CRM.
This is the second company (that I know of) that got acquired shortly after an AI pivot and re-brand. See: OpenAI to acquire Ona https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491821
Salesforce buying the support bot before the support bot becomes the CRM is very on-brand.
fwiw i heard Fin and Agentforce frequently lost to deca and sierra, their product / team / funding weren't as good
Seems like a catchup play by Marc
customer support -> customer disassociation
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