Dive Brief:
- Salesforce plans to bolster its agentic AI capabilities with the acquisition of Convergence.ai, the CRM vendor said in a Thursday announcement. The startup develops task-automation tools that can perform complex tasks and adapt to some changing conditions in real time, according to Salesforce.
- Salesforce will leverage Convergence technology and talent to advance Agentforce, an agent-building and orchestration platform it deployed last year. The acquisition is expected to close in Q2 of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2026, which ends July 31. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
- “This acquisition represents the direction Salesforce wants to take with AI,” Mila D’Antonio, principal analyst of customer engagement at Omdia, said in an email to CIO Dive. The vendor is banking on the agent platform to shape its CRM strategy by adding autonomous capabilities that go beyond today’s copilots, D’Antonio added.
Dive Insight:
Agentforce is a critical platform for Salesforce, as agentic AI has taken hold of the CRM market. In February, CEO Marc Benioff described the company’s Q4 as “the quarter of Agentforce,” highlighting that 5,000 customers have signed on to the platform as of October — 3,000 of which are paying for the service.
“Salesforce is betting the farm on Agentforce,” said Kate Leggett, Forrester VP and principal analyst, in an email to CIO Dive. “As AI agents become more mature, it erodes the value of their current clouds.”
The company’s efforts to port its products to Agentforce so that it can better align data and workflows across its clouds is grounded in its AI-focused strategy, as is its push to fuel agents with Salesforce Data Cloud customer data, Leggett said.
A flexible pricing plan for Agentforce announced Thursday, also plays into the platform strategy. The move indicates Salesforce is “rethinking their pricing model to protect their revenue stream as more user seats transition to AI work,” Leggett said.
The new pricing model includes flex credits, which come in packs of 100,000 for $500, to scale Agentforce across workflows; a Flex Agreement that enables companies to shift between user licenses and flex credits as needed; and Agentforce user licenses and add-ons, a per user, per month plan for unlimited access to customer-facing agents.
Acquiring Convergence brings AI talent along with technology, Salesforce said in the announcement. Convergence, co-founded in 2024 by two machine learning engineers, boasts employees from Google DeepMind, PolyAI and Meta and “brings in a highly skilled team that Salesforce clearly wants to build around,” D’Antonio said.
“What Salesforce is aiming for [with] Convergence is a step-change from Einstein where AI agents can actually perceive context, make decisions and adapt dynamically across complex workflows,” said D’Antonio, referencing the company’s first AI platform released in 2016. “Eventually an AI agent will manage an entire customer engagement from end to end.”
Disclosure: Informa, which owns a controlling stake in Informa TechTarget, the publisher behind CIO Dive, is also invested in Omdia. Informa has no influence over CIO Dive’s coverage.
