Salesforce is acquiring Tenyx, the latest sign of the company’s growing artificial intelligence ambitions.
The customer relationship management company will use Tenyx’s expertise in developing AI-powered voice agents to advance its own AI solutions, according to a Tuesday (Sept. 3) press release.
“Upon close of the acquisition, Tenyx will extend Salesforce’s existing autonomous agent capabilities for Agentforce Service Agent by integrating Tenyx’s innovative voice AI solutions, specifically tailored for service use cases,” the release said. “With Tenyx’s expertise, Salesforce aims to advance its AI-driven solutions, delivering more intuitive and seamless customer interactions.”
The deal, expected to close Oct. 31, will see Tenyx’s co-founders — CEO Itamar Arel and Chief Technology Officer Adam Earle — and their employees join Salesforce.
The acquisition follows Salesforce’s announcement in July that it had developed Einstein Service Agent, its first fully autonomous AI agent.
Einstein “is designed to replace conventional chatbots by understanding and taking action on a broad range of service issues without preprogrammed scenarios and make customer service more efficient,” PYMNTS wrote at the time.
Kishan Chetan, general manager of Salesforce’s Service Cloud, said the agent “will not just complete service jobs on its own; it will augment how human agents work and completely transform how service teams operate, making them far more efficient and productive.”
A week later, Salesforce announced a partnership with Workday that combines the companies’ AI platforms and data offerings to build an agent that can communicate with workers in natural language and human-like comprehension, making tasks such as onboarding, health benefit changes and career development easier.
Meanwhile, the PYMNTS Intelligence report “How Consumers Want to Live in the Voice Economy” found that Americans are optimistic about voice technology, with 60% of them saying that voice assistants will eventually match human intelligence and reliability.
“This optimism is further reflected in a willingness to invest financially in the promise of advanced voice assistants, with nearly 30% of American consumers open to paying a monthly fee for services that deliver the envisioned level of intelligence and reliability,” PYMNTS wrote in April. “Among millennials, this figure rises to 43%, reflecting a strong demand for next-generation voice technology among this age group.”
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