Salesforce buys Cresta, Five9 buys Level AI, and Dialpad and Ada combine in a week of CX AI deals

Three of the biggest names in contact center AI changed hands or merged in four days. On 2 Nov Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, on 4 Nov Dialpad and Ada announced they are combining, and on 5 Nov Five9 agreed to buy Level AI for about $325 million in cash. Each deal pairs a company that owns the customer relationship or the phone line with a company that builds the AI that handles the conversation.

Salesforce agrees to acquire Cresta

Cresta was in last week's issue for a different reason. On 29 Oct it opened its platform to in-house developers through Cresta Conductor, as the 2 Nov issue reported. Four days later Salesforce said it would buy the company. Salesforce describes Cresta as "the voice-first operating system for customer experience": its voice agents resolve complex calls end to end, and the same platform coaches human representatives in real time and analyzes every interaction. Salesforce named Marriott, Comcast, and Alaska Airlines as brands where Cresta runs at enterprise scale.

The plan is to connect Cresta to Service Cloud so that each conversation is tied to the customer record and to the outcome it drives. Kishan Chetan, who runs Agentforce and Service Cloud, said "voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers." The detail that matters most for current Cresta customers is in the last paragraph of the release: after the deal closes, Cresta will keep supporting the contact center and telephony platforms its customers use today. Salesforce did not disclose a price. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce's fiscal year 2028, subject to regulatory approval.

The purchase follows Salesforce's own move into CCaaS. The 19 Oct issue covered its native Contact Center reaching general availability in Europe, and last week Bandwidth said it is Salesforce's first certified international carrier for that rollout.

Dialpad and Ada combine voice network and AI agents

Dialpad and Ada are pitching their deal as a way to own more of the stack. Dialpad brings a global voice network and its own speech and language models, and says it has analyzed more than 14 billion minutes of business conversations since it introduced real-time AI in 2018. Ada says it has deployed more than 500 AI agents in production across voice, messaging, email, and social channels in more than 130 languages. The companies said that owning the network and the models will give the combined business more control over core costs and performance.

Dialpad co-founder and CEO Craig Walker will lead the combined company, and Ada CEO Mike Murchison becomes chief AI officer. Together they say they serve more than 50,000 companies, including Randstad, Netflix, Square, Pinterest, Canva, and Monday.com. Existing customers keep their contracts, pricing, account teams, support channels, and integrations, and the companies said roadmap details will come in the coming months. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the transaction is expected to close on or about 12 Nov. For buyers comparing call center AI vendors, Ada will come with its own phone network once the deal closes.

Five9 buys Level AI and reports its third quarter

Five9 announced the Level AI deal alongside its third quarter results. Level AI sells AI agents, agent assist, quality management, voice of the customer, and coaching on one conversation intelligence layer. It runs on its own family of models, called Latitude, which Five9 says cost less and respond faster than frontier models. Level AI handles more than one billion customer interactions a year for customers including Gusto, Chime, Empyrean, and VistaPrint, and the two companies have worked together since 2022 through the Five9 CX Marketplace.

The more interesting part is how Five9 plans to sell it. Level AI's applications will be offered on their own to enterprises that are not ready to move an on-premises contact center to the cloud, and to companies already on other cloud platforms, without requiring them to buy Five9's CCaaS platform. CEO Amit Mathradas called it "a new way to reach enterprises that want AI today but aren't ready to move their contact center to the cloud." The applications will also be part of the Five9 Genius CX Platform and available to its more than 4,000 customers. Five9 expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter.

The quarter itself was steady. Revenue rose 13 percent to $323.3 million, subscription revenue grew 16 percent, and GAAP net income was $14.5 million, or $0.19 per diluted share. Adjusted gross margin was 61.7 percent, down from 62.8 percent a year earlier, which fits the CMSWire point in last week's issue about the cost of the extra deployment staff Five9 added for AI customers. Five9 guided to full-year revenue of $1.269 billion to $1.275 billion, a figure that does not include Level AI.

NiCE grows AI revenue and cuts 5 percent of staff

NiCE reported on 4 Nov that third quarter revenue rose 8 percent to $790.7 million, above the top of its guidance range. AI annual recurring revenue reached $392 million, up 46 percent, which NiCE said is now 16 percent of cloud revenue, and international revenue grew 33 percent. NiCE said total and cloud revenue would have grown 9.4 percent and 12.2 percent without an unusual $10 million customer credit.

Margins moved the other way. GAAP gross margin fell to 62.4 percent from 66.8 percent, and GAAP operating margin fell to 15.3 percent from 22 percent. In the same release NiCE said it will cut its global workforce by about 5 percent, reduce management layers, and lean more on partners for sales and delivery, with $15 million to $20 million of restructuring charges mostly in the fourth quarter. It kept its full-year revenue guidance of $3.17 billion to $3.19 billion and raised its non-GAAP earnings per share guidance to $11.12 to $11.32. CEO Scott Russell said personal AI agents "have the potential to multiply customer interactions at an unprecedented scale," the same theme as the NiCE customer survey in last week's issue.

8x8, Twilio, and Freshworks add to the earnings picture

8x8 reported record revenue of $192.0 million for its fiscal second quarter on 4 Nov, up 4 percent, with service revenue up 5 percent to $187.8 million. It raised its full-year outlook and pointed to growing use of AI Studio and to the Customer 360 and JourneyIQ features covered in last week's issue.

Twilio reported its quarter the week before, and CX Today's read of the earnings call adds a number to the "very early innings" comment quoted here last week. CEO Khozema Shipchandler said voice AI is "still 1% penetration in terms of the total available voice minutes out there." Twilio also described its first eight-figure Conversations deal, with a health insurer using a voice AI agent and real-time transcription to cut agent wrap-up time, and a seven-figure deal in which Chapter moved its contact center to Twilio Flex in a matter of weeks. Twilio has put an identity product into private beta that lets businesses check who an AI agent represents, whatever channel or protocol it uses.

Freshworks reported third quarter revenue of $245.4 million on 3 Nov, up 14 percent, with GAAP net income of $18.3 million and record adjusted free cash flow of $73.9 million. Customers paying more than $100,000 a year rose 25 percent to 1,821, and net dollar retention held at 104 percent.

ElevenLabs voice agents plug into four contact center platforms

ElevenLabs said on 4 Nov that ElevenAgents now integrates natively with NiCE CXone, Genesys Cloud, Amazon Connect, and Five9, and connects to other platforms over SIP. The point is to add voice agents without replacing the routing, recording, and reporting a contact center already runs. Each integration works a little differently. On Genesys it runs through the Audio Connector with no SIP trunk. On Amazon Connect the Connect AI agent can bring in an ElevenLabs agent during a live contact and take control back when the task is done. On Five9 it runs through AI Agent Connect, a Five9 add-on, which transfers the call over SIP and gets routing and disposition data back. AMC Health's CTO said Genesys being its existing telephony platform was an important factor in choosing ElevenLabs.

Read alongside the Five9 and Cresta news, the ElevenLabs announcement points the same way. More AI vendors now sell into contact centers that are staying on the platforms they already run. Buyers comparing speech AI vendors can now ask which ones work natively inside their current CCaaS platform.

Retailers bet on shopping agents that shoppers do not trust yet

Talkdesk published its 2026 AI Holiday Shopping Survey on 4 Nov, based on a Centiment survey of 1,048 US holiday shoppers and 312 retail leaders at companies that use AI. Eighty-nine percent of retailers said they are preparing for AI agents that shop on a customer's behalf, but only 15 percent of shoppers would let an agent buy with their payment details even after reviewing the order, and 10 percent without a review step. Ninety-three percent of retailers are deploying AI agents in customer service this season. Nearly one in three of the retailers using AI said a tool took an incorrect action on a customer account in the past year, such as issuing an improper refund, and 29 percent of retailers that reported AI errors lost a customer because of one. Only 19 percent plan to cut seasonal hiring because of AI.

A day earlier Talkdesk released a report on CX automation in EMEA, drawn from a NewtonX survey of 60 senior leaders. It found that 30 percent of organizations use AI to resolve more than 40 percent of customer issues while 17 percent have not used it to resolve any, and that only 22 percent consistently measure AI's business impact.

Gartner publishes its first AI agent management Magic Quadrant

The governance question behind all of this now has a Gartner report. CX Today walked through the first Magic Quadrant for AI Agent Management Platforms on 2 Nov. Microsoft, IBM, and ServiceNow are the Leaders. Gartner credited ServiceNow for treating agents, models, data sets, and MCP servers as managed configuration items, and Microsoft for giving agents their own identities in Agent 365. AWS, Salesforce, OneReach.ai, and Gravitee are Challengers. Gartner praised the security of AWS Bedrock AgentCore but called it developer-centric, and it flagged cost predictability at Salesforce because of its mix of subscriptions, credits, and usage metering. Gartner expects that by 2029, 60 percent of AI agents will be managed through an agent management platform. The 26 Oct issue covered Gartner's 2026 CCaaS Magic Quadrant.

Also this week

Zoom expanded Zoom for Government on 4 Nov, adding Zoom Virtual Agent, AI Expert Assist, Quality Management, and Workforce Management to the already authorized Zoom Contact Center. Zoom said US federal agencies now get a FedRAMP certified CX platform without assembling tools from several vendors.

Amazon Connect flows can now call Model Context Protocol tools through a new External Tool block that connects to outside applications through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway, without custom Lambda functions. The feature is available in nine AWS Regions. Separately, Connect agents can now pause and resume emails while they wait for information or approvals, with paused time tracked apart from active handling time.

Genesys expanded its forward-deployed engineering program on 5 Nov, embedding AI specialists with customers to move agentic CX use cases from concept into production. Its 2 Nov Genesys Cloud release added an updated summarization model for Agent Copilot and wrap-up synchronization for ServiceNow email interactions routed through Genesys Cloud.

Concentrix put its Migration Engine for Dynamics 365 Contact Center on Microsoft Marketplace on 5 Nov. It uses AI to automate moves from legacy CX platforms, and Concentrix said early results show up to 50 percent faster migrations.

CX Today reported that Salesforce says Agentforce Coworker usage grew 21 times in three months to more than 185,000 users, and that Coworker is coming to Microsoft Teams with a $50 per user per month option. Analysts quoted in the piece called it pragmatic but said Salesforce has not yet shown evidence of customer impact.

New in the CXSpy catalog

CXSpy added seven company pages this week, bringing the catalog to 342. 3CLogic, a cloud contact center and voice AI company in Rockville, Maryland, that runs much of its business inside ServiceNow, joins CCaaS. Three European and Indian voice companies join speech AI: Deepslate, a Berlin lab building its own speech-to-speech model for European languages, Navana.ai, which builds speech models for 12 Indian languages and sells to banks and lenders, and Guava, a Los Angeles developer platform for voice agents on regulated calls that grew out of the Gridspace voice lab. Three more join call center AI: AlloBrain, a Paris company with one platform for AI agents and live agent assist, Reecall, a French company that now sells white-label voice agent infrastructure to software vendors, telecom operators, and outsourcers, and Omind, the contact center AI suite built inside the BPO Fusion CX.

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