Salesforce's purchase of Own Company for $1.9 billion highlights how the company has to play small ball with mergers and acquisitions given the scrutiny it gets with big deals. But keep in mind that small acquisitions such as Airkit.ai, which powered Salesforce’s Agentforce strategy, can have bigger impact.
The CRM giant said it will acquire Own Company, which provides data protection and management software, for $1.9 billion. Salesforce already owned 10% of Own Company. Memo to any future entrepreneur: Don't name your company Own if you want to be acquired because the headline gets wonky.
Own Company will plug into Salesforce's platform as part of the data protection and loss prevention offering. What is most notable is that Salesforce had to say that the $1.9 billion purchase "will not impact Salesforce's capital return program."
Yes folks, we're a long way from the heady days where Salesforce would blow $27.7 billion on Slack. Consider the following acquisitions since activist investors targeted Salesforce:
2022:
- Troops.ai provided applications that enhanced revenue ops collaboration and visibility.
- Phennecs for privacy and compliance.
2023:
- Airkit.ai, which specialized in AI-powered customer service experiences.
- Spiff, a company that has a commission management platform.
2024:
- PredictSpring, an existing Salesforce ecosystem partner.
- Tenyx, a developer of AI-powered voice agents.
- Own Company.
Now aside from Salesforce's reported interest in Informatica in 2024, the company is showing some serious M&A restraint.
Small ball works and Airkit.ai proves it
As someone who happens to like writing about large deals that may (or may not) work out, I miss the old big spending Salesforce. However, small ball works out well.
In fact, small mergers can transform a company without much risk. Airkit.ai is an example and Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller saw the impact early. Miller wrote last year:
"The Airkit.ai use case goes far beyond a familiar customer service or contact center storylines as Salesforce dives into industry-specific bots that are proactive and contextual to a customer or employee's journey...
With Data Cloud in place and the addition of the Einstein Platform and Einstein Studio on top of the Salesforce Platform, the company is now ready to supercharge their customer’s capacity to not just deliver results through AI-powered bots, but have the actual data and AI infrastructure in place to ensure that sales and service teams can safely, quickly and easily deploy digital cross-channel assistants."
Yep, Liz called it.
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Salesforce has pivoted the entire company on AI agents and Agentforce. On Salesforce’s second quarter earnings call, Benioff said “Agentforce” 26 times. Dreamforce will be the coming out party for Agentforce, genAI-powered agents that will leverage the entire Salesforce platform.
Benioff said:
"This is really the future, a new future that we can really envision, and with this Agentforce platform, we're making it easy to build these powerful autonomous agents for sales, for service, for marketing, for commerce, automating the entire workflow on their own, embedding agents in the flow of work and getting our customers to the agent future first. And this is our primary goal of our company right now. This is my singular focus."
Simply put, Agentforce is Airkit.ai scaled across the Salesforce platform.
Salesforce in recent years has laid the groundwork with Data Cloud and other parts. Salesforce created a core for all of its clouds, put Data Cloud in the center and then created the AI model pathways for enterprises. Agentforce (Airkit.ai) is the front-end.
In the end, the Airkit.ai purchase may be as critical to Salesforce as MuleSoft, the chassis that connects everything. Should Agentforce reinvent Salesforce, Airkit.ai may be its best acquisition of the bunch. Small ball may lack the excitement, but strategically has better returns.
