Salesforce plays Chess

Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Fin, the customer service AI agent company formerly known as Intercom, adding a platform with more than 30,000 customers and an average query resolution rate of 76% to its Agentforce portfolio.

Announced on 10 September, the deal brings Fin's AI models, trained specifically for customer experience, along with its technical team, into Salesforce's AI Labs division. Salesforce said Fin's agent resolves complex customer queries end-to-end across channels including live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, voice and Slack. Marc Benioff, Salesforce's chair and chief executive, said combining Fin with Agentforce would let companies "deploy trusted AI agents from day one". Eoghan McCabe, Fin's chief executive and co-founder, said joining Salesforce would let the company reach "magnitudes more businesses" than it could alone.

Salesforce said Fin would continue operating independently within its AI Labs unit, serving existing customers while continuing to develop its own models and technology, positioning it as an additional, more rapidly deployable option alongside Salesforce's more customisable Agentforce platform.

In a separate announcement the same day, Salesforce said it had become title sponsor and technology partner of the International Chess Federation (FIDE), putting its Agentforce 360 tools and Slack behind FIDE's player rankings, rating lookups and fan-facing services for what FIDE says is a global following of 1.5 million rated players across 204 member federations.

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