Salesforce has agreed to acquire marketing provider Qualified to expand its agentic AI marketing capabilities.
Qualified will allow the CRM giant to broaden its Agentforce platform offerings to deliver real-time, AI-driven engagement solutions for inbound interaction improvements and handoffs between service teams.
This acquisition will also enable Salesforce to further expand its vision of AI automation across the customer journey.
In a nutshell, the deal will allow Salesforce’s enterprise customers to access agentic marketing solutions for sales and marketing teams, ensuring that growth continues in alignment with the AI workforce.
With autonomous growth expansion across all company teams, Salesforce can continue its vision for AI automation by expanding its platform’s current marketing and engagement capabilities, offering real-time, autonomous interactions with inbound prospects during early stages.
For service teams, agents will typically experience high-volume, repetitive tasks during the early stages of a customer journey. This can include conversing with website visitors, answering general questions, and identifying customer intent to route their query to the appropriate team.
To resolve this peak in repetitive tasks, this acquisition enables Agentforce customers to access more automation with customer interactions, allowing service teams to offer immediate support by utilizing the CRM data to gain relevant insights for conversations and actions.
This can include determining next steps, meeting scheduling, and correct handoffs to lessen manual intervention.
Furthermore, this acquisition supports market demand for AI automation, with Salesforce aiming to provide further tools and agents to teams as part of its agentic enterprise strategy.
In a LinkedIn post, Nicolas de Kouchkovsky, Industry Analyst at CaCube, noted that buyers are now expecting unified, AI-driven interactions as a baseline, with the acquisition meeting this emerging standard.
“AI is redefining the experience well beyond appointment setting. It fuses service, assistance, and sales, and is rapidly setting a new benchmark for brands engaging prospective buyers.”
By utilizing Qualified’s AI agents, enterprise customers can handle repetitive inbound interactions and qualification tasks, reducing manual workloads for human agents to focus on high-value tasks while maintaining engagement levels.
Steve Fisher, President and Chief Product Officer at Salesforce, explained how acquiring Qualified will allow Salesforce to strengthen its ability to automate these early-stage tasks.
“The agentification of the enterprise continues to accelerate,” he said.
“By integrating Qualified’s agentic marketing expertise into Agentforce, we will enhance our ability to offer autonomous pipeline generation and empower our customers to scale their revenue teams with agent-first solutions that drive efficient growth.”
Qualified currently operates as a Salesforce AppExchange and Ventures portfolio company partner, ensuring current Salesforce customers of Qualified’s strategic alignment with its vision for autonomous execution and customer outcomes.
And having already been designed natively for the Salesforce environment, this will ensure that Qualified capabilities are safely deployed on Salesforce’s platform to reduce friction adoption for enterprise customers.
Who is Qualified?
Qualified is a B2B software provider for inbound AI-powered tools in sales and marketing services.
Its platform utilizes AI agents to provide real-time engagement with website visitors, offering high-quality customer service with minimal effort for both the agent and user.
With its products already integrated with Salesforce, the acquisition is expected to simplify integration and accelerate autonomous capabilities for both companies.
Kraig Swensrud, CEO and Co-Founder of Qualified, highlighted the company’s long-standing relationship with Salesforce and its commitment to the autonomous vision, positioning the acquisition as a continuation of that goal rather than a shift in direction.
“We founded Qualified to revolutionize how B2B companies generate pipeline, and today, that vision takes a massive leap forward,” he said.
“As Salesforce alumni, my co-founders and I have always built our products to deeply integrate with Salesforce.
“Joining forces with Salesforce is a natural evolution that will allow us to bring the power of agentic marketing to the enterprise.”
