On Monday, Salesforce’s top customer service executive put the problem in one sentence. “Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers,” Kishan Chetan, who runs Agentforce and Service Cloud, said as the company announced a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, a startup whose AI runs live phone calls for Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines.
Two days later, a survey of retailers put a number on how hard.
Salesforce did not disclose a price. The Information put Cresta’s valuation at $2.7 billion, The Stack reported, and the deal follows Salesforce’s $2 billion purchase of the research startup Listen Labs in September. Salesforce expects to close in the first quarter of its 2028 fiscal year, after regulators sign off.
What Salesforce is buying matters more than what it paid. Cresta sells two things at once: voice agents that handle complex calls end to end, and software that coaches human representatives in real time while they talk. Salesforce’s announcement presents both as one product. That is a quiet admission that the industry’s most valuable AI still needs a person in the loop.
The refund problem, counted
On Wednesday, the call-center software company Talkdesk released its 2026 AI Holiday Shopping Survey. The research firm Centiment polled 1,048 U.S. holiday shoppers and 312 retail executives at companies that use AI, in September.
The executives were candid. Ninety-three percent said they will run AI agents in customer service this holiday season. Thirty-one percent said their AI had taken an incorrect action on a customer’s account in the past 12 months, and the example the survey gives is an improper refund. Fifty-eight percent reported some kind of AI error, and 29 percent of those said the error cost them a customer.
Multiply those last two figures and you get a number the release does not print. Roughly 17 percent of AI-using retailers, about one in six, lost a customer to their own AI in a single year. That was before the busiest season of the year, and before the expansion they are now planning.
The expansion points straight at the weak spot. Of retailers putting AI agents on customer service this season, 51 percent plan to use them for returns, refunds or exchanges. That is the same territory where the survey’s headline error lives. Retailers are giving the job that breaks most expensively to the tool that has already broken on it.
Shoppers have noticed. Only 15 percent would let an AI agent buy something with their payment details, even if they could review the purchase first, and the figure falls to 10 percent without a review step. Seventy-seven percent want to know when AI is involved. Thirty-seven percent of retailers do not fully disclose it.
“Trust is the ultimate currency,” said Michael Klein, who runs retail product marketing at Talkdesk. A vendor saying so is self-interested, since Talkdesk sells the guardrails, but the executives’ own error numbers back him up.
Put the two stories side by side and the incentive is plain. A refund handled badly by a bot creates a second call and an angry customer, and often a person has to clean it up anyway. Companies that bought automation to cut headcount are finding they need the human layer to make it safe. Only 19 percent of the retailers surveyed plan to cut seasonal hiring because of AI, and 47 percent will hire about as many seasonal workers as last year. The money is moving toward tools that make those workers faster, not toward tools that remove them.
Our view: Salesforce’s bet is the right one, and it should end the pretense that a customer service bot is a finished replacement for a person. The companies that do well this season will put a human on refunds, tell customers when they are talking to software, and keep records of where the bot failed. Retailers that do not will learn about their error rate from their customers.
The rules are arriving too. On January 1, in the middle of the post-holiday returns rush, California’s AI customer service law starts requiring the largest companies to try to connect a caller with a human within 15 minutes.
How much is Salesforce paying for Cresta?
Salesforce did not disclose terms. The Information reported a valuation of about $2.7 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal 2028, subject to regulatory approval.
What does Cresta’s software do?
It runs AI voice agents that handle customer calls end to end, coaches human representatives in real time during calls, and analyzes every conversation. Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines use it.
How often does retail customer service AI make mistakes?
In Talkdesk’s September survey of 312 retail executives, 31 percent said their AI took an incorrect action on a customer’s account in the past year, and 58 percent reported some AI error. Among those, 29 percent lost a customer, roughly one in six of all AI-using retailers surveyed.