The contact center and CX vendor market consolidated last week. On Monday, Salesforce announced it is buying Cresta. Then on Wednesday, Dialpad announced its purchase of Ada, and a day later, Five9 said it would acquire Level AI.
Salesforce, Dialpad and Five9 are buying companies with a track record of existing installations with business customers and the technical expertise that created those solutions. That helps the acquiring companies deliver new features to their customers faster.
“Acquiring proven capabilities can significantly reduce time to value because the products and customer value already exist,” Terra Higginson, principal research director at Infotech, told CX Dive in an email.
Beyond these benefits, these acquisitions demonstrate vendors’ recognition that to serve businesses that are serious about supporting customers across the entire customer journey, their own solutions need to support that holistic CX vision.
“True CX spans marketing, sales, service and customer success. The technology needs to support that entire relationship,” Higginson said. “That is why we are seeing this huge rush of acquisitions.”
For CX leaders, the short-term implications of this consolidation are minimal, but they should reexamine their vendor contracts with an eye toward how their organizations are protected regarding its enterprise and customer data, planned features roadmap and support from the vendor.
Longer term, CX vendor consolidation may impact buying decisions. Vendor consolidation can force an enterprise into choosing between buying “best of breed” solutions versus “platforms.” Fewer independent CX vendors means fewer choices — at least until the next round of innovation and disruption.
Buying best-of-breed solutions, AI or otherwise, provides organizations with greater flexibility, cutting-edge capabilities and less risk of vendor lock-in. When buying a platform, companies benefit from fewer vendor relationships and integrations, better-connected data, and a more consistent customer experience, according to Higginson.
“Customers will increasingly buy platforms and ecosystems, not just individual applications. The strongest ecosystems will win,” Higginson said. “But the deeper an organization goes into one vendor’s ecosystem, the more difficult and expensive it may become to change direction. If you choose a vendor, you may find yourself becoming increasingly all in.”
Salesforce’s acquisition spree
Salesforce provides many different solutions, but is best known for customer relationship management. Its purchase of Cresta, which provides a voice AI agent solution, is the latest example of Salesforce staking out adjacent territory while expanding the technical capabilities of its platform.
Back in March, Salesforce launched its own contact center platform. In June, it bought Fin, an agentic AI-powered customer service platform. In October, Salesforce purchased Braze, which provides software to analyze customer behavior and personalize experiences based on those insights. These recent purchases are part of a large portfolio of Salesforce acquisitions in 2026.
Cresta fills a gap in Salesforce’s voice strategy because its product provides deeper capabilities in terms of analyzing voice, according to Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and principal analyst with Valoir. And, Salesforce adds Cresta’s marquee customers Marriott, Alaska Airlines and Comcast to its portfolio.
“Cresta gives them an interesting entry point, credibility from an AI orchestration perspective — and a pretty entrenched customer base using advanced AI solutions that they can now count as their Agentforce momentum numbers,” she said, meaning that Salesforce could count Cresta’s deployments toward its total number of deployed Agentforce AI agents.
Dialpad and Five9 level up their AI capabilities
In the second major acquisition last week, Dialpad bought Ada. Dialpad’s an established contact center as a service platform provider, also known as CCaaS. Ada provides AI agents that can operate across multiple communication channels — voice, email and social — and across 130 languages.
One of Ada’s selling points is the versatility of its AI agents. One set of instructions and guardrails govern how its AI agent behaves regardless of channel or language, which theoretically helps reduce set up time and simplify ongoing management.
In the third major deal last week, CCaaS vendor Five9 purchased Level AI, which was one of its partners. Level AI is already integrated with Five9’s CCaaS and sold in Five9’s digital marketplace.
Both Five9 and Level AI offer AI-powered capabilities. And while there is some feature overlap, Level AI brings AI-native applications for voice of the customer insights, agent assistance and quality management, plus AI automation across voice and digital channels, Five9 CEO Amit Mathradas said during the company’s Q3 2026 earnings call last week.
Level AI also provides Five9 with a different entry point to customers who want to implement AI but are not yet willing to move their on-premises contact center to the cloud, Mathradas said.
“Historically, we've led with CCaaS and brought AI into that relationship, and we'll continue to lead with CCaaS for customers ready to migrate,” Mathradas said. “Level AI adds another starting point, addressing a customer's immediate AI needs while its existing contact center stays in place.”
What consolidation means for CX leaders
Vendor consolidation can impact the dynamics around buying decisions, integrations, ongoing supplier relationships and even contract terms. As CX vendors consolidate — and both Higginson and Wettemann agree that last weeks’ acquisitions are a sign of more to come — buyers may have less choice.
“The big question for a lot of customers becomes: Is whatever product I've invested in at this point going to continue to be supported. and what does that look like?” Wettemann said.
CX leaders should reexamine their contracts and evaluate how well their organization's data, critical systems and customer-facing processes can continue to be supported in the event that one or more of their current vendors are acquired or, worse, cease operations. All of this applies to future contracts, as well, Wettemann advised.
“Those are the sorts of things that people need to be thinking about on the front end of these contracts — not when the announcement goes through,” Wettemann said.
