Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Listen Labs, an artificial intelligence-powered customer research platform, as the CRM company looks to bring customer interviews, behavioural insights and AI simulations closer to its marketing, service and agentic AI products.
Listen Labs uses AI agents to automate different stages of customer research, including designing studies, recruiting participants, conducting interviews and analysing responses. The platform gives companies access to a network of more than 50 million research participants and can conduct interviews in more than 120 languages.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed by Salesforce. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce's fiscal year 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
Founded in 2023 by Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann, Listen Labs began with an AI interviewer built by its founders after an application they developed attracted 20,000 users. The company subsequently expanded the technology into a broader customer research platform. Listen Labs counts companies including Microsoft, Anthropic and Sweetgreen among its customers.
Beyond conducting interviews, the startup has developed what it calls "digital twins", AI-powered simulations designed to estimate how customers may respond to products, marketing messages or ideas. According to Salesforce, these simulations are grounded in customer behaviour and can help teams compare different approaches before conducting further testing with people.
Salesforce plans to use Listen Labs to expand its customer and user understanding capabilities. The technology is expected to complement Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and the company's wider AI portfolio, potentially adding qualitative research and customer feedback as additional context for AI agents.
For marketing teams, the acquisition could bring customer research closer to CRM-driven workflows. Instead of customer interviews and qualitative findings remaining primarily within standalone research reports, the information could become another layer of context available alongside existing customer data.
However, Salesforce has not yet detailed exactly how Listen Labs will be integrated into its products or which AI agent workflows will use its research and simulation capabilities.
Listen Labs will become part of Salesforce AI Labs following completion of the transaction. Wahlforss will continue as CEO of Listen Labs, while Juengermann will remain its chief technology officer.
The deal comes as Salesforce continues to expand its AI portfolio around systems that can reason over customer data and take actions across enterprise workflows. Adding Listen Labs gives the company another source of customer context, combining direct research with simulated behaviour as businesses increasingly use AI to inform marketing, service and product decisions.
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