Salesforce’s investment in Genesys is strategic, not just financial

AI is transforming the customer experience space, and we're witnessing the start of an arms race.

By Mike Pastore ,

Head of Content & Media

August 4, 2025 • 2 minutes read

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Last week, Salesforce and ServiceNow invested $1.5 billion in Genesys, a customer experience vendor that built its business powering contact centers.

Genesys was one of the pioneers of cloud-based contact centers, or contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS). The company continues to evolve, focusing now on what it calls “AI-powered experience orchestration.”

And stop right there, because when you see the magic letters “A-I” in a story with a headline that mentions Salesforce, you know where this is going.

The two companies aren’t strangers. Salesforce and Genesys have a partnership that goes back more than a decade. In 2023, they launched CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce. (Genesys and ServiceNow also had an existing partnership before last week’s investment.)

Dig deeper: When AI makes customer experience feel personal

A win for all involved

Private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and Permira remain the majority shareholders in Genesys. While PE firms have a reputation for selling companies — and that could still happen – the investment by Salesforce and ServiceNow suggests long-term strategy, not a sale, was top of mind.

Salesforce and ServiceNow know CX and AI, which means they are well-positioned to help Genesys achieve its strategic goals. The two companies instantly become strategic shareholders and get a say in Genesys’ roadmap and future decisions.

Because the investment is a share buyback and not product or R&D, the private equity firms get a liquidity event without a sale or taking Genesys public.

An arms race in AI for customer experience?

But Salesforce and ServiceNow taking a stake in Genesys wasn’t the only news last week involving CX and AI. Earlier in the week, NiCE agreed to acquire Cognigy, which develops conversational and agentic AI tools.

The acquisition allows NiCE to combine its CXone Mpower platform with Cognigy’s Cognify.AI platform for conversational and agentic AI, with the goal of helping businesses deploy AI-first customer service and orchestrate AI agents across the front and back office.

Cognify’s AI agents think, adapt and act independently and deliver human-like service to customers in more than 100 languages on any channel.

Cognify isn’t the first conversational AI vendor scooped up by a customer experience firm. Back in December 2024, Calabrio acquired Echo AI, and Invoca acquired Symbl.ai in May 2025.

Unified, AI-powered CX platforms are here whether consumers like it or not.

Dig deeper: Why closing the feedback loop drives better CX outcomes

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MarTech is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.

Mike Pastore

Head of Content & Media

Mike Pastore is the Head of Content & Media at Third Door Media, the publisher of the Martech and Search Engine Land websites and the producer of the SMX and MarTech Conferences. In nearly three decades in B2B marketing, Mike has worked as an editor, writer, and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers at some of the best-known brands in B2B tech, creating content for marketing campaigns at both Jupitermedia and QuinStreet. Prior to joining Third Door Media as the Editorial Director of the MarTech website, he led demand generation at B2B media company TechnologyAdvice.

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