Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research, found the acquisition baffling. “I can’t figure out their focus. They are all over the place,” Bickley said.
Bickley said making so many AI acquisitions in such a short timeframe means that there will be a lot of decisions about what stays and what doesn’t. “They are going to be integrating dozens of code bases in short order. When I zoom out, it is a little bit troubling.”
“What they are trying to accomplish is not a bad goal: filling out their agent narrative. But they are trying to do it all at once. That means marketing will precede functionality,” Bickley said. For enterprise CIOs, he noted, “trying to map out the future will force a lot of questions. That tells me that they are trying to build the airplane while still in the air.”
He noted that Salesforce would benefit from diversifying its installed base, because “its growth trajectory with enterprise is starting to wane”, and this acquisition would potentially help it increase its SMB market share. Fin claims 30,000 customers, which likely means most of them are SMBs.