• Salesforce has been in talks to acquire AI startup Listen Labs for around $2 billion.
• Listen Labs, which was last valued at $500 million, sells an AI market analysis platform.
• Recent AI M&A deals include Nvidia's $12.9 billion acquisition of AI startup Hugging Face.

Salesforce could be on the hunt for acquisitions to beef up its AI capabilities.

The software giant has recently been in talks to buy Listen Labs, an AI-powered customer research platform for around $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The talks have not been finalized and could ultimately be unsuccessful, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.

Salesforce and Listen Labs did not respond to requests for comment.

Listen Labs was founded in 2023 by Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann, who first met as undergraduates at Harvard University while building an AI avatar app that went viral, attracting 20,000 users on its first day, according to Sequoia Capital. Juengermann was previously a national champion in competitive programming in Germany.

They used an early version of what would become Listen Labs to interview users, which helped them realize that using AI for market research would be extremely valuable.

The company's software automates much of the qualitative research process, which has typically been expensive and time-consuming.

Customers include Microsoft, Anthropic, Google, Nestle, Sweetgreen, and Perplexity. At the beginning of the year, Listen Labs said it had grown its annualized revenue by 15x and interviewed more than one million people in nine months.

For Salesforce, the deal would strengthen its broader quest to make its agentic AI platform, Agentforce, more than just about automating repetitive work. Listen Labs could boost Agentforce by understanding what customers are thinking. It could recommend which products they might buy and craft the perfect pitch for salespeople to close a deal.

If the deal were finalized, it would be part of a wave of AI acquisitions in recent weeks, with Nvidia acquiring HuggingFace for around $12.9 billion and Stripe buying OpenRouter for around $8 billion.

Salesforce has been pushing to improve its AI efforts, with a particular focus on enterprise agents. The Information reported that they considered acquiring HuggingFace before it was sold to Nvidia.

Listen Labs was last valued at $500 million in a financing round earlier this year. Its backers include Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Conviction Partners, and Pear VC.

• A VC got his Resy account shuttered after using an AI agent for a reservation at one of NYC's hottest restaurants.
• It's an example of how AI agents often take questionable approaches to the tasks they're given.
• "I will probably, in the short term, ask it to lay out a plan and tell me what the plan is," he said

AI agents can do lots of tasks. Landing you a table at one of New York's trendiest restaurants might not be one.

JC Bahr-de Stefano, principal at Better Tomorrow Ventures, a fintech-focused VC firm, learned that after he connected an AI tool called Instinct to his Resy account in hopes of getting a reservation at 4 Charles Prime Rib, the West Village steakhouse where diners gobble up reservations within seconds of them appearing online.

Instinct, which is an invite-only service at the moment, communicates with users via text. The bet was that Instinct could check for open tables at 4 Charles much more frequently than Bahr-de Stefano — or any other human — could manually.

Instead of getting him a ticket to some prime rib or an egg-topped burger, though, Bahr-de Stefano's AI agent spammed Resy's website so much that the platform temporarily shut down his account.

The VC's experience is another example of how AI agents are bending or breaking the rules of the internet, from impersonating Wikipedia editors to trying to convince a GitHub user to upload malware into a project.

Agents might appear to understand their objective, though exactly how they carry it out — and whether the strategy they pick might have unintended consequences — is often an afterthought.

"Resy does not currently permit unapproved third-party bots or agents to independently access or interact with the Resy platform," an American Express spokesperson told Business Insider. "Unapproved automated activity can introduce risks to the platform and compromise a fair reservation experience for diners."

Users can find restaurants and make reservations through Resy's integrations with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, the spokesperson said. The company declined to comment specifically on Bahr-de Stefano's case.

'It was acting like a bot'

Bahr-de Stefano noticed the Resy issue on Sunday when he couldn't get into his account. In his email inbox, there was a message from the American Express-owned reservation platform saying that his account had "displayed behavior in violation of Resy's Terms of Service."

He got details about what went wrong after checking Instinct's activity log. Unbeknownst to Bahr-de Stefano, the AI agent had been sending Resy about 200 API requests per hour. That included checking the restaurant's availability through Resy every 10 minutes throughout the day, as well as looking every 0.4 seconds around the time that reservations usually dropped each morning.

That behavior mimics the bots that some people use to snag everything from restaurant reservations to limited-run pairs of sneakers and resell them, Bahr-de Stefano said.

Bahr-de Stefano wrote back to Resy, laying out how he had used the AI agent. The log made clear why his account had been flagged, he said.

"Of course, this account got flagged for spam, because it was acting like a bot," he said.

On Tuesday, an email from Resy informed him that the company had reinstated his account.

It came with a warning, though: If he did it again, American Express could permanently close his Resy account as well as his AmEx credit card. Bahr-de Stefano shared screenshots of the Resy and American Express emails in posts on X.

The tool has worked well in other cases, such as finding an appointment at an otherwise booked-up doctor's office and deciding which attractions to visit in Paris during a trip, Bahr-de Stefano said.

"That was part of what made it really great," he said. "It felt like magic."

The VC said that he plans to continue using Instinct, though with some adjustments. Instead of simply giving the AI agent a simple prompt, he said, he'll now set parameters on how the agent tackles the task, such as how often it pings a website looking for reservations.

"I will probably, in the short term, ask it to lay out a plan and tell me what the plan is before it does it," he said.

At the same time, he added, websites like Resy need to distinguish between legitimate AI agents and those with more nefarious intentions.

"Most of these sellers or providers need to get to a point where they can understand the difference between a verified agent acting on someone's behalf versus a bot farm," he said.

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