Salesforce goes shopping for the research function

TechCrunch reported on 9 September, after Business Insider first carried the story, that Salesforce is in talks to acquire Listen Labs, an AI customer-research platform, for around $2 billion. The talks are not finalised and may not end in a deal, but the price is the interesting part: Listen Labs was valued at $500 million when it closed a $69 million Series B in late January, and it walked away from a signed $125 million Series C term sheet at $1.5 billion to have this conversation instead. The product replaces the human moderator. Its AI writes the study, recruits from a participant panel, runs audio and video interviews and turns them into reports and decks. Customers include Microsoft, Canva, Sweetgreen and Anthropic, which by Listen Labs' own account now runs 100 research studies in the time it used to manage five or six. For Salesforce the logic is tidy, since it already owns the record of what customers do and this is the layer that explains why. We are more interested in what it does to the discipline. Run badly, research at machine speed produces noise faster. Run well, it stops being a slow input that arrives after the decision has been taken, which makes the function more valuable than it has been in years for the teams that get the methodology right. (TechCrunch)