You picked your CRM, your booking system and your customer service tool one at a time, because each one did its specific job well. That’s usually the right call. But it comes with a risk most business owners never think about until it happens to them: what do you do when one of your tools gets bought out by a much bigger company?
The problem: the best point solutions keep getting acquired
On 10 September 2026, Salesforce completed its acquisition of Fin, the AI customer service agent formerly built by Intercom. Fin isn’t a small player, it’s used by more than 30,000 companies and resolves customer queries at a 76% average rate across chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, voice and Slack. Salesforce chair and CEO Marc Benioff called it “the number one customer agent meets the number one CRM,” and Fin’s own CEO Eoghan McCabe said joining Salesforce means reaching “magnitudes more businesses and their customers.”
Why this matters beyond the headline
This is the second major AI customer service acquisition of the year and it won’t be the last. When a tool you rely on gets absorbed into a bigger platform, one of three things usually happens: it gets bundled and the price goes up, it gets rebuilt to only work well inside the parent platform’s ecosystem, or it gets quietly deprioritised while the parent company focuses on its own in-house version. None of those outcomes are in your control, and you often don’t get much warning before they hit.
What it means for your business
The instinct after news like this is to go all in on one big platform so you’re never caught out. We’d argue the opposite. The businesses in the best position when a vendor gets acquired are the ones who chose each tool because it fit a specific job, kept their data portable, and never let any one platform become the single point of failure for their whole operation. Being tied to one ecosystem feels simpler right up until that ecosystem changes the deal on you.
Where to start
Take stock of what’s actually locking you into your current stack. Is it a genuine fit for how you work, or is it just where your data happens to live and it feels like too much hassle to move? If you can’t answer that clearly, or you can’t say what you’d do if one of your core tools got bought out tomorrow, that’s worth working through with someone who isn’t selling you the next big bundle.