Klaviyo and Salesforce race to make CRM agentic
Both platforms are betting that autonomous agents, not dashboards, will define the next generation of customer relationship management.
Mariano De Vitto · August 2026
Klaviyo has acquired Agency, an AI startup specializing in autonomous marketing agents, marking a decisive move to embed agentic AI directly into its CRM stack rather than treating it as an add on feature. The deal signals that AI agents are shifting from a competitive edge to a baseline expectation in customer relationship management, a change that forces every marketing team to rethink how journeys are built, approved and personalized down to the individual message.
Klaviyo built its reputation as the email and SMS engine of choice for direct to consumer and ecommerce brands, competing head on with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot and Braze for the attention of growth focused marketing teams. Since going public, the company has steadily expanded beyond messaging into broader customer data and orchestration territory. Acquiring Agency fits that trajectory: according to Futurum Group's analysis of the deal, Klaviyo is positioning the startup's technology to automate campaign creation, segmentation and message level decisions that previously required manual marketer input at every step.
From tools to decision makers
The stakes go beyond feature parity. As Futurum Group notes, Klaviyo's move suggests that email and SMS marketing platforms are no longer just execution tools but are becoming decision making systems, where agents choose content, timing and audience without constant human oversight. That is a meaningful shift in how marketing software is positioned: instead of giving a marketer a canvas to build a journey, the platform increasingly proposes, tests and ships variations of that journey on its own, with humans stepping in to approve or override rather than to originate.
This comes as Salesforce pushes its own agentic push through Agentforce, embedding AI agents across its CRM and Marketing Cloud products to handle tasks like lead qualification, service responses and campaign optimization. Salesforce remains one of the largest CRM vendors in the world, and its ability to fold agentic capability into sales, service and marketing simultaneously gives it a structural advantage that a specialist like Klaviyo cannot easily match through organic development alone, which is likely part of why the Agency acquisition happened now.
Consolidation pressure builds
Both companies are effectively racing to define what an AI native CRM looks like, and the outcome will shape which platforms marketers rely on for the next generation of customer engagement. Salesforce's scale advantage means it can push agentic capabilities across sales, service and marketing simultaneously, pressuring smaller players to consolidate or specialize fast. Expect more acquisitions of narrow, agent focused startups by mid size marketing platforms over the coming quarters, as vendors that lack the resources to build agentic infrastructure in house look to buy their way into the conversation before it becomes table stakes.
What marketers should do now
Why it matters: marketers should expect agentic features to become table stakes in CRM platforms within the next product cycles, not a premium add-on. Teams need to audit how much message level personalization they are willing to hand to autonomous agents, and build review processes now, before these capabilities become the default rather than the exception. That means defining brand voice guardrails, setting clear escalation paths for edge cases, and deciding today which decisions, from send timing to offer selection, still require a human sign off once every major CRM vendor ships an agent by default.
The Signal Brief · Mariano De Vitto — Head of Marketing, Barcelona