February 11, 2026 • 4 min read
Salesforce Acquires Cimulate to Navigate the Future of Agentic Commerce
Director of Content & Market Research
February 11, 2026
Salesforce has signed an agreement to snap up Cimulate, which offers a ‘CommerceGPT’ purpose-built for retailers.
CommerceGPT interacts with shoppers to understand their buying intent and sell via conversation, replacing legacy search, browse, and recommendations tools.
Customers describe what they wish to purchase, and CommerceGPT will share the best-placed results, taking into account the brand’s products, use cases, and customer preferences.
Cimulate’s solution can also interact with agentic shoppers, which search, compare, and buy products on a customer’s behalf.
There are many other tech providers promising similar tools, bolting GPTs onto legacy systems and connecting to open-source models. However, retailers often struggle to accumulate the data required to make a GPT perform effectively.
Ultimately, that’s what separates CommerceGPT. It creates personas and simulates millions of shopping journeys, producing massive volumes of synthetic shopping data.
In doing so, it extracts commerce-relevant signals from general-purpose LLMs, learning what drives conversions.
From there, Cimulate combines that synthetic data with proprietary data in a process it calls “distillation via simulation.”
Via this process, the company, and now Salesforce, aims to deliver contextual experiences that convert in the age of agentic commerce.
Now, Salesforce plans to embed Cimulate with Agentforce Commerce, powering the next generation of AI shopping assistants that align with the shift in how consumers browse and buy.
“The future of commerce is agentic, moving beyond simple transactions to intuitive, conversational discovery,” added Nitin Mangtani, SVP & GM, Commerce and Retail at Salesforce.
“By integrating Cimulate’s technology into Agentforce Commerce, we’re helping retailers close the gap between shopper intent and action, delivering experiences that feel more natural, relevant, and effective.”
The acquisition of Cimulate is Salesforce’s eleventh announced roll-up in nine months, with the tech giant expecting to close the deal before May 2026.
Interestingly, Cimulate - like several of the company’s other acquisitions - delivers on a specific AI agent use case, which solves a data problem, embeds in real workflows, and drives a measurable outcome.
Our Take: Another Acquisition That Signals Salesforce’s Evolved Approach to AI Agents
Salesforce has stepped out of its Agentforce hype phase, where its messaging was broad and aspirational, tools were horizontal and generic, and data foundations weren’t ready.
Now, it’s focusing less on how many agents it can provide and more on specific agents/assistants, and whether they have access to clean data, fit into real workflows, and drive measurable ROI.
Cimulate’s solution fits this pattern. Yet, so do many of Salesforce’s recent acquisitions.
Consider its August 2025 pickup of Bluebirds, for example. Its AI agent - now the Agentforce Prospecting Agent - scans a database of seven million company accounts to detect triggers like job changes, funding announcements, new hires, and tech adoption, moments that signal buying intent.
Once a signal is identified, the Agentforce Prospecting Agent enriches contact data from multiple sources, automatically providing accurate titles, roles, and contact information, before alerting the sales rep. The alert comes with the context of why now is the right time to reach out, with the AI also drafting personalized intro messages.
Integrated with Agentforce Sales and email systems, the AI agent helps to book more qualified meetings, accelerate pipeline generation, and reduce time spent on prospecting work.
As a result, it has access to good data, augments how teams already work, and aims to deliver against clear ROI-generating outcomes.
Many of Salesforce’s other acquisitions fit this mold.
Regrello is another prime example, alongside Qualified, which essentially does what Salesforce’s first out-of-the-box agent - the Salesforce Business Development Rep (BDR) - already did, just better.
Yet, when it released Salesforce BDR, Salesforce was in its era of AI agent experimentation, which exposed weaknesses in data quality, governance, integration, and change management.
Bluebirds, Regrello, and Quallified sidestep such issues by solving a focused problem, integrating directly into Salesforce workflows, and delivering measurable results.
Ultimately, that seems to be the blueprint moving forward and what likely led to the Cimulate acquisition, which strives to help commerce teams move beyond legacy tools and AI agent experiments.
“We can help brands move beyond legacy search to experiences that truly understand what shoppers are looking for and respond in real time.”
In 2026, expect similar targeted acquisitions from Salesforce, more workflow-embedded agents, and fewer broad “platform AI” narratives.