SAN FRANCISCO, June 16 -- The pitch Salesforce made on Monday, stripped of the language about agentic enterprises, was really a pitch about getting rid of the person who answers your support ticket. The company agreed to pay about $3.6 billion for Fin, an artificial intelligence agent that its makers say handles roughly three out of every four customer questions before a human ever sees them. It is buying that capability at a strange moment, when investors are not sure software companies like Salesforce will survive the very technology it just spent billions to own.

Fin spent fifteen years as Intercom, the messaging tool that lived in the little chat bubble in the corner of a million websites. This year it renamed itself after its own ch...