In conjunction with its Knowledge 2025 user conference this week, ServiceNow released CRM Agents that can autonomously manage sales and fulfillment tasks, handle complex case routing and be set up to enable cross-departmental workflows, such as between sales and service.
The agents follow the introduction of ServiceNow's agentic AI suite earlier this year.
Furthermore, the company is in the process of acquiring Logik.ai, which makes a configure price quote (CPQ) tool commonly used for automation. Logik, a close partner of ServiceNow, is already tightly integrated into the platform, according to Terence Chesire, vice president of product management for CRM and industry workflows at ServiceNow. The company plans to finalize the acquisition later this year.
Last year, ServiceNow added order management to its platform, a type of sales and service tool that Salesforce also provides.
You can only sell sales, marketing and service so many times. You can only sell ITSM so many times. So [companies have] to be looking at adjacent growth [areas].
Rebecca WettemannFounder, Valoir
ServiceNow is ratcheting up the competition with partner -- and rival -- Salesforce, which is moving steadily into HR and IT service management, (ITSM), ServiceNow's traditional tech strongholds. While on the surface, it might look like two heavyweights squaring off in a boxing ring, it more resembles tech business as usual, according to Rebecca Wettemann, founder of independent research firm Valoir.
"They're both publicly traded companies, and they've got to continue to grow their addressable market," she said. "You can only sell sales, marketing and service so many times. You can only sell ITSM so many times. So they've got to be looking at adjacent growth [areas]."
ServiceNow talks CRM
Chesire said that technically, ServiceNow has been a CRM player for nine years. Still, the recent addition of order management, sales-focused agentic AI and, soon, CPQ is the biggest CRM "functional expansion" in his nearly a decade at the company. He also added that ServiceNow respects its close partner, Salesforce, and will continue to integrate with it for the sake of its joint customers.
Chesire said he feels that ServiceNow's CRM fills a market need, and that large enterprise tech companies such as Salesforce know there will be overlap.
"What we clearly heard from the market was that there was a hunger for this alternate approach to go beyond interactions, omnichannel and the front-office activities," Chesire said. "What was being overlooked by the overall CRM market was driving fulfillment against sales or service requests through the middle and back office."
Joint ServiceNow and Salesforce customer Pure Storage welcomes the ServiceNow approach to agentic AI, according to chief digital transformation officer Paolo Juvara. The company is in its second year of a massive modernization project to streamline its order-to-cash process with applications built on ServiceNow.
Pure Storage is in the earliest days of adopting ServiceNow's AI tools, but Juvara said he sees them as orchestrating processes from the front office to the back by connecting disparate systems such as ITSM, HR, legal services and facilities management that don't presently interact with each other. The company plans to also grow its use of ServiceNow for customer experience and support.
"ServiceNow really is an enterprise workflow system with all these applications packaged on top of it," Juvara said. "So, we started really thinking of ServiceNow in those terms and using it more and more to connect business processes across the enterprise."
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
