Salesforce rolls into ITSM with Slack-based agentic AI platform

At first glance, Salesforce entering the IT services management space later this month might appear as an attempt to compete for ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC or Zendesk seats -- which indeed it might, eventually. But more than that, it's a new offering aimed at hundreds of thousands of Slack users, said Salesforce brass at its unveiling.

ITSM is a mature technology dominated by companies such as Zendesk, ServiceNow and Atlassian. Salesforce's agentic AI-based entry in the market will be driven primarily through Slack but will also have connectors to Microsoft Teams and other channels. Salesforce built the ITSM features from homegrown technology, with a small part of it coming it from an acquisition, said Muddu Sudhakar, senior vice president and general manager of Agentforce IT Service and HR Service at Salesforce.

It will include four parts: an employee interface, a proactive agent that alerts employees who may be affected by an issue, a service desk dashboard for IT workers to manage activity, and an embedded configuration management database, which maps an enterprise graph of assets and dependencies to determine the extent of incidents and perform root-cause analyses.

"We have about 150,000 Salesforce customers, and our Slack installed base is about a million customers," said Kishan Chetan, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce Service Cloud. "So there's a lot of unfulfilled demand out there in the market for us to essentially provide the service to enable customers to manage IT service. So, it's absolutely something where we believe that there are a lot of unmet needs and demand from customers."

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was an early adopter of Salesforce's ITSM platform, piloting it this summer with plans for a full rollout by January 1, 2026, said Omar Baig, UNESCO chief information and technology officer. Based in Paris and with 53 offices globally, the organization fosters international collaboration in education, science and culture in 194 countries -- and with it comes sprawling IT operations.

"The key challenge that I'm facing alongside my other management colleagues is to be able to deliver more with less these days, and we need the tools and the platforms to be able to do so with zero downtime," Baig said.

Considering ServiceNow's recent charge into Salesforce's longstanding bastion of CRM, it might be tempting to consider Salesforce rolling into ServiceNow territory as a tit-for-tat. ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott proclaimed that "CRM is broken," which became an oft-repeated phrase by other execs at the company's Knowledge 2025 user event last May.

Chances are that Salesforce was building its ITSM features long before that, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of independent research firm Valoir.

"ITSM has been in the works for a while, so I don't think Marc [Benioff, Salesforce CEO] heard Bill say, 'CRM is broken,' and said, 'Oh, I'm going to go after you now,'" she said. "I think ITSM has been in Salesforce's sights for a while. But I do think we're going to see much more aggressive competition between the two."

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.