From Salesforce's entry into the ITSM market to ServiceNow's center automation strategy, here are extracts from some of this week’s most popular news stories.
Salesforce to Enter the ITSM Market at Dreamforce 2025 & Challenge ServiceNow
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has revealed that his company will enter the IT service management (ITSM) at Dreamforce 2025.
Speaking on The Logan Bartlett Show, Benioff said:
"Come to Dreamforce and you’ll see. We’ve never been in the ITSM market before, but now we’re entering, and we’re building it on Slack."
ITSM solutions help IT teams manage the services they deliver across the business. These “services” could include everything from giving someone access to an application and setting up a laptop to hosting internal applications and managing cloud storage.
ServiceNow is the dominant player in the ITSM space. Yet, Benioff suggests that Slack gives Salesforce a significant differentiator.
“ServiceNow is a great company,” he said. “I think they automate 9,000 companies… But Slack is already in a million companies, small, medium, large, and extra large.”
With Slack, Salesforce aims to build an ITSM solution within a “different kind of architecture” where humans and agents work together. The CEO continued:
Whether you’re managing assets in a company or configuring systems, the agentic capability is incredibly powerful. And if you can provide it right on your phone, in Slack, that’s really a next-generation UI.
Of course, many will view the move as a tit for tat. After all, ServiceNow has made big moves in CRM this year, aiming to usurp Salesforce as the “market leader” (Read more...).
ServiceNow Hasn’t Cut Its Customer Service Headcount, Despite Deflecting 75% of Cases
In July, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that AI advancements are leading to the ‘end of human customer service’.
Meanwhile, just three days ago, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, noted that his company had cut its customer service team from 9,000 to 5,000 employees after implementing Agentforce.
Yet, ServiceNow tells a different story. Its headcount has remained flat.
Indeed, despite deflecting roughly 75 percent of customer cases, its contact center team is no smaller than two years ago.
Amit Zavery, President, CPO, & COO of ServiceNow, shared the news in a discussion on Bloomberg Live.
One of the big reasons here, per Zamery, is that the company’s case volume has increased by 40 percent over the past two years, as the business has grown.
However, ServiceNow has also empowered its agents with their own self-service AI to not just give answers back, but engage in deeper discussions and solve their issues.
As such, while its headcount hasn’t changed, its customer satisfaction (CSAT) rates have, moving in a positive direction (Read more...).
