The past week in CX has seen a big move from ServiceNow, a change of leadership at Zoho, more Agentforce news from Salesforce, and a further agentic AI release by Kore.ai.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
ServiceNow Officially Enters the CRM Market
During its 2025 Partner Kickoff, ServiceNow boldly declared: “We are in CRM.”
The announcement came as John Ball, SVP & GM CRM Workflows at ServiceNow, celebrated the vendor’s leader position in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center.
While ServiceNow has refrained from using the term “CRM” until now, over recent years, its Customer Service Management (CSM) platform has begun to look increasingly like such a solution.
Indeed, it now features omnichannel support, case management, self-service, knowledge management, proactive outreach, conversational intelligence, and a “360-degree customer view”.
As it has added these capabilities, the platform has won significant new business, with Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, revealing during the company’s latest earnings call:
[We’re] growing faster than markets, especially the customer service management market.
Yet, ServiceNow won’t challenge out-of-the-box CRM providers. Instead, its expertise lies in complex service delivery rooted in data from the ERP and other back-end systems (Read on...).
Sridhar Vembu Steps Down as Zoho CEO, Shailesh Kumar Davey Takes His Place
Co-founder Sridhar Vembu has vacated his post as Zoho CEO.
Vembu will step into the Chief Scientist role, focusing fully on R&D initiatives and his “personal rural development mission.”
Announcing the move on X, Vembu cited the “recent major developments” in AI as the primary reason for his role change. He wrote:
Our co-founder, Shailesh Kumar Davey, will serve as our new group CEO. Our co-founder, Tony Thomas, will lead Zoho US. Rajesh Ganesan will lead our ManageEngine division, and Mani Vembu will lead the Zoho.com division.
Vembu co-founded AdventNet in 1996 before renaming the company “Zoho” in 2009.
The business has since extended from its CRM heritage to become a global provider of supply chain, workspace, human capital management (HCM), and other tech solutions.
Its portfolio keeps expanding, too, with the recent launch of a payroll platform and IoT arm (Read on...).
Salesforce Has Already Won Thousands of Agentforce Deals, Claims CEO
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has claimed that the company’s Agentforce platform is already proving to be a big financial success.
