ServiceNow has signed two major customer deals that reinforce one of the company’s clearest strategic messages from its third-quarter 2026 earnings call, that the next generation of customer relationship management (CRM) will not be defined by sales pipelines alone.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has selected the ServiceNow AI Platform as the foundation for support services across its Cloud & AI business, while Stagwell is rolling out ServiceNow across its global network of more than 70 agencies to unify employee experience, IT, HR, security and AI governance.
The announcements back up a broader argument the vendor made during its latest earnings call that CRM is becoming less about managing sales teams and more about orchestrating work across the enterprise.
In HPE’s case, ServiceNow said its platform will create a single foundation for case and service management and operations across the company’s Cloud & AI business. The five-year agreement includes ServiceNow Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, Technology Provider Service Management, Workflow Data Fabric, Hardware Asset Management, Service Exchange and Super Intelligence Control Tower.
Mark Bakker, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Operations at HPE, said:
“Support is a critical part of the customer experience, and our goal is to make that experience easier, faster, and more personalized. ServiceNow gives us a single foundation to connect teams, streamline processes, and use AI and automation to deliver a more seamless experience across our Cloud & AI support services.”
That is exactly the kind of use case ServiceNow wants to own, a customer support environment where cases, field dispatch, assets, AI workflows, data and governance all need to operate as one connected system.
The Stagwell announcement extends the same logic into employee experience. The marketing services group is deploying ServiceNow EmployeeWorks, HR Service Delivery, ITSM, Identity and Access Security and Super Intelligence Control Tower to support more than 10,000 employees across its agency network.
Stagwell said it will use the platform to consolidate four legacy service desks, streamline onboarding and offboarding, retire custom middleware, and create a repeatable “day-one” onboarding blueprint for future acquisitions.
The deals support ServiceNow’s positioning that it is not just selling CRM as another customer database; it is pitching the ServiceNow AI Platform as the connective tissue between customer service, employee service, IT operations, field work, security, data and AI governance.
Its latest CRM push is a direct competitive challenge to legacy, sales-led CRM architectures.
ServiceNow’s “New CRM” Pitch Takes Aim at Legacy Sales CRM
During the earnings call, ServiceNow’s Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott made the company’s CRM challenge clear:
“As enterprises rethink the mandate of their CRM systems, ServiceNow is leading the way. The old CRM was built for sales teams. The new one has to work across your entire business. That’s a different product. That’s a different architecture. That’s why we’re seeing customers rip and replace, not just add alongside.”
McDermott’s statement is one of ServiceNow’s clearest attacks yet on traditional CRM, and it did not need to name Salesforce as the target. The company is arguing that older CRM systems were designed around Salesforce automation, pipeline management, account data, and customer records, but not necessarily around the operational work required to resolve customer issues.
Most large enterprises already have extensive CRM estates that can track accounts, cases, opportunities, interactions and customer histories. But many still struggle with what happens after a customer issue is logged. The work often moves outside the CRM into IT, operations, product teams, finance, compliance, field service, logistics or risk, creating handoffs where customer experience often breaks down.
ServiceNow is arguing that AI-era CRM needs to close that gap by going beyond recording the customer interaction to trigger, coordinate and resolve the work behind it.
That is why the HPE deal is strategically useful for ServiceNow, as it sits directly at the intersection of customer support, case management, field service, AI governance, asset workflows and operational data—where ServiceNow believes legacy CRM architectures are vulnerable.
AI Is Pulling ServiceNow Further Into CRM
ServiceNow’s CRM ambitions have been building for some time, but Q3 suggested AI is accelerating the company’s movement into the category.
Gina Mastantuono, ServiceNow’s President and CFO, said that CRM and industry workflows remained on a “rapid growth trajectory” and appeared in 13 of the company’s top 20 deals during the quarter. “CRM AI had a standout quarter as well, with net new ACV tripling both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year,” Mastantuono added.
This growth is important because rather than trying to compete as another CRM vendor, ServiceNow is making the case that AI changes what CRM is expected to do.
