Salesforce continues to go full steam ahead with its flagship AI tool, Agentforce, and recently introduced the Agentforce 3 update. Addressing customer concerns about understanding the tool and its ROI, the update featured the brand new Command Center – a hub that allows businesses to take a closer look at their agents’ health, overall performance, and how often they’re being used.
Having heard much of the qualms that customers had regarding Agentforce, this feels like the right step towards increasing business adoption. Having a full view of the agents you’re buying and understanding how they are performing should give executives more confidence in what they’re acquiring. Pair this with the new pricing model, and you now have a tool that has clear and logical business advantages.
However, tech news website CX today recently discussed how Salesforce’s new Command Center shares many similarities with competitor ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower. The ITSM company revealed the Tower at their Knowledge conference in May, detailing their own centralized hub to manage and secure agents.
The two companies have frequently crossed paths since the beginning of this year, and are increasingly encroaching on each other’s territories as they pursue strategic expansions. And as both look to expand their AI offerings, they’ve once again unveiled strikingly similar products to the market. But why is this particular case important?
The centralized agent hub concept offers clear benefits, and we’re likely to see it become more prevalent across the tech industry, regardless of the specific branding. IBM and Boomi, for example, have already launched their own Command Center-style solutions. Yet for Salesforce and ServiceNow, this innovation adds further fuel to an ongoing rivalry.
In this article, we’ll explore what the emergence of these command centers means for both companies and the wider tech landscape.
Understanding the “Rivalry”
Historically, the two companies have focused on very different fields – Salesforce has dominated the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) space for over two decades, and ServiceNow has held a strong and influential position in Information Technology Service Management (ITSM).
But over the last few months, both have aggressively made strategic steps to enter each other’s territories.
During ServiceNow’s partner kick-off in January this year, the company declared that they were officially entering the CRM space, and that they were in a position to offer a data-rich CRM experience. Martin Schneider, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, stated to CX that “because of its history, knowledge, and deep data integration, ServiceNow can provide insights and capabilities that others can’t.”
ServiceNow’s CEO Bill McDermott also shared during a Q4 earnings call that the company would be aligning with tech giant Microsoft “to accelerate disruption in the CRM category”.
On the flip side, Salesforce strategically launched Agentforce for HR Service on May 6, 2025 – the very first day of ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2025 conference. During this launch, Kishan Chetan, Salesforce’s EVP and General Manager for Service Cloud, also confirmed that Salesforce would soon be expanding into ITSM, marking a direct move into ServiceNow’s core territory.
Now, entering each other’s core markets is a bold move by both Salesforce and ServiceNow, and will inevitably cause friction. But both companies are fully aware that displacing one another from their dominant positions won’t be easy.
Even without immediate dominance, these expansions make strategic sense. Salesforce gains new revenue opportunities, deeper integration into existing customers, and a stronger defensive stance by entering ITSM. Similarly, ServiceNow’s CRM move, strengthened by their partnership with Microsoft, positions them to offer something genuinely new – CRM deeply integrated into productivity tools like Teams and Outlook, powered by AI.
However, the introduction of the Command Center and Control Tower respectively takes this ongoing battle into new territory, where dominance is the main aim. Both are looking to gain long-term influence over enterprise AI management.
Why Command Center vs. Control Tower Really Matters
Introducing the agent hub concept gives businesses exactly what they’ve been asking for: control.
Agentic AI has come a long way in a short time, but if businesses are going to start handing off tasks to autonomous agents, they need to trust that those agents are doing the right thing, for the right reasons, with the right data.
Visibility, governance, and oversight may be misunderstood as nice-to-haves, but not having these features is becoming a deal-breaker for businesses who are contemplating investing. And that’s exactly what tools like Salesforce’s Command Center and ServiceNow’s Control Tower are trying to offer.
This move also marks a new chapter in the ongoing rivalry between the two platforms. As mentioned, Salesforce and ServiceNow have traditionally operated in different parts of the enterprise, but with AI agents now touching every department, both companies are moving into shared space.
These new centralized AI control tools show they’re going beyond just exploring each other’s territory and are actively going head-to-head to become the default platform for enterprise AI.
And part of that battle comes down to openness.
ServiceNow’s Control Tower was built with third-party AI agents in mind, allowing companies to bring in agents powered by other LLMs or platforms beyond their Now Assist tool and manage them from a single interface. That’s a huge draw for large enterprises experimenting with multiple AI models across their business.
Salesforce is taking a similar approach. With the rollout of Model Context Protocol (MCP), users can now connect external AI models into the Salesforce ecosystem. That includes services like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more. This again mirrors the capabilities of ServiceNow’s offerings at a time when their competition is heating up.
The result is a new kind of platform war, which is less about features and more about control, visibility, and interoperability. And whichever company wins this layer could end up owning the most valuable real estate in the future of work.
Final Thoughts
Once again, Salesforce and ServiceNow are going head-to-head, and it feels like this is only the beginning of the conversation.
I recently explored how the Command Center update reflects Salesforce responding to customer needs. But is there something more going on under the hood? With ServiceNow launching a near-identical offering just a month earlier, it raises the question: Was Salesforce’s move influenced by competitive pressure?
Either way, these new agent hubs are a win for users, and that’s what matters most. But now the spotlight is on Salesforce to prove this isn’t just a reactionary update or a marketing play. The real test will be whether the Command Center delivers the tangible value that teams on the ground have been promised from this update.
