Salesforce is today launching a new Agentforce offering for IT Services – as competition ramps up with rival tech titan ServiceNow.
The new product, dubbed Agentforce IT Service, automates incident management for IT teams, with agents creating and prioritizing incidents based on employee reports.
Employees can make requests in Slack, leading to AI agents autonomously handling tasks like answering questions, troubleshooting issues, and escalating urgent requests, leading to immediate support without ever having to switch apps, Salesforce says.
If multiple employees report a VPN issue, for instance, Agentforce identifies a widespread problem and escalates it as a major incident.
While Salesforce has historically been something of a giant in the CRM industry, ServiceNow has dominated the world of IT Service Management (ITSM). Increasingly, however, the two seem to be stepping on each other’s toes.
Let’s take a look at these new Agentforce features – and what they might mean for the growing rivalry between the two companies.
Agentforce IT Service Capabilities Explained
Agentforce IT Service includes the following capabilities:
- An agentic IT service desk intended to provide next-generation end-to-end IT service management functionality, compliant with ITIL processes.
- Several AI agents working together as subject-matter experts (SMEs) to support employees and IT teams.
- Enterprise-wide connectors, integrations, and workflows to work across an organization’s IT landscape.
- Agentic Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and Service Graph, which provides an enterprise graph of all infrastructure, applications, and services, offering a full view of connectivity and dependencies. This system features advanced discovery capabilities (both agent and agent-less) and a comprehensive service map, powering proactive and reactive incident resolution and root-cause analysis.
Agentforce IT Service is meant to meet employees where they work – whether that be Slack, Microsoft Teams, an employee portal, or webchat.
For employees, IT support is simplified through Slack, with employees making a request right in the messaging interface, and AI agents autonomously handling tasks like answering questions, troubleshooting issues, and escalating urgent requests, leading to immediate support “without ever having to switch apps”, Salesforce says.
With personalized resolutions from Agentforce, if an employee needs to know if they’re eligible for a laptop refresh, instead of filing a ticket and waiting, they can ask that question wherever they work, be that Slack, Microsoft Teams, or employee portals. Agentforce then checks their profile and company policy, providing a personalized, real-time resolution without any IT team intervention.
When a widespread issue occurs, like an email server outage, Agentforce can automatically alert affected employees and give real-time status updates.
It can also detect and create an incident on the employee’s behalf if their issue isn’t resolved.
As ever, human handoff is an option for sensitive issues. “If an inquiry is highly complex or time-sensitive – a security breach, for example – Agentforce instantly transfers the conversation to a human IT representative and includes insights needed for quick action,” Salesforce said in a statement.
For IT teams, it automates incident management and augments IT teams with deeper insights for quicker resolutions, letting them prevent problems before they start and reduce IT support costs, Salesforce says.
The new features include:
- Automated incident management: Agentforce creates and prioritizes incidents based on employee reports automatically.
- Rapid issue detection: When a major incident occurs, Agentforce analyzes previous incidents to find out the underlying problem, generate a summary, and propose solutions.
- Data-driven decisions: IT managers can easily monitor team performance, asset inventory, and incident volume, so decisions about optimizing resource allocation and workload imbalances can be made on the basis of the facts.
- Minimize downtime of IT operations and assets: With an embedded CMDB that serves as a single source of truth for your IT infrastructure, IT teams can quickly identify breakages. For instance, by flagging all systems impacted by a failed network switch before it causes widespread downtime.
Announcing the new capabilities, Muddu Sudhakar, SVP & GM, IT & HR Service at Salesforce, said: “The fragmented, legacy ITSM model is fundamentally broken. By building Agentforce IT Service natively on the Salesforce and Service Cloud platform, we are driving a conversation-first, agent-first revolution with product and technology innovation that transforms IT and HR for incredible efficiency and cost reduction.
“This agentic shift delivers trusted, embedded intelligence that makes IT teams exponentially more efficient and significantly improves employee productivity.”
Kishan Chetan, EVP & GM of Service Cloud at Salesforce, said: “For 15 years, Service Cloud has been recognized as the leader in the Customer Engagement Center Magic Quadrant.
“Now, in direct response to years of customer requests, we’re building Agentforce IT Service to transform IT from a reactive, ticket-based model to a proactive, conversation and agentic solution that provides instant, personalized support directly in Slack, Teams, or anywhere an employee works. The future of IT service is agentic, and it’s here today.”
Agentforce IT Service is launching with more than 100 pre-built connectors and integrations to heterogeneous apps, services, and systems that organizations already rely on.
The complete Agentforce IT Service solution, including the IT Service Desk, employee agents, and an embedded CMDB will be generally available in October 2025.
Salesforce vs. ServiceNow
When asked, during a webinar ahead of the product’s full announcement, whether this represented a ‘land and expand’ strategy, or if Salesforce would be going after ServiceNow in particular, Kishan Chetan, EVP & GM, Service Cloud at Salesforce, said they would be “running into” ServiceNow – but they were confident in their innovation.
He said: “What is most important for us is, as we look at this, we have a set of customers who’ve consistently come to us and wanted to have this solution in their market. As we said, we have about 150,000 Salesforce customers. If you look at our Slack install base, there’s about a million customers, so there’s a lot of unfulfilled demand out there in the market for us to essentially provide this service to enable customers to manage IT and HR services.
“So it’s absolutely something where we believe that there are a lot of unmet needs and demands from customers in the market. And there are several players in the market, including, of course, ServiceNow, but also the other players in the market.
“So, absolutely, there’s a lot of demand from customers. And I’m sure in several of those situations, we’ll absolutely run into ServiceNow, and we’re very confident of our innovation and our continued innovation to be able to take that, and we have the strength of the deeply unified platform to help us and strengthen us as well.”
Final Thoughts
As we reported a month ago, Salesforce has been making advances into the world of ITSM for some time now, and their rivalry with ServiceNow does not appear to be going anywhere.
This year has seen ServiceNow enter the CRM space, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has recently said that the company would be entering the ITSM market at Dreamforce 2025 – so there may be more to see in this arena.
As tech companies of all stripes pivot harder and harder into AI – particularly agentic – solutions, the amount of overlap between them will grow.
Hopefully, it is not wishful thinking to want the increased competition to lead to greater results for customers.
