ServiceNow has been making a strong name for itself since its inception in 2003 – just four years after Salesforce’s mighty entry to the market in 1999. However, perhaps now more than ever, its competitor status is really something to be reckoned with.
Now that the platform officially holds its CRM status and has had a few big names in Salesforce transfer over to the ServiceNow side, the platform has the potential to be as monumental in the shared market space as Oracle and Microsoft. Let’s take a closer look.
ServiceNow as a Competitor: Joining the CRM Market
It’s no secret that Salesforce has dominated the market for years, positioning itself at the top of cutting-edge cloud technology that seamlessly ties business processes, workflows, and connection processes together. In 2024, it was ranked as the #1 CRM provider for the 11th consecutive year, despite its first missed revenue target since 2006 in May.

As a rival player in the market, ServiceNow has a unique set of specializations. Although they share similar goals to Salesforce, ServiceNow is more focused on internal enterprise operations, offering tools for IT service management, HR, and security operations to optimize internal workflows and improve employee productivity.
Up until now, ServiceNow has mainly sat in the peripherals of the market as although the cloud-based platform does call itself a workflow automation and optimization solution, it had not been officially classed as a CRM.
However, on January 21, 2025, ServiceNow officially declared itself a CRM, after John Ball, SVP and GM CRM Workflows at ServiceNow, celebrated the vendor’s leader position in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center, as reported by CX Today.
This means that the platform offers functionality such as omnichannel support, self-service, case management, conversational intelligence, and more, as well as a 360-degree customer view much akin to Salesforce’s own Customer 360 functionality.
What Does This Mean for Salesforce?
With ServiceNow now having official CRM status, it would be natural to assume that the platform is eager to fight against the other big dogs in the market.
However, as Salesforce and other existing players like Microsoft have already solidified themselves as strong and successful solutions for a wide variety of customers, this might not be the case. ServiceNow could very well be pivoting to target a very specific section of the CRM market.
Charlie Mitchell, tech journalist for CX Today, believes that ServiceNow “won’t challenge out-of-the-box CRM providers” and that ServiceNow would likely need to rethink its marketing strategy now that it is in the CRM space. This is especially true if the vendor wants to get their latest AI tools off the ground in the mainstream CRM market.
Falling Forecasts
On January 29, it was announced that ServiceNow forecasted slower growth, causing shares to drop by 9% – despite strong revenue results in last year’s Q4.
This follows ServiceNow’s Chief Executive Bill McDermott admitting that the company is still in the “early innings” of capitalizing on changes coming from AI, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
However, ServiceNow executives have also emphasized that AI is boosting sales. Chief Financial Officer Gina Mastantuono said that a new annual contract value related to the company’s AI product “stepped up meaningfully” in the fourth quarter, as reported by Bloomberg.
Are ServiceNow’s AI Tools Competitive?
Last September, ServiceNow officially joined the AI agent race when it announced the release of its own AI agents.
ServiceNow’s agents, powered by the Now Platform, leverage advanced reasoning and real-time, cross-enterprise data to deliver deep contextual comprehension and intelligent, personalized responses. Designed to “reinvent workflows across the enterprise,” these agents integrate knowledge, tools, workflows, and data to enhance oversight, governance, and prompt-based activities with sophisticated understanding.
These agents fall into the same sphere of capabilities as those of Salesforce and even Microsoft. Similarly to Salesforce, ServiceNow has its own version of Trailhead called Now Learning, which professionals can use to learn about generative AI for free.
They’ve also released the new Now Assist Skills Kit which enables organizations to build, test, and deploy custom generative AI skills on the ServiceNow platform, presenting solutions to the tech-wide AI skills gap.
It’s clear that Salesforce has its eye on ServiceNow’s AI capabilities, as they have put up a Salesforce vs. ServiceNow page, highlighting why customers and users should use Salesforce over ServiceNow, including a reported 33% higher customer satisfaction and a 35% increase in sales revenue.
However, the attention must always fall back on the fact that ServiceNow and Salesforce have different, distinct core audiences. The types of businesses that Salesforce’s agents might be best suited for will likely differ from those that ServiceNow would be better suited for, and we would likely need to see different use cases for the two in action to get a full understanding.
The Salesforce to ServiceNow Pipeline
Last year, it was reported by Bloomberg that ServiceNow had developed a new hiring strategy: “poaching” employees from Salesforce.
Whether the “poaching” aspect holds full merit or not is uncertain, but from 2023 to 2024, more of ServiceNow’s new employees came from Salesforce than any other company, according to an analysis by Live Data Technologies for Bloomberg News. This includes more than 240 Salesforce alumni in the last year and a half.
A couple of people in the line-up include Amy Regan Morehouse, the creator of Trailhead, who was hired by ServiceNow to work on a similar program, and Debbie Brewer, the executive behind the running of Salesforce’s flagship conference Dreamforce. Colin Fleming is another big name, having been Salesforce’s Executive Vice President of Global Marketing and Chief Brand Officer for 13 years before he became ServiceNow’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) last year.
According to Live Data Technologies, it was reported that about half of the workers who’ve joined ServiceNow from Salesforce over the last five years were in sales and marketing, with around 30% in product and engineering.
Now that ServiceNow has made its first fully-fledged steps into the world of CRM, they have also announced that it aims to hire 3,000 new employees to support this endeavor, and even more of Salesforce’s alumni will likely make the switch.
Final Thoughts: What Does ServiceNow Want?
Now that ServiceNow is an official player in the CRM space, there is a strong possibility that the vendor will try to fight against Salesforce. After all, the CRM market is only so big, and it is likely that ServiceNow took on those Salesforce professionals for a reason.
There is certainly a possibility that we will see more people in the Salesforce ecosystem make the switch to the ServiceNow ecosystem, especially considering the persistent saturation in the Salesforce job market and lack of opportunities. Now that ServiceNow is a CRM, Salesforce professionals will be even better suited than before to get stuck in with their transferable skills, but of course, this will depend on changing market climates.
How successful ServiceNow’s movements are in the CRM market are yet to be determined, especially as Salesforce is a “sticky” software that makes it difficult for customers to move away from it. Maybe ServiceNow will stick to its niche in the beginning, but we need to expect a strong resurgence as a valuable CRM player too.
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