Salesforce to Take Aim at ServiceNow with Slack-First ITSM
At Dreamforce 2025, Salesforce will roll out an AI-powered IT service platform built into Slack, reshaping the ITSM landscape
In a few weeks at its annual Dreamforce conference, Salesforce is expected to announce new AI-powered updates to its platform. While its Agentforce service will undoubtedly take center stage, the company will formally launch a new product that puts it further in direct competition with ServiceNow: Agentic IT Service.
Talk of Salesforce’s IT service management (ITSM) push has been circulating since early this year. But during the company’s call with analysts to discuss its second-quarter financial earnings, Chief Executive Marc Benioff disclosed that an agentic IT service platform will be launched in October 2025. It won’t be a standalone product like Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud or Tableau. Instead, it will be Slack-first.
Disclosure: I will attend Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce. The company is paying most of my expenses. However, Salesforce in no way dictated the content of this post. These are my words.
“Right inside Slack, you’re going to be using our agentic IT service capability,” Benioff explained. “It’s natively embedded where employees already work with zero learning curve. And with agentic IT service…every request is becoming a conversation where [AI] agents work hand-in-hand with IT teams proactively fixing their problems. It’s going to be an incredible growth driver for the company, but it’s just really another example of how every platform is going to become agentic.”
He highlights that most ITSM products are only serving the “very highest end of the market, with maybe 1,000 customers here or 1,000 customers there.” By embedding its IT service into Slack, Salesforce believes it has an advantage: The team communication platform is “used by about a million customers worldwide.” In addition, it claims its offering is designed to be more democratic.
“No one else is delivering this level of agentic capability, and digital labor is scale,” Benioff asserted.
Seemingly unwilling to wait a few weeks, Salesforce has begun sharing more details about its agentic IT service. The company’s Executive Vice President and General Manager, Kishan Chetan, posted on LinkedIn a teaser GIF showing the new platform’s user experience. He added that it “combines 25 years of Salesforce customer service expertise with the power of Slack and Agentforce to deliver a modern, conversational, and agentic support solution.”
IT Help Without Context Switching
It’s worth noting that Salesforce does have some capabilities around case management through its Service Cloud, but it does not have a dedicated ITSM platform. This ITSM would be unique because it’s perhaps the first SKU to emerge from Salesforce’s Agentforce era and is natively built for Slack.
This development shouldn’t be surprising, as workers who experience issues with their technology may be more likely to send a message in Slack to IT support, despite reminders to post the problems in Jira, ServiceNow, BMC’s Helix, Microsoft’s System Center Service Manager, or any other similar application. While further details have yet to be revealed, this Slack-first ITSM service keeps workers in the same environment without having to switch to a new app, saving them valuable time.
Additionally, the infusion of AI can speed up resolution times, enabling employees to troubleshoot issues independently. An IT professional would, consequently, be able to focus more resources and time towards larger technological concerns.
The ITSM agent could be the first Agentforce generation of bots to launch on Slack. When Agentforce 2.0 was introduced, Salesforce added native agent support for its app “where work happens.” Developers could build channel-specific AI agents, and teams could summon a bot into any Slack conversation. At the same time, the company announced the discontinuation of support for legacy custom bots and so-called classic apps—the early generation of bots for which Slack was well-known in its early years.
Agentic IT Services could be another initiative aimed at keeping people on Slack longer. It’s the latest addition of AI tools to the app, doubling down on efforts to improve worker productivity. In July, Salesforce unveiled AI features designed to help teams “move faster, stay aligned, and focus on what matters.” One of the most significant updates was to the search function. It now utilizes AI to surface information scattered across multiple apps and data silos, curating it within Slack and putting it in direct competition with services like Glean, Atlassian, and Dropbox.
But how will companies react to Salesforce’s ITSM play? Again, details about what it can do are sparse at the moment, but will the infusion of AI, combined with its native Slack app status, be convincing enough to get teams to switch? Companies will need to assess a host of factors, including whether this Agentic IT Service improves the average resolution time and mean time to resolve. Does it solve more problems on the first interaction? Is it helping to meet or exceed service level agreements consistently? What’s the impact on the ticket volume? How do the platform’s core capabilities—namely, incident, problem, change, service request, and knowledge management—fare against the existing platform? And are employees using it more?
Needless to say, only time will tell.
The Salesforce-ServiceNow Rivalry
Naturally, this ITSM product launch will only further discussions about Salesforce encroaching on ServiceNow’s turf. However, ServiceNow isn’t entirely blameless either. Earlier this year, it launched an AI-powered CRM, with CEO Bill McDermott suggesting incumbent solutions aren’t working. His lieutenant, President, Chief Product and Operating Officer, Amit Zavery, decried that “traditional CRM is broken. It’s a patchwork of point solutions held together with duct tape and chewing gum. The result: More complexity, more cost, and less value.”
That said, the ServiceNow CRM isn’t exactly new—especially if you look under the hood. Many believed the company had long had such a product, but it was only in May that ServiceNow decided to acknowledge what we all knew.
“They’ve been going after this market for a while,” Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of analyst firm Valoir, told me on the sidelines of ServiceNow’s Knowledge conference. “They just haven’t been calling it ‘CRM’. They were calling it customer service workflows. They’ve got the customer service piece and the field service piece nailed. Now, they’ve got sales order management. All I need to hear is a little bit about marketing…and they’ve got at least a complete story from a CRM pillar perspective.”
ServiceNow’s CRM revelation and Salesforce’s IT push will further add fuel to this tit-for-tat rivalry. Leaders from both firms have derided the other’s solution, describing it as either too complex, antiquated, or unscalable. But what caused this inflamed tension, which ultimately led to this all-out war?
Wettemann believed that the pool is no longer big enough for all parties, especially as these enterprise firms fight for every available growth opportunity. "It’s always co-opetition,” she stated. “But what we’re seeing now is that all of these guys have to continue to grow their total addressable market. As I move from a more square seat-based model to a more consumption-based model, I have to find more seats to keep that growth going. So they’re looking at who else I can touch in the enterprise, and that means looking across the different pillars that they maybe haven’t touched before. They all have to continue to expand the portfolio of things that they’re selling and the people that they’re selling to, to be able to keep up the growth that the market expects from them.”