Agentforce IT is Salesforce’s biggest threat to ServiceNow • The Register

ServiceNow’s dominant spot among IT service management (ITSM) platforms is facing its “most credible” threat to date, as longtime platform rival Salesforce has rolled out an AI agent-powered product that has won early plaudits from one of the largest credit unions in the US.

Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff crowed to investors on Wednesday that the company’s Agentforce IT Service, which debuted in October, was already winning customers and saving them money. He singled out PenFed, one of the nation’s largest credit unions, as one of the early users and claimed PenFed is projecting a 30 percent cut in operating costs, and $2 million in savings.

“It is killer,” he said. “So tell your friends who need ITSM, they can get it now from Salesforce.”

ServiceNow has repeatedly topped Gartner’s ITSM market-share rankings and this year it was the only vendor named a Leader in the analyst house’s AI Applications in IT Service Management report.

Benioff is making his best pitch to dethrone them.

“We never really went after this before,” Benioff said during the company’s Q3 FY2026 earnings call this week. “And then all of a sudden, we realized we have the top service product in the world, and then we’ve got the top field service product in the world, and customers want this kind of trinity from us that includes IT service.”

“There’s no question that this is one of the most credible threats to ServiceNow to emerge. I don’t think anybody would argue that. I don’t think ServiceNow would argue it. I think the question is more like, ‘Why did it take Salesforce so long?'” Forrester VP and principal analyst Charles Betz told The Register.

Jay McBain, chief analyst with Omdia, said as the SaaS market has slowed from its 20 to 30 percent super-growth, Salesforce has struggled to hit double-digit sales increases, and it needs to find new buyers. He sees this as the company’s attempt to grow horizontally using agentic AI.

“I am surprised they didn’t get into ITSM/CX much deeper years ago,” he told The Register via email. “With such a solid sales and marketing cloud (and the world shifting into subscription/consumption models), it would be a natural to carry that customer throughout the entire journey before, during, and after the transaction.”

Salesforce had tried repeatedly over the years to create a rival to the ITSM product that ServiceNow founder Fred Luddy built in 2004 to manage the care and feeding of an organization’s IT assets and configurations, Betz told us. Attempts have ranged from work with BMC’s Remedy to dalliances with Samanage.

“For a lot of us who’ve been in the know and tracking this industry for 20 years, we kind of all looked at each other and said, Here we go again,” he said when he learned of Agentforce IT this summer. “Maybe fifth time is the charm, or fourth time is the charm. There’s a lot of kind of residual skepticism.”

Betz said in the ensuing years, ServiceNow has moved into Salesforce’s turf, building a customer relationship management (CRM) that has now reached $1 billion in revenue, about 10 percent of the company’s annual sales.

Benioff indicated that the company’s late arrival into ITSM was due to internal disagreements.

“For whatever reason, because we had certain people in our company, we won’t go into the names, who didn’t want to build it and that building that database that drives it, well, already we’re selling product and really doing a phenomenal job there,” he told investors.

Betz sees Salesforce’s strongest opportunity among the midmarket companies that are already using the CRM giant’s other products, but have not yet settled into a preferred ITSM provider.

“I think those companies are going to be very receptive to adding another SKU, another Salesforce SKU. And I do think that in some of these cases, ServiceNow won’t even be invited to the shortlist,” he said.

He said due to ServiceNow’s development lead, it will take more time for Salesforce to reach the sophistication to compete for the Global 2000.

“Discovery is hard, the CMDB is hard,” he said. “And, I believe Salesforce knows they’ve got significant work ahead of it to get to parity with ServiceNow, on that data management, because managing data for the business of IT, if you look at what ServiceNow has, it’s not just a help desk with some assets. It is light years beyond that.”

Among the largest pitfalls, however, is security. Because they expose so many ways to reach systems and escalate user permissions, ITSM tools have historically been popular targets for cybercrime. Betz said Salesforce has to get the security right.

As The Register reported in September, Agentforce was tricked into leaking sales data via prompt injection by a security researcher. Salesforce released patches to prevent AI agents from retrieving CRM records and sending them to untrusted external URLs.

Agentforce IT uses AI models to communicate with users and broker system-access requests. During an example of Agentforce IT at the company’s Dreamforce conference in October, employees communicated with the system via Slack and Teams to gain permission to use Sales Cloud and GitHub repositories.

“If Salesforce has any indication of cross tenant leakage in their ITSM product, that would be a mess,” Betz said. “A massive, massive problem for that product.” ®