ServiceNow Re-Establishes Itself as a Big-Time CRM Player: The 2025 CRM Conversation Starters

Starting at the top with CEO Bill McDermott, ServiceNow’s whole messaging has changed. Its whole positioning has changed. The company has, over the past few months, expressed a strong desire to become a serious CRM player again.

Though it came as a surprise to many, this new focus isn’t really a shock. After all, at last year’s Knowledge event, the company revealed that its customer workflows business had overtaken its IT support business as its main revenue driver. And if you look at some of the key moves ServiceNow has made in the past year, it seems to be putting the CRM talk into action. From its partnerships and acquisitions to its home-grown product introductions and enhancements, ServiceNow has been doubling down on customer-facing workforce automation with a solid foundation on generative and agentic artificial intelligence.

On the acquisition front, the past 12 months saw ServiceNow snatch up Moveworks, providers of a front-end artificial intelligence assistant and enterprise search technology. Its acquisition of Logik.ai, providers of a configure, price, quote (CPQ) solution for sales and commerce, expanded its growing CRM footprint in sales and order management, from opportunity management, quoting, and order placement, through fulfillment and delivery, to renewals and expansions. And its January deal for Cuein, a conversation data analysis and insights company, advanced ServiceNow AI Agents with the ability to understand, process, and transform data from siloed customer interactions across channels and systems into a comprehensive analysis with actionable insights.

Partnership signings in the past year included integrations with Google that enable ServiceNow customers to use BigQuery to connect their enterprise data to AI; extend these AI-powered insights to Google Workspace; and build genAI applications on top of their data foundation with Vertex AI. A new integration between ServiceNow CRM and Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI will allow customers to automate and personalize interactions across customer service channels, including self-service voice and chat conversations.

Other partnerships brought integrations with NiCE and Amazon Web Services to improve workflow automation and data portability; with Xactly to unify sales order management and sales performance management; with 3CLogic to unveil an AI-powered unified contact center solution; with Cognizant for a dispute resolution solution for midmarket banks; with NVIDIA to provide a foundation for agentic AI; with Five9 to combine ServiceNow Customer Service Management and the Five9 platform, bringing together real-time transcription, unified routing, and a consolidated agent workspace; and with Zoom, enabling Zoom’s AI Companion custom add-on to trigger actionable workflows in ServiceNow Now Assist.

In perhaps its strongest CRM-related statement of the year, ServiceNow at its Knowledge event this spring introduced CRM AI Agents that can autonomously orchestrate and complete tasks across the entire customer life cycle, from selling and fulfilling to servicing. These AI agents can resolve inquiries instantly, route complex cases with full context, manage workflows across departments, and coordinate with live agents when human intervention is needed.

Other product introductions in the past year included AI Control Tower, a centralized command center for any ServiceNow and third-party AI agent, model, and workflow; AI Agent Fabric, which delivers new levels of agent-to-agent and multi-model communication and collaboration; AI Agents for Telecom, a full-stack industry-specific agentic AI solution; AI Agent Orchestrator, which ensures teams of specialized AI agents work together across tasks, systems, and departments; and AI Agent Studio, which extends agentic AI to create and deploy custom AI agents that are integrated with enterprise-wide workflows and data. And ServiceNow’s new Workflow Data Fabric is an enhanced integrated data layer that unifies business and technology data across the enterprise.

“Far beyond rebranded chatbots, we’re enabling our customers to orchestrate end-to-end sales and service on a single AI-powered platform, helping organizations manage the entire customer life cycle with greater efficiency,” said John Ball, ServiceNow’s executive vice president and general manager of CRM and industry workflows, at the recent Knowledge event.