AI Competition Between Salesforce and ServiceNow

The rise of agentic AI has led Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to describe a 'complete transformation' of his 26-year-old company. This growth imperative has prompted Benioff to engage in a direct confrontation with ServiceNow and its CEO Bill McDermott in the IT Service Management (ITSM) sector.

Benioff's decision to move beyond Salesforce's traditional CRM category holds significant implications for both customers and Cloud Wars Top 10 vendors.

The mutual incursions by ServiceNow and Salesforce into each other's core areas will bring substantial benefits to customers, with the transformative technologies of data and agentic AI at the center of this upheaval.

Competition is beneficial, especially when it is intense, relentless, and high-stakes. This is precisely the scenario with Salesforce and ServiceNow, and a similar dynamic is unfolding on a larger scale with agentic AI and data clouds involving SAP, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft, and others.

Ultimately, the biggest winners in the Cloud Wars will be the customers.