From Salesforce’s entry into the ITSM market to ServiceNow’s center automation strategy, here are extracts from some of this week’s most popular news stories.
Salesforce to Enter the ITSM Market at Dreamforce 2025 & Challenge ServiceNow
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has revealed that his company will enter the IT service management (ITSM) at Dreamforce 2025.
Speaking on The Logan Bartlett Show, Benioff said:
“Come to Dreamforce and you’ll see. We’ve never been in the ITSM market before, but now we’re entering, and we’re building it on Slack.”
ITSM solutions help IT teams manage the services they deliver across the business. These “services” could include everything from giving someone access to an application and setting up a laptop to hosting internal applications and managing cloud storage.
ServiceNow is the dominant player in the ITSM space. Yet, Benioff suggests that Slack gives Salesforce a significant differentiator.
“ServiceNow is a great company,” he said. “I think they automate 9,000 companies… But Slack is already in a million companies, small, medium, large, and extra large.”
With Slack, Salesforce aims to build an ITSM solution within a “different kind of architecture” where humans and agents work together. The CEO continued:
Whether you’re managing assets in a company or configuring systems, the agentic capability is incredibly powerful. And if you can provide it right on your phone, in Slack, that’s really a next-generation UI.
Of course, many will view the move as a tit for tat. After all, ServiceNow has made big moves in CRM this year, aiming to usurp Salesforce as the “market leader” (Read more…).
ServiceNow Hasn’t Cut Its Customer Service Headcount, Despite Deflecting 75% of Cases
In July, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that AI advancements are leading to the ‘end of human customer service’.
Meanwhile, just three days ago, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, noted that his company had cut its customer service team from 9,000 to 5,000 employees after implementing Agentforce.
Yet, ServiceNow tells a different story. Its headcount has remained flat.
Indeed, despite deflecting roughly 75 percent of customer cases, its contact center team is no smaller than two years ago.
Amit Zavery, President, CPO, & COO of ServiceNow, shared the news in a discussion on Bloomberg Live.
One of the big reasons here, per Zamery, is that the company’s case volume has increased by 40 percent over the past two years, as the business has grown.
However, ServiceNow has also empowered its agents with their own self-service AI to not just give answers back, but engage in deeper discussions and solve their issues.
As such, while its headcount hasn’t changed, its customer satisfaction (CSAT) rates have, moving in a positive direction (Read more…).
HubSpot INBOUND 2025: The Top 10 Announcements
HubSpot is a tech provider that has done an excellent job of establishing a customer community and acting on feedback from it.
In doing so, it has honed in on the requirements of its sweet spot: the midmarket.
Companies in the midmarket don’t typically have the skillset or time to configure innovations, like AI agents, from scratch.
Instead, they typically want pre-built innovations to drop into their platforms, customizing them to their business, teams, and needs.
HubSpot is following that path, not jumping from the latest hot trend to the next.
While some may frame HubSpot as lagging the likes of Salesforce, its customers can match its speed, steadily advance, and prove results.
The announcements at HubSpot INBOUND 2025 aim to help its customers take their next steps.
From new data and configure, price, quote (CPQ) solutions to pre-built AI agents and playbooks, you can find out all about the top ten announcements from the event here.
Microsoft Completes a Big Move to Converge CCaaS and UCaaS
Microsoft has confirmed the general availability of Teams Phone extensibility for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
In a nutshell, Teams Phone extensibility “extends” the Dynamics 365 Contact Center to share the same voice platform as Microsoft Teams.
As such, it removes the need for a separate telephony system. That simplifies deployments of the CCaaS platform for companies already leveraging Teams and streamlines the billing process.
Christopher Ehlo, the Tech Lead at Sveriges Lärare, echoed these benefits, with his company being an early adopter.
As quoted in a Microsoft blog announcing the move, Ehlo said:
By consolidating our telephony on one platform with Teams Phone and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we’re reducing complexity and improving operational efficiency.
Ehlo also explained how the single phone system and familiar management tools helped lighten the administrative load.
Additionally, Teams Phone Extensibility aids contact centers that wish to empower contact center agents to send customer calls to subject matter experts (SMEs) across the business, who use Teams. That capability is often referred to as “swarming”.
More businesses are leveraging this functionality. As they do so, Microsoft claims that the lines separating CCaaS and UCaaS are “vanishing fast” (Read more…).
