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”.
However, with AI blurring the lines between customer-facing and IT teams, this move makes more and more sense.
Why ITSM Matters More & More in Customer Experience
“If Salesforce were to enter the ITSM space, this would accelerate an inevitable trend,” Nate Brown, Head of Education and Enablement at Metric Sherpa, told CX Today.
The wall between ITSM and customer service is already coming down. Between agentic AI, the need for combined experience-driven data, and the evolution of the service role to something with a larger scope, there is no stopping it.
“Savvy solution providers are seeing this as a major opportunity to differentiate and gain critical market share.”
To Brown’s point, thanks to AI agents enabling end-to-end fulfilment, IT teams are designing and governing customer-facing agents that stretch across the enterprise to grab data and automate resolution flows. As such, they need to work more closely with CX leaders, perhaps on Slack.
While working closer together, IT teams may need access to CX insights to uncover friction points, anticipate needs, and deliver consistent experiences. Again, they could share these via Slack.
Finally, consider what IT and customer service reps both do: they resolve tickets. If Salesforce can democratize its case management capabilities, it can support both teams in becoming more than “ticket takers” and driving proactive change.
Salesforce recognizes an opportunity here, as Zoom did earlier this year. Indeed, it made its Zoom Contact Center available inside ServiceNow ITSM in May.
Given Salesforce’s market entrance, it’ll be fascinating to see if ServiceNow encourages similar collaborations over the coming months.
More Spoilers Ahead of Dreamforce 2025
Alongside releasing an “agentic” ITSM solution, Benioff suggested that at Dreamforce 2025, all of Salesforce’s Customer 360 apps will get an “agentic” makeover. That could even include a name change. Indeed, the CEO told Logan Bartlett:
We’re doing this across all of our products. For example, Sales Cloud, something we’ve talked about for decades, is becoming Agentic Sales. Service Cloud is becoming Agentic Service. Even our Marketing Cloud, where we send 11 trillion emails every year, is transforming.
It’s not certain if Salesforce will change the names. After all, earlier this year, it announced “agentic analytics”, but didn’t change the name of Tableau.
Yet, while that might be one to watch out for, there will be plenty more to keep an eye on at the event, including all the AI agent case studies.
These will start with Salesforce itself, with Benioff claiming on the podcast that implementing Agentforce had cut his service team from 9,000 to 5,000 reps.
However, he also teased how 12 Fortune 100 companies will share their agentic stories, from Pfizer and FedEx to OpenAI and Anthropic.
From there, Benioff said: “At Dreamforce, one of my biggest messages will be: you need to become an Agentic Enterprise. Here are the products; every app is now agentic. Here’s the data foundation and all the pieces that make it possible.”
Finally, he may share more on Salesforce’s three acquisitions announced over July and August, undoubtedly aligning each with its rejuvenated Agentic Enterprise vision.
