ServiceNow has lost five customers to one of its biggest competitors, according to Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff.
In the CRM giant’s latest earnings call on Wednesday, Benioff revealed that these five customers moved from ServiceNow ITSM to Salesforce’s competing Agentforce IT Service.
Who Are These Companies?
According to Salesforce, the companies that Salesforce has poached from ServiceNow include Sunrun, Cornerstone, and CoolSys. The other two companies were not mentioned by name in the earnings call.
“[They’re] leaving ServiceNow now for the new Salesforce IT service product, which is about apps and agents helping you manage all your ITSM,” Marc Benioff said.
Agentforce IT Service (also known as Salesforce IT Service), launched to compete in the ITSM space in October last year, has gained over 180 customers in just a few months. As of 2025, ServiceNow has over 500 “high value” customers with Annual Contract Values and over 4,300 companies using ServiceNow ITSM.
Sunrun, Cornerstone, and CoolSys operate in multiple sectors, including energy, HR, and HVAC, and deal with complex SaaS or field-heavy service environments.
What Does This Mean for ServiceNow?
ServiceNow boasts some of the most notable customers in the tech industry, including NVIDIA, Visa, and MERCK. Its ITSM offering has numerous use cases, including incident resolution, service predictability, change management, issue identification, and now agent productivity.
But does that make it the better choice against Salesforce’s newer ITSM offering?
When Salesforce entered the ITSM space last year, it marked an escalation in the ongoing competition between the two software giants. Salesforce, as a notoriously “sticky” technology, already had widespread adoption, which worked in its favor, posing a real threat to ServiceNow and its traditionally separate product architecture.
At the time, experts insisted that it would take Salesforce time to find their footing in an area that it didn’t have established expertise in, and that investment in Slack would need to increase. That was true then – now, we’re seeing Slack being prioritized alongside Agentforce, and existing customers pivot to a solution that is inherently AI-focused and allows “companies to move from purchase to production in weeks”.
What Does This Mean for Professionals?
Last year, when ServiceNow went on a spree of poaching Salesforce talent, it should have emphasized the importance of cross-platform skills and knowledge, especially as the two companies merge further into each other’s spaces. Now, these companies jumping ship also underline the opportunities that could come from being flexible as an ITSM professional.
The professionals that are going to be the most in demand right now are not just ServiceNow or Salesforce agnostic – they’re workflow platform generalists, and having the skills to work interchangeably between the two is really proving to be crucial.
Summary
ServiceNow has lost five customers to a growing competitor, posing the question of whether Salesforce’s ITSM offering is slowly gaining a competitive edge.
However, it is still very early in Salesforce’s ITSM journey, while ServiceNow has been in the game since 2003, so if this were to become a more wide-scale phenomenon, it would likely only happen with much more time.