It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there with the ongoing AI race, and only the most innovative players can afford to keep up. For ITSM specialist ServiceNow, having only recently taken its stance in the CRM landscape, the competition is more ruthless than ever, especially as some of the biggest dogs are working together.
Now that Salesforce and Anthropic are two peas in the same pod, the possibility of AI transformation on a much larger scale is a real one. So where does this leave ServiceNow?
The Salesforce-Anthropic Partnership
Salesforce and Anthropic’s partnership has been a growing endeavour over the course of the last nearly four years, beginning as an investment before it became a product partnership. It started in May 2023, when Salesforce put money into Anthropic’s $450M Series C. Anthropic was one of the first investments made from the $250M Generative AI fund Salesforce Ventures launched in March 2023. That first stake was roughly $50M, and Salesforce has continued investing in every subsequent round, including Anthropic’s Series G in February 2026.
The technical integration started early as well. Early versions of Claude were distributed through the workplace collaboration tool Slack, and Claude was later integrated into one of its main AI products at the time – Salesforce Einstein 1 Studio.
Since then, as the pace of AI innovation continued to speed up, the partnership also continued to deepen. In October 2025, Salesforce brought Claude into Agentforce – Salesforce’s current proprietary AI offering – as part of its multi-model strategy, with work focused on industry-specific tools for finance, healthcare, and other regulated sectors.
The momentum has only increased from there. Although Salesforce has partnered with other AI companies, including OpenAI, by mid-2026, Salesforce’s position in Anthropic was worth approximately $5B, and CEO Marc Benioff has said Salesforce will spend $300M on Anthropic tokens in 2026. Claude is also believed to be Salesforce’s AI model of choice, and Salesforce remains Anthropic’s preferred CRM.
Introducing Claudeforce
During the company’s Q2 ‘27 earnings, Salesforce announced Claudeforce – the biggest and boldest step in its partnership with Anthropic yet. This 37-skill plugin that allows sales users to get the most out of Salesforce in Claude takes customers a step further than just bringing the two platforms together. It seems the two understood that giving customers the choice of where they work is the key to success, and Claudeforce is a direct response to that.
This product followed the release of Claude capabilities like Claude Tag, which allows Slack users to interact with Claude within Slack.
Is ServiceNow Dead?
After the release of Claudeforce, conversations began to circulate on whether ServiceNow even had a stake in the AI race anymore. Huck Huckaby, CCO at ServiceNow governance platform xtype.io, took to LinkedIn to share his thoughts on the topic, writing: “I have heard a lot of noise around the claim that Salesforce is putting its CRM inside Claude, meaning ServiceNow is dead. That is a serious claim.”
He explained that although Salesforce’s move with Claudeforce is a strong one, the architecture still depends on Salesforce permissions, business rules, workflows, state, and evidence. “The front door moved,” he wrote. “The platform did not.”
He also wrote that ServiceNow had not just stood still, and it certainly did not. At its flagship Knowledge Conference in May, the company announced Agent Fabric, which exposes ServiceNow’s workflows headlessly, a new AI experience called Otto, an expanded AI Control Tower, and new “Autonomous Workforce” AI specialists for IT, CRM, employee service, and security and risk.
ServiceNow has also expanded some of its own partnerships, including those with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and even Anthropic. Like Salesforce with Headless 360 (now AIforce) and Claudeforce, ServiceNow is betting that it stays central even as AI agents replace traditional app screens.
Who Is Better Positioned to Capitalize on AI?
So, ServiceNow may not be on its last legs or at risk of completely crashing in the AI race. But does that still mean it’s in a good position to capitalize on AI against Salesforce?
The two are certainly not slacking with the release of new AI products and functionality, as well as AI-driven acquisitions. In just the last 16 months, ServiceNow closed its acquisition of Moveworks in December 2025, and then agreed to buy nonhuman identity provider Veza for an estimated $1B, which completed in March 2026.
Its biggest move was the purchase of cyber exposure management company Armis for approximately $7.75B in cash, completed in April 2026 and the largest acquisition in the company’s history. Together, these deals connect asset visibility with identity and access intelligence, so the platform knows not just what devices exist but who and what can reach them.
The company’s partnership with NVIDIA, particularly on Project Arc, also taps into a different side of workplace automation to Salesforce – extending its ecosystem advantage beyond Salesforce’s Anthropic-only AI stack.
Most analysts, including Alex Sirois and other observers like Huck, have said they believe ServiceNow shouldn’t just not worry about Salesforce, but that they bet it will come out on top too.
“I am planting my flag with ServiceNow,” Huck wrote. “I am inviting Salesforce practitioners, builders, governors, security leaders, auditors, and operators to challenge it.”
“ServiceNow looks structurally better positioned to win the enterprise AI battle because it sits as a cross-platform system of action rather than a front-office system of record,” Alex wrote. “Salesforce is the safer name for value-tilted investors.”
Final Thoughts
Salesforce and Anthropic may be the pairing everyone is watching right now, but it’s far too early to count ServiceNow out. Claudeforce has changed where users do their work, but ServiceNow is betting that as AI agents multiply, businesses will need a platform to keep them in check – and so far, that bet seems to be paying off.
Either way, the dogfight is far from over. As Claudeforce moves beyond its pilot phase and ServiceNow’s latest acquisitions settle in, the next 12 months will show which of these big dogs has the stronger bite.