In the last few weeks, Salesforce and ServiceNow have announced a significant investment of $1.5B in the AI contact center vendor Genesys.
Collectively, the two tech giants clearly see huge potential for Genesys’ technology, particularly as the tech scene becomes increasingly focused on Agentic AI. But teaming up to co-fund the same company is an unexpected move for Salesforce and ServiceNow – since they’re increasingly beginning to compete in each other’s markets.
Genesys: The Leading Cloud Contact Center
While Salesforce and ServiceNow are household names in the B2B world, Genesys might well be new to you. In the last few years, the company has been quietly attracting attention for its AI-powered contact center innovation – and this announcement is just the latest culmination of that long trend.
But first, some basics. Genesys is a ‘contact center as a service’ vendor (CCaaS), providing cloud-based infrastructure and tools that enable organizations to manage a range of customer interactions across email, web messaging, SMS, and social media. The idea is straightforward: to make life easier for customer service agents and customers by bringing all these disparate channels under one roof.
But Genesys isn’t the only CCaaS vendor around. And if this were the only interesting thing about the company, we probably wouldn’t be writing this post.
Genesys’ Journey to Salesforce and ServiceNow
“We’ve all seen big companies partner with smaller players and underestimate the effort it takes to make those partnerships functional. But Genesys put in the work, talent, innovation, and time to make it happen.
If you talk to both ServiceNow and Salesforce, they’ll tell you: Genesys made the heavy investment to ensure those connectors really worked, map the data, go beyond just an API call.”
Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research (via CX Today)
Over the last few years, Genesys has been investing heavily in two main priorities: AI-powered customer experience and CRM integration. The vendor’s goal here is to offer a single, cloud-based architecture to unify an organization’s contact center tools. As such, Genesys has prioritized embedding traditional contact center technology directly into the CRM, including voice, digital channels, routing, and workforce optimization tools.
This innovation has already helped the company become more than just another CCaaS vendor. In fact, just this year, it became the first tech provider to announce $2B+ in annual CCaaS revenue. While its competitors have since followed Genesys’ lead, it’s clear where the innovation is coming from here.
So in reality, it’s no huge surprise that the company has caught the eye of the tech giants. In fact, the latest funding announcement isn’t even the first engagement between Genesys and these companies. Salesforce and ServiceNow have been working separately with Genesys on the CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce and the Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow, respectively.
The joint funding announcement is clearly a natural progression of the direction all three companies have been moving in for some time now. For Genesys, it’s clearly a win. As well as the investment, it also puts them right at the center of the hottest trend in tech: Agentic AI.
But while there’s clearly no downside for Genesys, the situation for Salesforce and ServiceNow is a little more complicated.
A Rivalry of Tech Giants
Salesforce and ServiceNow are by far the biggest players in their own niches: CRM and ITSM, respectively. Historically, they’ve minded their own business quite harmoniously. But in recent years, the companies have increasingly started to step on each other’s turf.
For ServiceNow, this became clear earlier this year when the company boldly declared: ‘We are in CRM.’ In reality, this announcement has been a long time coming, since the Customer Service Management (CSM) tool has been a CRM in all but name for some time now.
Now, it’s got the name as well. Just a few months ago, the rebranded ServiceNow CRM was announced, combining the CSM product with two other existing solutions: Sales and Order Management and Field Service Management.
At the same time, Salesforce has also parked its tanks on ServiceNow’s lawn, having confirmed its move into the ITSM space earlier this year. Clearly, there’s something of an arms race going on between the two tech giants at the moment.
Agentic AI: The New Battleground
But it’s not just about ITSM and CRM. The two tech giants are competing to present their platforms as the go-to choice for agentic AI, via Agentforce and the ServiceNow AI Platform, respectively. Both companies see themselves as uniquely placed to take their customers forward into the new AI era.
As such, they’ve both been on something of an AI acquisition binge in recent months. Just this year, ServiceNow has already announced five: Cuein AI, Quality 360°, Moveworks, Logik, and Data.World. One of these (Moveworks) is the highest-value acquisition ever announced by ServiceNow, with an eyewatering price tag of $2.85B.
For Salesforce, the drive has been no less determined, having announced acquisitions of Convergence.ai, Informatica, and Bluebirds so far in 2025.
Final Thoughts
So, why have Salesforce and ServiceNow decided to co-fund the smaller company when they’re both competing in the same space? After all, neither has been shy about hoovering up smaller AI companies in order to cement their dominance in the Agentic AI space.
In truth, we can only speculate. But to the casual observer, it looks like Genesys has pulled off something of a coup: playing the two tech giants off against each other to get the best of both worlds, while securing vital funding and maintaining its independence.
For Salesforce and ServiceNow, the latest stage in their ongoing cloud wars is increasingly starting to look like a draw. Where the next one leads is anybody’s guess.