Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, ServiceNow’s push into CRM meets Salesforce’s expansion into ITSM (IT Service Management), powered by agentic AI.
Highlights
00:14 — While I’m focusing here on Salesforce and ServiceNow, and some changes each is making to get into markets dominated by the other, the larger point here is about how agentic AI is triggering new competition and new approaches. Today, I’m going to share about five repercussions with you.
01:15 — On Salesforce’s Q2 earnings call, Marc Benioff said, “Hey, we’re going to get into IT Service Management.” Salesforce is changing from being an apps company to a data company. It just so happens that ServiceNow and CEO Bill McDermott have been making it very plain that they intend to move aggressively into the CRM business, which has been Salesforce’s prime area.
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02:34 — So, I’m going to mention big implications. One, these companies are looking for new hunting grounds — new areas to help customers do more and to allow these vendors to make more money. Agentic AI is also blasting out boundaries, because agentic AI, I think, optimally works on an end-to-end basis.
03:36 — Benioff, on the earnings call, said Data Cloud and agentic AI — Agentforce — are “at the heart of our company strategy”, not their applications. Which leads into this: I don’t think, as Satya Nadella said, “apps are dying,” or “SaaS is dying,” but I do think that agentic AI is going to change profoundly what apps do, how they work, and how customers can extract value from them.
04:44 — We are seeing agentic AI knock down a lot of boundaries. You’re going to have more wide-ranging tools that let [customers] see all of their data, be able to develop end-to-end processes that are more effective, more successful, and give them better insights — and, mostly, better business outcomes.
