Salesforce Launches Agentforce IT Service, Opening New Doors For Partners

‘We are embracing partners—large global SIs to regional partners to small partners—everybody that the customers are used to. Our team will be working with them jointly as we go winning one deal at a time. And we will make them successful,’ says Salesforce executive Muddu Sudhakar.

One of the biggest reveals to come out of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference this week is its Agentforce IT Service product, which aims to bring new opportunities to Salesforce solution providers.

Muddu Sudhakar, senior vice president and general manager for IT and human resources service at the San Francisco-based CRM vendor, said that part of the short-term opportunity for Salesforce systems integrators and other solution providers is new implementation and migration services around the platform, which launches with more than 100 prebuilt connectors and integrations with companies including CrowdStrike, Google, Microsoft and IBM.

“We are embracing partners—large global SIs to regional partners to small partners—everybody that the customers are used to,” Sudhakar said during a press briefing in response to a question from a CRN reporter. “Our team will be working with them jointly as we go winning one deal at a time. And we will make them successful.”

Agentforce IT Service Vs. ServiceNow

Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff shouted out Agentforce IT Service during his Dreamforce keynote address. Although he didn’t address ServiceNow by name in his keynote, in a September appearance on “The Logan Bartlett Show,” he called ServiceNow “a great company” but pointed out that ServiceNow automates about 9,000 companies compared with about 1 million companies using Slack.

ServiceNow executives, meanwhile, have made repeated references throughout the year about looking to take share in Salesforce’s traditional CRM market.

In response to a CRN reporter asking for comment on Agentforce IT Service as a competitor, a ServiceNow spokesperson said in an email that ServiceNow has spent more than 20 years shaping the future of IT workflows, executing more than 65 billion workflows and 4 trillion automated transactions annually.

"Our platform is purpose-built for IT, with AI deeply embedded—not bolted on—to drive faster resolutions, boost productivity, and ensure reliable operations at scale," the spokesperson said. "This unique combination of deep IT expertise and a unified platform is why ServiceNow is the trusted backbone for digital operations across the enterprise."

Salesforce has about 12,000 partners worldwide, according to the company. ServiceNow has about 2,200, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.

Megan Glasow, Salesforce practice managing director for St. Louis-based Perficient—No. 61 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500—told CRN in an interview that she and her team have been working with clients to exit the proof-of-concept stage for AI projects and get real business outcomes, increasing top-line revenue or avoiding costs.

As Perficient’s Salesforce practice grows, the vendor has been investing more resources into its partner ecosystem, Glasow said.

“They’re bringing some diverse perspectives to the partner network within Salesforce,” she said. “That’s really valuable.”

Bringing Agentic AI To IT Service Management

Conversational and agentic AI experiences are transforming IT services, Kishan Chetan, Salesforce executive vice president and general manager for Service Cloud, said during a press briefing on the new product. Traditional IT service management (ITSM) vendors have invested in forms, portals, bots and tickets for IT help desk teams, all interfaces and technologies that bog down teams.

In response to a question about whether ITSM is a shot at ServiceNow, he said that customers have asked Salesforce for an IT product to help with vendor platform consolidation.

“There's a lot of unfulfilled demand out there in the market,” he said. “I’m sure in several of those situations we’ll absolutely run into ServiceNow. And we’re very confident of our innovation and our continued innovation.”

IT teams may have to check up to 20 disparate systems to solve someone’s issues, Chetan said. Agentforce IT Service aims to give workers support where they are, be it in Salesforce’s Slack or Microsoft Teams collaboration applications, email platforms, employee portals or webchats.

Salesforce’s ITSM aims to free IT teams to focus on more strategic tasks. The ITSM is based on best practices from Salesforce’s Service Cloud, its No. 1 cloud product with more than 60,000 customers out of Salesforce’s 150,000 total customers.

“It’s a big organic investment from Salesforce,” Chetan said. “We’ve been working on this over the last year and a half. And you’ll see the fruit of that. … We’re not trying to just build another thing on our platform. We’re reimagining how this process is made.”

Agentforce IT Service’s place on the unified Salesforce platform means users can avoid data silos and receive faster AI-driven auto-resolutions to IT problems, according to the vendor. The ITSM is compliant with Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes and features an agentic configuration management database (CMDB) and service graph for a complete view of infrastructure, applications, services, connectivity and dependencies.

The CMDB can serve as a single source of truth for IT infrastructure for finding breaks and the systems affected by failed equipment, potentially preventing widespread downtime.

The product has agent-enabled and agent-less discovery and a service map for proactive and reactive incident resolution and root-cause analysis, according to Salesforce. The ITSM can tell employees if they’re eligible for a laptop refresh based on their profile and company policy without human intervention. Preventative measures seek to reduce the cost of IT support.

If an email server goes down, for example, Agentforce can automatically alert employees and provide real-time status updates, even detecting and creating incidents if an issue isn’t resolved. Agentforce will transfer conversations to human representatives with insight for action if the user’s issue becomes too complex or is time sensitive, according to the vendor.

Agentforce is capable enough to identify widespread problems and escalate them to major incidents should multiple employees experience the same issue. It can also generate summaries and propose fixes based on past incidents. IT teams can monitor asset inventory and incident volume for data-driven resource allocation and workload imbalances.

Salesforce’s Sudhakar told reporters during the IT Service briefing that the ITSM product will also help with endpoint incident and performance management as well as security use cases including identity and access management and account lockout. Security can account for up to 20 percent of IT tickets today, he said.

He called the ITSM a “next-generation IT service desk” that “is something that IT teams will delightfully enjoy, and they won’t see that as a burden on their job.”