ServiceNow’s EmployeeWorks ‘Land Grab’: 89 Solutions Takes The Assist On NBA Agentic AI Deal

‘Moveworks had 300 or 400 customers when it was purchased. ServiceNow has 9,000 customers. … ServiceNow is of the mindset it’s a land grab, and they’re going to own the front door to ITSM and employee experience, and we’re riding that wave right now,’ says Andrew Ames, director of sales at 89 Solutions.

When ServiceNow unveiled an extended relationship with the NBA for its EmployeeWorks self-service business platform, the vendor left out one key detail: the technology was deployed by 89 Solutions, ServiceNow’s largest EmployeeWorks channel partner.

Andrew Ames, director of sales at Melbourne, Australia-based 89 Solutions, told CRN his company is focused primarily on ServiceNow, in particular, ServiceNow’s EmployeeWorks agentic AI assistant platform for finding information and automating workflows across business systems.

EmployeeWorks is heavily based on ServiceNow’s 2025 $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks. ServiceNow combined Moveworks’ technology with its own AI capabilities to drive agentic AI adoption across enterprise business clients.

89 Solutions started as a ServiceNow consulting group more than a decade ago, and also became the first and the largest global Moveworks partner, Ames said.

“Our founders grew that company and sold it to Thirdera, which in 2024 was acquired by Cognizant,” he said. “After the sale to Thirdera, we started a partnership with Moveworks as 89 Solutions. And wouldn’t you know it, ServiceNow picks up Moveworks, so all of our ServiceNow certifications light back up, and we’re in the driver’s seat because we’ve done probably 150-ish EmployeeWorks Moveworks engagements globally, and we probably are subcontracted to a good 40 to 50 percent of the Moveworks professional services engagements on the delivery side.”

89 Solutions’ ServiceNow EmployeeWorks Opportunity

89 Solutions co-sells pretty much in every account that the ServiceNow or Moveworks sales team is working with, Ames said.

“We’re helping the customer understand what does it look like to adopt? How do you prioritize your use cases? How do you phase in crawl, walk, run opportunities?” he said. “We did the same motion as we did with everyone else with the NBA, working with the ServiceNow sales team to get to this point. It was a great experience.”

Inside The NBA’s ServiceNow EmployeeWorks Deployment

For the NBA, 89 Solutions was pulled in by the Moveworks and ServiceNow sales teams when they were at about 40 percent to 50 percent probability of a sale, Ames said. The NBA was already a big ServiceNow customer, and was looking to do more with AI, and knew it would take time to get it right, he said.

“We got pulled in alongside introductory calls with them, and immediately started talking about their list of requirements, and it was really enterprise-wide with things like scheduling meetings and accessing Workday for PTO balances,” he said. “They are looking at future phases around SAP S/4Hana for finance, Concur for expense management, and a number of other things. They asked us right up front, ‘How can we get live in a couple months, two, three months from a platform standpoint?’ So we help guide them on the quick wins from a crawl walk run standpoint, and help them understand initial scope to get the true value.”

89 Solutions is currently focused on the initial deployment of EmployeeWorks, and expects to tackle the other projects over the next six months to 12 months, Ames said. The solution provider last week also started Workday integration, he said.

Prior to adopting EmployeeWorks, the NBA was already a ServiceNow ITSM (IT service management) customer, Ames said.

“They already have a decent amount of spend with ServiceNow,” he said. “But this was the opportunity for an agentic conversational approach to all of their ServiceNow assets because that’s ultimately the direction they’re going.”

The NBA declined to comment on this story.

89 Solutions: EmployeeWorks Is The ‘Front Door’ To ServiceNow

Since ServiceNow’s Moveworks acquisition, 89 Solutions has stayed focused on that technology, and expects to continue to do so for the foreseeable future, Ames said.

“EmployeeWorks is key front door for the entire ServiceNow platform, and ServiceNow is really trying to drive that into all their customer base,” he said. “We’re going to stay focused on that, and if we need ITSM or asset management or other expertise, we’ll just leverage our close partner network to bring in the expertise so we can stay laser focused.”

Ames said he is not worried that a focus on EmployeeWorks to the exclusion of other ServiceNow technologies could open the door to competition with other ServiceNow channel partners.

“I definitely think the market’s going to mature,” he said. “It has to, because ServiceNow is driving this into every single one of their clients. I think the EmployeeWorks portfolio and HRSD (Human Resources Service Delivery) portfolio, which is now owned by Bhavin Shah, who was a co-founder of Moveworks, will continue to grow their footprint. Certainly, the market will evolve. Certainly, there’ll be new competition. But Moveworks had 300 or 400 customers when it was purchased. ServiceNow has 9,000 customers. … ServiceNow is of the mindset it’s a land grab, and they’re going to own the front door to ITSM and employee experience, and we’re riding that wave right now.”

Ames also said 89 Solutions can implement EmployeeWorks with customers’ other technologies that may have been deployed by other channel partners. The NBA, for instance, had a pretty mature ServiceNow environment already in place.

“It’s really us getting access to that, harvesting that knowledge, and of building out the interface for the employees,” he said. “It’s fairly simple, honestly. When you look at EmployeeWorks deployments, there’s really I would say two key phases that occur. The first phase is around what I would consider the platform or the bot, which is kind of the front door, and they’re going to do it within Slack. They are a big Slack shop, so they’re going to have their chat capability within Slack. The access to their knowledge is largely in ServiceNow ITSM, and I think they have a fair amount in SharePoint and a couple other systems. The ability to go out and discover and integrate with that is usually a pretty light lift for us.”

89 Solutions Expands EmployeeWorks Reach With KPMG

Ames also said 89 Solutions is a subcontractor to KPMG and its ServiceNow business.

“We’re doing all the EmployeeWorks work for ServiceNow for their whole HR experience,” he said. “We’re not wearing KPMG shirts and hats and stuff like that. We’re obviously a smaller organization, but we’re very focused on this AI solution that ServiceNow is bringing to market. It’s a tidal wave of opportunity for us.”