ServiceNow Sharpens Its Salesforce Attack With Sweep Acquisition

ServiceNow’s acquisition of Israel-based Sweep gives the workflow software giant new agentic AI capabilities as it sharpens its CRM push against Salesforce and helps customers accelerate enterprise application deployments and agentic systems.

ServiceNow has acquired Sweep in a deal aimed at expanding its ability to build AI agents aimed at its burgeoning CRM push.

Sweep, an Israel-based software company, develops an agentic layer for enterprise systems aimed at providing AI agents the context needed to understand, plan, and govern changes across the Salesforce ecosystem. Its technology works across some of the IT industry’s top AI-based platforms including ServiceNow, Salesforce, Snowflake, HubSpot, and Data 360.

The value of the acquisition has not yet been revealed.

With the acquisition, first reported by Israel-based media site CTECH, ServiceNow gains access to a wide range of agentic AI technologies aimed squarely at Salesforce and the CRM market.

These include AI-powered documentation and Q&A capabilities, metadata agents, agentic workspace capabilities, Sweep’s MCP (model context protocol) capabilities for a natural language interface, the ability to work across multiple organizations from a single conversation, and an artifact mode that transforms metadata analysis into charts, summaries, and filters.

Salesforce did not reply to a CRN request for more information.

The acquisition comes as ServiceNow makes a push to expand its AI-based NOW platform into the CRM market, which is currently dominated by Salesforce.

ServiceNow has for over a year touted its CRM capabilities and its desire to tackle the CRM business of rival Salesforce by taking advantage of how wide ServiceNow’s AI technology has spread via its NOW platform which the company said touches on so many of its enterprise customers’ systems.

ServiceNow executives declined a CRN request to discuss the acquisition.

However, in an emailed response to a CRN request for more information, the company, in a statement, said the acquisition of Sweep will help ServiceNow improve its AI capabilities around CRM.

“Sweep specializes in accelerating enterprise application implementations for our customers. The solution will strengthen and accelerate our implementation capabilities, helping our customers achieve faster time to value. The technology and expertise strengthen our AI-native development capabilities and advance agentic deployment for CRM. The impact for customers is direct: faster time-to-value as they scale agentic systems,” the company said.

ServiceNow President of Global Customer Operations Paul Fipps recently told CRN that his company’s CRM business has doubled year-over-year in sales, and CRM was a part of 16 of the company’s top 20 deals in the last quarter.

CRM is not really a new business at ServiceNow, Fipps said.

“We’ve had the front end on how you configure pricing,” he said. “We built out the sales order management capability, and we've always won in field service management. So you can imagine, top to bottom, we can configure price all the way through to how we actually service customers. We now have the entire stack from the technology standpoint.”

AI is a big part of that, Fipps said.

“You can see where we're heading with voice from an interaction standpoint on CRM,” he said. “You can see where we're heading with native AI capabilities from a user experience standpoint to CRM. You can see where we're winning in tech and financial services.”

ServiceNow also has a program called Now Next CRM aimed at moving customers safely from legacy CRM products to the ServiceNow CRM product, and is working with channel partners on it, Fipps said. However, he declined to name specific legacy vendors.

Tracey Cesen, founder and CEO of Forever Human, a Pittsburgh-based ServiceNow-focused solution provider, told CRN there is a lot of opportunity for ServiceNow in the CRM market, though it won’t be an easy journey.

“They have to traverse a whole different ecosystem to get to their end customer,” Cesan said, adding that having Sweep as part of ServiceNow will help make its move to CRM easier.