ServiceNow to acquire Moveworks to strengthen agentic AI and enterprise search

ServiceNow has announced plans to acquire AI firm Moveworks in a $2.85 billion deal, highlighting the growing enterprise shift toward AI-driven automation to enhance IT operations and service management efficiency.

“The acquisition will combine ServiceNow’s agentic AI and automation strengths with Moveworks’ front‑end AI assistant and enterprise search technology to unlock new experiences for every employee for every corner of the business,” ServiceNow said in a statement.

After closing the deal, ServiceNow will work with Moveworks to expand its AI-driven platform and drive enterprise adoption in areas like customer relationship management, the company said.

The surge in generative AI adoption has driven enterprise software providers, including ServiceNow and Salesforce, to expand their offerings through acquisitions and partnerships to maintain a competitive edge in the rapidly evolving market.

Moveworks, which develops AI-driven assistants to support enterprise users, serves major clients such as Broadcom, Palo Alto Networks, and Pinterest.

In the statement, ServiceNow said that in the initial phase of integration, it plans to provide a unified search and self-service experience for employees across various workflows.

“As domain specific AI agents proliferate to accomplish tasks across HR, CRM, finance, IT, and more, ServiceNow’s powerful agent orchestration capabilities will connect, analyze and manage AI agents, ensuring agents work in harmony across tasks, systems, and departments,” the company added.

Signaling strategic direction

By integrating Moveworks, ServiceNow may aim to enhance its AI assistant capabilities, bridge gaps in workflow automation, and expand its reach across enterprise systems.

“The Moveworks acquisition significantly enhances and accelerates ServiceNow’s agentic AI capabilities, strengthening its competitive positioning against established market incumbents,” said Prabhu Ram, VP of the industry research group at Cybermedia Research. “This deal enables ServiceNow to challenge Salesforce more effectively, provided it successfully navigates cultural integration challenges and fully leverages Moveworks’ capabilities.”

Analysts see this as a move to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving AI-driven business landscape. The deal also underscores ServiceNow’s long-term commitment to agentic AI.

“ServiceNow has made its strategy clear that it will focus on Agentic AI, which is the future,” said Sharath Srinivasamurthy, associate vice president of research at IDC. “This acquisition is another step in that direction. ServiceNow’s strong enterprise application suite, combined with its platform, is helping it move quickly toward becoming a major player in this space, and this deal will accelerate that progress even further.”

Moveworks has built a strong presence as an AI assistant with integrations across enterprise systems, offering automation and business support that competes with the likes of Microsoft Copilot, along with a Creator Studio aimed at developers.

“This combination helps ServiceNow to provide an agentic experience that competes well against other assistants and workflow vendors and provides a very smooth experience for end users seeking to access many systems through a single assistant,” said Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst at Amalgam Insights. “However, Moveworks may not provide the ease of agent creation or performance management that are starting to appear in the newest AI and agentic studios.”

Integration and regulatory concerns

From an integration perspective, ServiceNow’s acquisition of Moveworks is expected to be technically straightforward, given that the two platforms are already compatible.

“Moveworks already integrates with ServiceNow, which should make the integration fairly straightforward,” Park said. “Part of the reason that ServiceNow is interested in this acquisition was because move works was going to be a fairly easy technology to bring into the ServiceNow platform.”

However, smooth integration does not guarantee seamless execution. Successfully embedding agentic AI into an enterprise platform requires careful alignment with security, governance, and compliance standards, according to Abhivyakti Sengar, practice director at Everest Group.

“Additionally, ServiceNow must ensure Moveworks’ AI enhances, rather than disrupts, existing customer workflows,” Sengar said. “Moreover, as regulatory scrutiny of AI and large-scale tech acquisitions intensifies, ServiceNow will need to demonstrate that this deal fosters innovation and competition rather than consolidating market power.”

Despite such concerns over AI regulation, the deal is unlikely to attract major antitrust scrutiny due to Moveworks’ relatively modest market footprint. “Although Moveworks is considered a leader in the enterprise assistance space, its $100 million+ annual revenue is probably not enough to invite monopoly or trade scrutiny compared to the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, or other behemoths that have billions of dollars in revenue or billions of dollars in funding,” Park said.