ServiceNow, which provides businesses with outsourced IT and customer service support as well as other digital services, said it was buying the business process automation company Moveworks for $2.85 billion in cash and stock.
The Santa Clara, California-based ServiceNow framed the acquisition around the burgeoning market for AI agents that can perform digital tasks for people, often involving the use of other software.
The company is among a clutch of competing software giants, including Salesforce, Microsoft, and Alphabet's Google, that are building platforms that enable companies to automate work with AI agents.
ServiceNow said the purchase would allow it to combine its own agentic AI and automation capabilities with Moveworks' AI assistant, as well as Movework's prowess in providing AI-based search tools that allow organizations to find information within their own large data pools.
Gina Mastantuono, ServiceNow's president and chief financial officer, told Fortune that while ServiceNow's AI agents primarily automate specific back-end tasks, Moveworks had built an "elegant front-end" AI assistant that can perform a wide range of different tasks. The same interface works for both people requesting a task to be fulfilled and for the people who are normally responsible for fulfilling those requests. More than 90% of the customers that use Moveworks' AI assistant have rolled it out to their entire workforce—a reach into the employee base that Mastantuono said was attractive to ServiceNow.
Enterprise search tools have also emerged as an important new battleground among software companies in the AI age because finding the right data from within a company's knowledge base is critical to both "retrieval augmented generation" (or RAG)—a technique for reducing the chances that AI models will make up false information, a phenomenon known as "hallucination"—and also to having AI agents that can accurately and effectively perform tasks.
The combined companies would be able to build what ServiceNow said would be "a powerful universal AI assistant, along with more perceptive AI-based enterprise search to find answers to requests, automate and complete everyday tasks, and increase productivity."
ServiceNow says its own existing AI solution is the fastest-growing product introduction in its history, with nearly 1,000 customers signed up for the product and more than $200 million in "annual contract value" as of the end of December 2024. The company both sells pre-built, off-the-shelf agents to customers and also allows them to build and customize their own AI agents.
Mastantuono said that one ServiceNow's selling points was that all these agents exist on the same platform, meaning that the agents can work across use cases without "swivel chairing" between different applications.
Moveworks, meanwhile, sells its AI assistant to companies including Hearst, Instacart, Siemens, Toyota, and Unilever. Common use cases of the assistant include customer relationship management (CRM) and sales automation, as well as uses in finance and human resources.
The Mountain View, California-based Moveworks said in September 2024 it had surpassed a $100 million in its annual revenue run rate. The 500-person company was last valued at $2.1 billion in 2021 when it closed a $200 million Series C venture capital round. The company had received $315 million in total venture capital funding.
Publicly-listed on the New York Stock Exchange, ServiceNow is currently valued at about $175 billion. It reported $11 billion in annual revenue last year.
ServiceNow said it expected the acquisition to close in the second half of 2025.
Updated, March 10: This story has been updated to include comments from ServiceNow's CFO Gina Mastantuono.
