In the battle of the AI agents, competition is heating up for Salesforce . ServiceNow’s new artificial intelligence-powered platform for customer relationship management is going after Club name Salesforce’s dominance in the space. CRM software “helps track each interaction you have with a prospect or customer,” according to Salesforce’s own definition . And, it so happens that CRM is also Salesforce’s ticker symbol. After years of providing software for companies to manage information technology services and human resources, ServiceNow entered the customer relationship management market in January. Since then, it has bolstered its offering with several acquisitions, including Moveworks, and announced all the fresh bells and whistles earlier this month at its Knowledge 2025 showcase in Las Vegas. “The cost of losing a customer is higher than ever,” ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told CNBC on May 6, on the sidelines of his company’s gathering. “What we’re trying to do is reinvent the category. And that includes how you order things, how you fulfill that order, and how you service the customer relationship.” Back in July 2024, Jim Cramer asked Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff whether he’s worried about ServiceNow as a competitor. “That’s like saying that Wienerschnitzel is competing with McDonald’s,” scoffed Benioff, who likened Salesforce to McDonald’s in his analogy. Benioff’s confidence is not unwarranted. According to IDC, Salesforce captured 20.7% of the CRM market in 2024. Other players in CRM include fellow Club name Microsoft , which has an offering within its Dynamics 365 platform, and Oracle . For sure, it will take time to see if CRM upstart ServiceNow can take market share from Salesforce. But ServiceNow is riding momentum out of last month’s earnings. NOW CRM YTD mountain ServiceNow vs. Salesforce YTD Since bottoming for 2025 on April 4 with a close of $721.65, ServiceNow stock soared 15% after earnings on April 24 and back above $1,000 per share on May 12. Shares were down just over 3.5% year to date. On ServiceNow’s post-earnings call, McDermott said, “CRM and industry workflows continued its momentum in 16 of our top 20 deals, with nine deals that were over $1 million.” Shares of Salesforce, while also seeing a bump since late April, were still down 13% year to date ahead of next week’s earnings. The stock was down modestly on Monday to around $289. Questions have swirled about whether Salesforce has put too much emphasis on Agentforce, its answer to AI agents. D.A. Davidson downgraded Salesforce to a sell-equivalent rating from neutral last month. The analysts said Salesforce is neglecting its core business “to pursue a premature AI opportunity.” Benioff responded to the downgrade in a “Mad Money” interview in April . He told Jim, “Agentforce is not some separate product.” He added, “We have pivoted our company hard and fast to completely absorb Agentforce into all of our products.” The key competition between ServiceNow and Salesforce in the agentic CRM race lies within services-based call centers, and which company’s AI agents can produce higher rates of call deflection away from humans to self-serve or digital options, according to Barclays analyst Raimo Lenschow. “Whoever builds the better agents is going to win this,” Lenschow said, adding that it is up to Salesforce to protect its turf. Salesforce’s deep industry experience and large customer base offer an advantage. For ServiceNow, this opportunity “is one of the most straightforward ROI [return on investment] situations,” he noted. To boost its AI efforts, ServiceNow also announced its expanded partnership with Club name Nvidia . This new facet of their alliance includes the release of Apriel Nemotron 15B, a reasoning model designed for real-time workflow execution. McDermott said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and he envision a company that could still operate if every employee called in sick on the same day. “We’re building the autonomous company,” McDermott said, while sitting next to Huang, in a separate CNBC interview from Knowledge 2025. Salesforce has also been evolving AI, announcing back in September its own collaboration with Nvidia to develop AI agents. The first version of its Agentforce launched in October . Since then, two newer versions, Agentforce 2.0 and 2dx were made available in February and April. During its fiscal 2025 fourth quarter earnings call back in February, Salesforce reported 3,000 paying Agentforce customers. Salesforce is set to report its fiscal 2026 first quarter on May 28. We’ll be looking for three things: proof that the company has not neglected its core business, momentum in Agentforce, and continued cost discipline. Jim believes in Agentforce — and thus far, he’s confident in Salesforce’s long-term business plan. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long CRM, NVDA. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. 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The logo for Salesforce is displayed on the Salesforce Tower in New York City on March 7, 2019.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
In the battle of the AI agents, competition is heating up for Salesforce.
