ServiceNow has announced its acquisition of Moveworks for $2.85 billion, signaling a strategic move to connect AI-driven search capabilities with ServiceNow’s workflow automation engine. The deal, expected to close in the second half of 2025, aims to allow employees to not only find information but also complete tasks across departmental boundaries.
At the heart of the deal is a fundamental challenge in enterprise AI: systems that can help users find information often struggle to transition from discovery to task completion.
Amit Zavery, ServiceNow’s president, COO, and chief product officer, highlighted this as the primary rationale for the acquisition:
We definitely have a very powerful fulfilment engine. We can complete all the tasks, which a lot of companies struggle with today. [Moveworks] can provide the front-end, but they can’t finish the full intent of the user and complete the task.
Therefore, by integrating Moveworks’ enterprise search capabilities with ServiceNow’s workflow automation platform, the company aims to create a complete platform that understands user intent and carries tasks through to completion.
Unlike generic AI assistants, Moveworks says that its platform incorporates organizational context and knowledge, including important data security policies. Zavery told diginomica:
When you drill down into Moveworks, they have built a very enterprise-centric search, it is not just like a ChatGPT wrapper. It has an understanding of policies, security, governance, what a user can have access to – what is allowed. But also finding information that might be very relevant to that user as well as the employee, based on their roles, location and other things like that.
This contextual awareness is already being used by 5 million employees across organizations including Hearst, Instacart, and Toyota, the companies said.
Enhancing the employee experience
A significant focus of the acquisition is improving employee productivity and engagement through AI. By combining search and fulfillment capabilities, ServiceNow aims to create a more seamless employee experience. Zavery said:
I think on employee engagement, a lot of people want AI to help with productivity. Provide predictable outcomes, provide a lot more automation and control. Agentic AI even turbocharges that, because now you’re able to not just provide information, but also figure out what you need to do to do the task and complete that requirement as well.
The idea is that rather than having employees navigate multiple systems or filing tickets, employees could simply ask for what they need and have the AI assistant handle the entire process.
The acquisition, however, represents a departure from ServiceNow’s traditional approach of organic growth and smaller, tuck-in acquisitions. The company has historically emphasized its “one data model, one platform” approach, with CEO Bill McDermott describing ServiceNow as “playing chess, not checkers”, given its lack of desire to use acquisitions as a mechanism for growth.
The size and significance of the deal indicate that ServiceNow sees Moveworks capabilities as being significant enough to break from its established playbook. ServiceNow’s CTO Pat Casey has previously distinguished between the modest productivity gains from current AI assistants and the transformative potential of autonomous agents capable of handling substantive business tasks. Equally, McDermott told diginomica last year that generative AI (and now agents) will potentially change organizational structures down the line – which is why Moveworks is significant to the vendor, as this provides an AI search engagement layer across the enterprise. If users can not only ask for information, but have tasks fulfilled, from one entry point, this has the potential to change operating models and departmental silos.
That being said, it bodes well that ServiceNow claims that the majority of Moveworks’ current customer deployments already use ServiceNow as a system of action, with approximately 250 mutual customers. Moveworks has also integrated with over 100 technology systems, which aligns with ServiceNow’s broad integration strategy. Zavery said:
The combination makes the value to customers happen very fast.
ServiceNow has this unique differentiator, which nobody else can do, where we touch every part of the enterprise. We are connected, automated and we understand how to do things with those various systems of records, legacy systems, bespoke systems. So we are the glue inside an enterprise, we are the control plane of AI inside an enterprise.
I think that’s the use case that you unlock very, very fast. When you search for something and you want to finish the task. We have a lot of understanding of user intent, the user workflow requirements.
So you’re unlocking everything around sales, customer service, finance, procurement, HR, IT. Every employee engagement and customer engagement becomes unlocked for us now.
ServiceNow reports that it already has significant traction with its AI offerings, claiming nearly 1,000 AI customers and surpassing $200 million in annual contract value for its Pro Plus AI solution by the end of 2024. In January, the company announced what it called “an army of thousands of AI-powered agents” alongside orchestration capabilities and development tools.
The Moveworks acquisition also adds approximately 500 AI specialists to ServiceNow’s team, which is another key piece to why the Moveworks deal is so valuable – AI talent is hard to find and doesn’t come cheaply.
My take
For buyers, the acquisition signals how ServiceNow wants to move enterprise AI beyond simple assistants toward systems that can autonomously handle complex workflows across departmental boundaries. Agentic AI, workflow automation and enterprise search/employee experience tools (enabled by Moveworks) builds out this strategy more comprehensively.
The acquisition represents an interesting inflection for the company. The $2.85 billion price tag – one of ServiceNow’s largest acquisitions ever – speaks to the competitive pressure companies are facing in the enterprise AI race. Every major enterprise software vendor, from Microsoft to Salesforce, is building AI assistants to capture the employee interaction layer. ServiceNow has been doing this for some years already, but by acquiring Moveworks, it is once again indicating that it isn’t a back-end system that other companies’ AI assistants merely call upon.
Where ServiceNow holds a distinct competitive advantage – and always has – is that it has long prioritized a strategy of integration across all systems. The vendor’s engagement layer spans the whole enterprise, so could prove to be the natural choice for many when considering how to combine AI with getting work done. Pulling in an established AI search vendor that has a strong focus on employee experience, as well as context, whilst also adding hundreds of skilled AI employees to the ServiceNow workforce, could prove to be a savvy move for the company – if it can prove that its ‘one data model’ approach isn’t being compromised.
The most significant long-term implication may be how this acquisition, and ServiceNow’s broader AI strategy, reshapes organizational structures. If employees can truly initiate and complete cross-departmental workflows through a single AI interface, traditional departmental boundaries – and the teams that maintain them – may change shape. Change management will, of course, be key to the success of this – but we’ve been waiting to see how new AI models could change operating models beyond marginal efficiency gains. This feels like a step in the right direction.
