Omdia view
Summary
ServiceNow has announced plans to acquire Moveworks for $2.85bn. Moveworks is a vendor offering an AI-powered, employee-focused solution that helps organizations improve federated support across different departments including IT, HR, finance, customer services, and sales. Though AI is a huge aspect of this acquisition, Omdia also believes that it will better enable ServiceNow to grow its share in the employee engagement technology market, a market Omdia forecasts will be worth $170bn by 2028.
ServiceNow’s acquisition of Moveworks enhances its AI-powered self-service capabilities
Moveworks offers an agentic AI solution that can be used by all employees across the business. It eliminates the need for employees to navigate different agents and portals to find answers to important support queries and to take action within a variety of systems of record. The solution uses natural-language processing to support employees in finding the information and support guidance they need to remain productive. This federated approach to employee support and self-service is nothing new to ServiceNow given its long history in providing capabilities such as unified service catalogs, but the Moveworks acquisition signals a notable leveling up of ServiceNow’s intent and approach in this area. The strength of the ServiceNow platform and the breadth of data captured by the solution mean the acquisition of Moveworks will bring about a significant evolution in self-service and in how employees are supported.
At $2.85bn, this is ServiceNow’s biggest acquisition ever
In Omdia’s view, this acquisition offers ServiceNow an opportunity much greater than just advancing its employee support and self-service capabilities: it enables the vendor to become a more important player in the huge collaboration, intranet, and employee productivity adjacent markets. One example that highlights the opportunity that lies ahead comes from the work ServiceNow has been doing with Microsoft, notably via the integration with Teams. Over the past few years, ServiceNow has continued to strengthen its integration with the Microsoft Teams employee collaboration platform. This acquisition is an important strategic move because Teams has become an invaluable business tool and hub of employee productivity as people have moved to more digital-first working. Teams has a lot of mindshare and frequent employee interaction time, so building strong and valuable integrations with Teams is important for vendors such as ServiceNow. Omdia believes that when they are integrated, the ServiceNow and Moveworks capabilities will be one of (if not the) most advanced AI-powered assistants integrated with Microsoft Teams. Omdia also believes this enhanced value proposition will be well protected from a competitive perspective, because though other vendors do offer employee support agents that integrate with Teams, none are able to power those solutions with the rich backend data fabric and workflows that ServiceNow currently provides. Additionally, Moveworks’ integrations with popular intranet solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, and Entra highlight how a single conversational AI-augmented solution such as this has the potential to fundamentally change the way that employees access business-related information, helping businesses modernize intranets and get more value from their investments. For many businesses, the traditional intranet has become a confusing web of fragmented information and documents. The conversational and AI-driven approach ServiceNow is embracing will provide employees with a more intuitive way to access and work with important intranet-based resources.
This acquisition will put ServiceNow in a position to grow its share of the $170bn employee engagement platform market
Omdia’s 2025 Hybrid Workplace Technology Forecast provides a comprehensive view of the revenue opportunities associated with hybrid workplace technologies. One of the more significant categories profiled in this forecast is what Omdia calls employee engagement platforms. This is a significant ecosystem of different but complementary technologies that help businesses deliver better employee experiences. Collectively, these solutions have a significant total addressable market: Omdia forecasts revenue for these technologies will reach $170bn by 2028. We believe the capabilities ServiceNow is acquiring through this deal have the potential to enable the vendor to expand its agentic AI solutions for employee engagement.
The new era of employee self-service is AI augmented, personalized, and conversational
Moveworks is an enterprise conversational AI solution that enables employees to access support, complete tasks, and find information via a natural-language interface powered by the Moveworks Intelligence Engine—a platform that brings models together to optimize for ability, performance, latency, and cost. The Moveworks solution is interesting because it is not only employee support focused but also fine-tuned on industry-specific terminology, workflows, and processes. This makes the solution a great fit with ServiceNow given the vendor’s heavy focus on industry specificity. Moveworks also provides a mature and comprehensive set of enterprise search capabilities that make it easier for employees to retrieve important information that commonly sits across many different business domains. This capability can search across all enterprise systems, whether the knowledge within is structured or not.
The eventual integration between the language models powering ServiceNow and those that Moveworks has pioneered in the employee support domain offers exciting potential for the platform to support a truly end-to-end and AI-augmented approach to optimizing employee support and experiences. This end-to-end approach also has significant value for businesses looking to advance customer experiences and services. Employees in customer service departments will have easy access to information and resources that can help them deliver better customer services and outcomes. The Moveworks conversational agentic AI capabilities will enable new ways for ServiceNow to surface insights and advance employee interactions with the wealth of data and value the platform houses. When fully integrated into the platform, Moveworks’ conversational AI capabilities will help improve user engagement and experiences by delivering a more intuitive, chat-based interface that enables employees to interact with the platform using natural language. This will prove especially valuable for ServiceNow as it looks to continue growing traction and awareness in the CRM and customer engagement spaces. For many years now, ServiceNow has been evolving into a true enterprise platform, one that supports multidepartmental automation and digitization across teams including IT, HR, sales, finance, and customer services. With this acquisition and subsequent platform integration of the Moveworks capabilities, ServiceNow will take the next step on its journey to truly federate self-service, making it easier for employees from any part of a business to get the support they need quickly and efficiently. From a strategic perspective, this acquisition will further strengthen ServiceNow’s appeal and traction beyond just the IT department and into the broader enterprise.
Appendix
Further reading
ServiceNow (March 10, 2025) “ServiceNow to extend leading agentic AI to every employee for every corner of the business with acquisition of Moveworks,” available at www.servicenow.com/company/media/press-room/servicenow-to-acquire-moveworks.html (retrieved March 11, 2025)
Author
Adam Holtby, Principal Analyst, Workplace Transformation
