Slack in the Front, Service Cloud at the Core

Salesforce Re-enters ITSM on Its Own Terms

Salesforce has finally stopped orbiting IT service and picked a re-entry path that plays to its strengths. The front door is Slack. The backbone is Service Cloud. The bet is that conversation-first work, guided by agents and grounded in a coherent record, will change how service is delivered across the enterprise.

The history matters. Remedyforce showed that borrowing an engine doesn’t make a platform. ServiceNow built scale by turning ITSM into the wedge that unlocked corporate services. Salesforce watched, learned, acquired Slack, and rebuilt the kernel (in one year!) from the inside. This time it is an organic build. No borrowed chassis, no Force.com detours. Just a Service Cloud product with Slack as the surface where the work actually happens.

The October 2025 launch lands with four moves. A service desk that speaks ITIL rather than trying to rename it. Employee agents that resolve the obvious where people already are. IT (nominally, Fulfiller) agents that collapse the hunt through tickets and logs into a single conversation with the right context. And a CMDB with discovery and an enterprise graph that maps dependencies not as a static diagram, but as the substrate for root cause and change analysis. The promise is fewer tickets, faster resolutions, and a paper trail that writes itself as the dialogue unfolds.

The message is Slack-first and Teams-ready, but the shift is bigger than chat. This is omnichannel by design. The ticket is no longer the beginning of the story. The conversation is. Proactive detection lights up before someone types “my VPN is broken.” Auto-resolution takes the first actions a human would have taken. When judgment is needed, the handoff isn’t a bounce or a portal detour. It’s the same thread, the same context, the same record.

There is a quiet rebuttal here to the last two years of agent hype. A fleet of point agents without a record is noise. A pristine record or KB without a surface is inertia. Salesforce wants both. Slack commands attention. Service Cloud enforces process, data, and audit. Together they aim to convert attention into action, and action into a governed outcome that other systems can trust.

This will not arrive as an ITSM monolith. How could it? Salesforce will land first in commercial and mid-market accounts, coexist where displacement would be wasteful, and grow depth quarter by quarter. Pricing follows the shape of the work. Fulfillers (IT) will be priced per user and employee agents as a subscription with consumption-based add-ons for connectors and agentic actions. The theme is simplicity. The intent, predictability. The subtext is total cost, not a race to the bottom on licenses while the integration bill climbs.

For ServiceNow, I thikn the contour of competition is clearer. The suite keeps its edge in governance, depth, and the maturity of a long-tested operating model. Salesforce will pressure the edge where people live. So the fight will not be about who can brand a portal, but about who can make the surface feel native without breaking the spine of the record.

And the sharper contest may not evem be with ServiceNow alone. By putting Slack at the surface, Salesforce moves directly into the lanes of Freshworks, Jira Service Management, and ManageEngine. These are the tools chosen by mid-market and cost-conscious buyers who see ServiceNow as too heavy and too expensive.

Slack as the service front end, paired with Salesforce’s existing footprint, makes it easier for those buyers to justify extending rather than adding a separate platform. That distinction matters.

ServiceNow remains the gravitational force in enterprise ITSM, but in India, Southeast Asia, and globally across the commercial segment, price and simplicity win the day. Buyers who will pay for SAP in ERP and Salesforce in CRM can sometimes draw the line at ServiceNow’s ITSM licenses. Freshworks and Jira thrive in that gap with “good enough” service desks. Salesforce’s re-entry sharpens the perception that there is now an alternative that feels both familiar and affordable.

The architecture question remains the only one that matters. Surfaces capture attention. Suites enforce order. Neither wins alone. The trunk that binds them is the platform. And you know my thoughts on this! Salesforce is arguing its trunk is now strong enough to carry IT service as just another domain on the same line as customer service and HR. If that holds, the gravity of the installed base will matter more than any feature list. Initally anyway.

This is where cost comes back into the picture. For years, Total Cost of Ownership was the discipline that kept technology buying honest. It was the world my generation grew up in. Subscription models changed that. They eroded the discipline, turning license fees into a proxy for value and hiding the integration and governance costs that never really went away. Every new SaaS tool without architectural discipline adds to what has become the complexity tax.

ServiceNow’s value claim has always and remains about cost not price. And I agree that it does still collapse ownership costs into one platform. Salesforce will argue that its install base and Slack surface deliver the same effect with less sticker (price) shock. Freshworks, Jira, and ManageEngine will counter with even lower prices and speed. The real choice is whether buyers want affordability at the edge, discipline at the core, or a workable blend of both.

What happens next will also depend on how cleanly SI partners can build with it. Out-of-the-box agents are a start, but enterprises will want domain packs tailored to the messy realities of their estates. Credibility won;t come from demos but from post-mortems where the agent prevented an incident rather than summarised one.

Ultimately, the risk is the same as ever. If the surface floats without the platform, this will be a novelty that, like all novelties, will fade. If the platform underneath becomes too rigid and process-heavy, Slack risks becoming just a thin veneer over the same legacy workflows. The opportunity is a single motion. To see the issue early, act in the conversation, land the outcome in the record, and repeat.

If Salesforce can do that at scale, Slack will no longer be just the place where work is discussed. It will be the place where service work is done.