Salesforce is stepping up its push into the IT service management (ITSM) market. It is pitching as a differentiator that it has embedded AI into its platform from the outset rather than simply adding it on.

Techzine reported on April 17 that Muddu Sudhakar (무두 수다카르), who leads Salesforce's ITSM business, stressed: "We built AI into the product from the beginning. It is different from other companies." He said competitors have layered AI functions on top of existing ITSM platforms, forcing data, workflows and knowledge information to be duplicated across systems and creating security and performance problems.

Salesforce's ITSM platform operates in 2 ways.

It includes an agent that tries to resolve IT-related problems before employees create a ticket, and a "proactive AI assistant" for IT administrators. The proactive AI assistant provides root cause analysis, suggestions for incident resolution and summarisation functions.

Salesforce also cited the ability for customers to switch quickly to its solutions as a key differentiator. The company said migration from existing ITSM solutions is possible within a few months.

Migration work covers knowledge documents, ticket data and workflows, and is carried out by Salesforce's professional services team or global and regional systems integrator partners.

Salesforce also simplified its ITSM pricing policy. "Existing ITSM providers have complex pricing structures that are hard to understand," Sudhakar said. "Salesforce offers three methods: usage-based, outcome-based and a per-user-per-month (PUPM) subscription." He also said Salesforce is targeting 200,000 Salesforce customers, 65,000 Service Cloud customers and 1 million Slack customers. "The goal is to be No. 1 in the ITSM market five years from now," he said.