ServiceNow CEO says Sweep deal speeds CRM switches to weeks

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said the company's acquisition of Israeli startup Sweep helps move customers from one customer-relationship-management (CRM) system to another in weeks instead of years. He made the remarks on the company's earnings call last Wednesday, as ServiceNow pushes into CRM, a market long dominated by Salesforce. McDermott said rollouts now take 'a month ... 30 days, 60 days' for large companies.

Faster CRM switches

McDermott told analysts that long implementation cycles make it hard for customers to change CRM systems. 'One of the big reasons why customers sometimes have a more difficult time changing from one CRM system to another is they have a long implementation cycle,' he said. 'So now we're able to accelerate the deployment times for CRM.' He said customers are ripping and replacing systems, 'not just add alongside,' and that 'the old CRM was built for sales teams. The new one has to work across your entire business.'

Sweep acquisition details

CTech reported on September 3 that ServiceNow had acquired Sweep in a deal estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars. Neither company had announced it or disclosed a value. Sweep was founded in 2021 by Ido Gaver and Eran Kirshenboim, who earlier started Flok, which Wix acquired. It raised $22.5 million in a Series B led by Insight Partners in 2025 and had disclosed $46 million in total funding. Its software acts as an 'agentic workspace' across ServiceNow, Salesforce and HubSpot, and its customers included Brex, LG Electronics and NBC Sports. McDermott called the deal 'our tuck-in of Sweep' and said it 'adds deep expertise in rapid agentic deployments, giving us another gear to accelerate while improving customer outcomes.' Sweep is among at least seven Israeli or Israeli founded acquisitions by ServiceNow worth more than $8 billion in total, including Armis for $7.75 billion, Pyramid Analytics, Traceloop and ai.work.

Delivery experts and AI adoption

To speed up AI projects at large customers, ServiceNow now bundles its own delivery experts into select deals and books that value as professional services rather than subscription revenue. Gina Mastantuono, the company's president and chief financial officer, said the shift was about 25 basis points in the third quarter and is expected to be about 50 in the fourth quarter. She said the shift is part of why ServiceNow did not pass its full beat on to its annual guidance. Customers receiving the support 'saw AI adoption progress twice as fast during just the first five weeks,' she said. 'We're reacting by building more of these deployment teams into our forecast because we're seeing such incredible results.' Mastantuono added that the company does not expect to include this delivery expertise over the long term. Amit Zavery, ServiceNow's chief product officer and chief operating officer, said the company is 'using AI implementation agents' so that 'a lot of the heavy lifting is done by AI.'

CRM bookings growth

McDermott said the same logic applies to ServiceNow's other products, noting that in 24 hours the company activated its AI governance tool, the Super Intelligence Control Tower. Mastantuono said ServiceNow's AI enabled CRM bookings tripled from both the previous quarter and a year earlier, and that CRM and industry workflows appeared in 13 of the quarter's top 20 deals.

Sources: CTech · Techmeme