AI Agents Take Center Stage: Workday, ServiceNow, and SAP Challenge Agentforce
December 2024 witnessed a landmark moment in enterprise AI: the announcement of Salesforce Agentforce 2.0. Amid a flurry of AI agent launches from Workday, ServiceNow, and SAP, Salesforce took center stage, redefining the conversation around AI-driven business automation. At the Agentforce 2.0 event, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declared, “The AI revolution isn’t coming—it’s here.” With its pre-trained autonomous agents, low-code Agentforce Builder, and deep integration with Salesforce Data Cloud and Slack, Agentforce 2.0 cemented Salesforce’s position as the leader in AI-powered digital workforces.
But Salesforce isn’t the only major player in this space. Since December, Workday, ServiceNow, and SAP have been rolling out their own AI-powered agents, each claiming to revolutionize how businesses operate. Here’s how these platforms compare in the battle for AI agent supremacy.
Table of contents
- Workday’s AI Agent Strategy: HR & Finance Automation
- ServiceNow’s AI Agent Strategy: Enterprise Workflow Orchestration
- SAP’s AI Agent Strategy: Enterprise-Wide AI & Data Governance
- How Salesforce Agentforce 2.0 Stands Apart
- Competitive Breakdown: Where Each Vendor Stands
- The Embedded AI Agent Battle Is Just Beginning
- What’s Next?
Workday’s AI Agent Strategy: HR & Finance Automation
Workday’s AI ambitions center on HR and finance, where it already serves as the system of record for workforce data. Its latest innovation, the Workday Agent System of Record, provides a governance framework for both human employees and AI-powered agents, ensuring seamless automation. More significantly, Workday is pioneering role-based AI agent descriptions, enabling enterprises to define and standardize AI agent roles for enhanced discovery, selection, and composition. This framework allows AI agents to integrate into structured workforce environments with predefined capabilities, much like APIs for enterprise automation.
Workday’s role-based AI agents include:
- Contracts Agent: Extracts key obligations from contracts and automates follow-ups.
- Payroll Agent: Monitors payroll transactions and flags anomalies in real time.
- Policy Agent: Enforces HR policies and provides proactive guidance.
By leveraging Workday Illuminate, its AI platform that processes over 800 billion transactions annually, Workday ensures its AI agents are deeply embedded in HR and finance operations. Furthermore, Workday’s role-based metadata standardization could shape the future of enterprise AI marketplaces, much like standardized APIs transformed software integration. This approach contrasts with Salesforce Agentforce’s more customer-facing automation focus.
ServiceNow’s AI Agent Strategy: Enterprise Workflow Orchestration
ServiceNow is positioning itself as the control tower for AI agents across IT, customer service, and HR workflows. Its AI Agent Orchestrator and AI Agent Studio empower organizations to:
- Coordinate multiple AI agents across different business units.
- Build custom AI agents with a no-code interface.
- Deploy pre-built AI agents that integrate with ITSM, HR, and security workflows.
ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric ensures AI agents have real-time access to enterprise-wide data. Unlike Salesforce Agentforce, which enhances CRM workflows, ServiceNow’s focus is on cross-functional enterprise automation, particularly in IT service management (ITSM).
SAP’s AI Agent Strategy: Enterprise-Wide AI & Data Governance
SAP is embedding AI across its massive ERP footprint, with Joule AI agents driving automation across finance, supply chain, HR, and customer service. Key differentiators include:
- SAP Business Data Cloud: A unified data platform integrating SAP and non-SAP data.
- SAP Knowledge Graph: Context-aware AI reasoning across enterprise processes.
- AI Agent Builder: Low-code tools for creating industry-specific AI agents.
SAP’s strength lies in its ability to link AI agents across business processes—from procurement to order-to-cash—whereas Salesforce Agentforce excels in sales, service, and marketing automation.
How Salesforce Agentforce 2.0 Stands Apart
While Workday, ServiceNow, and SAP focus on back-office automation, Salesforce Agentforce is built for customer-facing AI workflows. Its key features include:
- Pre-trained AI Agents: Industry-specific AI agents ready to automate sales, service, and marketing tasks.
- Agentforce Builder: Low-code customization tools.
- Slack Integration: AI agents embedded in Slack for real-time collaboration.
- Salesforce Data Cloud: AI agents act on real-time customer data.
Competitive Breakdown: Where Each Vendor Stands
Let’s take a look at how these vendor strategies compare.
| Vendor | Primary AI Agent Focus | Data Foundation | Key Differentiator |
| Salesforce | CRM & Customer Engagement | Salesforce Data Cloud | Deep CRM integration & Slack capabilities |
| Workday | HR & Finance Automation | Workday Illuminate | Governance of AI agents in workforce management & Role-based AI metadata |
| ServiceNow | IT & Workflow Automation | Workflow Data Fabric | Multi-agent orchestration across business units |
| SAP | End-to-End Business Processes | SAP Business Data Cloud & Knowledge Graph | Cross-functional AI agents spanning multiple SAP modules |
The Future of AI Agent Interoperability
As enterprise AI adoption accelerates, organizations will increasingly rely on AI agents from multiple vendors to streamline workflows, automate decisions, and enhance business agility. While today’s AI-powered platforms—Salesforce Agentforce, Workday AI Agents, ServiceNow AI Orchestration, and SAP Joule—largely operate within their respective ecosystems, the industry is moving toward a future where AI agents from different vendors collaborate seamlessly across enterprise functions.
To illustrate this vision, we present the following diagram, which imagines a multivendor AI agent ecosystem where intelligent agents work together to fulfill distinct enterprise roles. In this scenario:
- HR Managers leverage Workday AI Agents to automate payroll processing, enforce policies, and ensure compliance, while connecting with financial systems via ERP.
- IT Administrators rely on ServiceNow AI Orchestration to manage IT support tickets, predict infrastructure failures, and ensure system security, with real-time insights from enterprise data clouds.
- Sales Representatives use Salesforce AI Agents to retrieve customer insights, personalize engagement, and drive revenue growth through CRM-integrated automation.
These AI agents don’t just execute tasks—they communicate, share insights, and adapt in real time to enterprise needs. In a fully interoperable landscape, AI agents could dynamically integrate with multiple systems, exchanging structured knowledge through standardized frameworks. This level of cooperation would enable enterprises to:
- Reduce silos by creating a network of AI-driven assistants across business units.
- Improve decision-making with AI agents that analyze and respond to cross-functional data.
- Enhance efficiency through automation that is not limited by vendor ecosystems.
The Embedded AI Agent Battle Is Just Beginning
While we are still in the early stages of AI agent adoption, companies are already laying the groundwork for this future. As vendors refine their agent architectures, interoperability will be key to unlocking the full potential of AI-driven automation. The race is on to define the standards, governance, and technical frameworks that will bring this multivendor AI agent landscape to life.
Each vendor is leveraging its system-of-record dominance to deliver AI agents that streamline workflows. While Salesforce is pushing AI-powered digital workers for front-office automation, Workday is focusing on AI governance in HR/Finance, ServiceNow is orchestrating AI-driven ITSM, and SAP is embedding AI across enterprise operations.
What’s Next?
2025 will reveal how enterprises adopt these AI agents. Will companies embrace multiple AI agent platforms, or will one vendor dominate enterprise AI automation?
One thing is clear: the age of AI-powered digital workers is here, and the battle for AI agent supremacy is just beginning.
Moreover, Salesforce and Workday have a history of technical alliance announcements, signaling potential for deeper collaboration. Adam Evans, Salesforce AI GM, in a recent press release, explicitly endorsed Workday’s agentefforts, reinforcing the strategic importance of standardized AI agent definitions. This alignment could pave the way for enhanced AI agent interoperability across platforms and accelerate the evolution of enterprise AI marketplaces, where role-based agents are seamlessly discoverable, composable, and deployable.
