ServiceNow acquires Moveworks for $2.85 billion, reshaping the AI ​​chatbot landscape

Before the generative artificial intelligence boom emerged, Moveworks was already using a new generation of language models to solve technical challenges in customer service. Recently, service management software giant ServiceNow announced the acquisition of Moveworks for US$2.85 billion, a deal that has attracted widespread attention from the industry.

Founded in 2016, Moveworks is co-founded by Bhavin Shah, Vaibhav Nivargi, Varun Singh and Jiang Chen, and is committed to developing corporate chatbots to enhance the capabilities of human customer service representatives. CEO Shah mentioned in an interview that 2016 was not a good time because the industry was generally skeptical about the future of chatbots at that time. It was not until 2017 that Google launched a language model based on the "Transformer" architecture that provided a better technical foundation for Moveworks.

With the advancement of technology, Moveworks began to use early language models such as Google's BERT in 2021 to fine-tune the company's own data, thereby improving the performance of chatbots. These optimized language models not only go beyond the old recursive neural networks and natural language processing technologies, but also play an important role in customer service in multiple large enterprises.

Moveworks’ chatbots can automatically handle 70% to 80% of customer service work, providing services to many well-known companies such as Hearst, Instacart, Toyota. These projects not only allow Moveworks to gain extensive industry experience, but also help them optimize their integration capabilities with a variety of backend databases and enterprise applications.

As the technology of large language models (LLM) continues to mature, Moveworks' business has also gradually grown. Its vice president Varun Singh said the latest assistant can undertake 36 different manual customer service tasks, demonstrating strong cross-application capabilities. Moveworks’ innovation has attracted the attention of ServiceNow, which hopes to enhance its AI strategy through acquisitions.

ServiceNow's chief product officer Amit Zavery said the acquisition of Moveworks will provide a huge boost to the company's adoption of enterprise-level AI. Moveworks’ team, combined with ServiceNow’s workflow automation platform, will provide employees and customers with a new user experience. Shah, founder of Moveworks, also said that joining ServiceNow is an excellent opportunity to accelerate innovation and will further promote the improvement of user experience.