Before generative artificial intelligence technology became mainstream, Moveworks began to explore how to use a new generation of language models to solve technical challenges in customer service. Recently, ServiceNow, a giant in the service management software field, announced that it had acquired Moveworks for up to US$2.85 billion, a deal that has attracted widespread attention and heated discussion in the industry.
Moveworks was founded in 2016 and was co-founded by four founders, Bhavin Shah, Vaibhav Nivargi, Varun Singh and Jiang Chen. The company's main goal is to develop enterprise-level chatbots to enhance the work efficiency of human customer service representatives. CEO Bhavin Shah recalled in an interview that 2016 was not an ideal entrepreneurial opportunity because the industry was generally skeptical about the future development of chatbots. However, Google's language model based on the "Transformer" architecture launched in 2017 provided a solid technical foundation for Moveworks, allowing it to grow rapidly.
With the continuous advancement of technology, Moveworks began to use early language models such as Google's BERT in 2021 and fine-tune it in combination with the company's own data, thus significantly improving the performance of chatbots. These optimized language models not only go beyond traditional 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 efficient services to many well-known companies such as Hearst, Instacart, Toyota, etc. These projects not only allowed Moveworks to accumulate rich industry experience, but also helped them optimize their integration capabilities with various back-end databases and enterprise applications, further enhancing their technical strength.
With the continuous maturity of large language model (LLM) technology, 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 great attention from ServiceNow, which hopes to further enhance its AI strategy through the acquisition to cope with increasingly complex customer service needs.
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 a new user experience for employees and customers. Shah, founder of Moveworks, also said that joining ServiceNow is an excellent opportunity to accelerate innovation, which will further promote the improvement of user experience and bring more value to customers.
This acquisition not only marks a further layout of ServiceNow in the field of AI, but also indicates that enterprise-level AI technology will play a more important role in future customer service. Moveworks' technology combined with ServiceNow's platform will bring more efficient and smarter customer service solutions to enterprises around the world, reshaping the service experiences of employees and customers.