Chatbot Pioneer Moveworks Acquired by ServiceNow for $2.85 Billion
Long before ChatGPT ignited the generative AI revolution, a company called Moveworks was busy using a promising new family of language models to help solve tough technological problems in customer service. All that work paid off this week when ServiceNow announced it has agreed to purchase Moveworks for $2.85 billion.
The Early Days of Moveworks
Moveworks was founded in 2016 by Bhavin Shah, Vaibhav Nivargi, Varun Singh, and Jiang Chen to develop conversational interfaces, or chatbots, that companies could use to augment human call-center workers. At the time, the company relied on recurrent neural networks (RNN) techniques, which were not easy to work with.
"That was not the best year to start such a company," CEO Shah acknowledged to BigDATAwire in a 2023 interview. "In 2016, chatbots were declared dead. Most people were skeptical."
The Transformer Architecture
But then something unexpected happened. In 2017, Google invented the transformer architecture, which was based on a fundamentally different approach. It dispensed the convolutions and recurrence that were used in convoluted neural networks (CNNs) and RNNs and relied on something called the attention mechanism, whereby the relative importance of each component in a sequence is calculated relative to the other components in a sequence.
The Rise of Large Language Models
Suddenly, Moveworks had better underlying technology to work with. By the spring of 2021, two years after it came out of stealth, the Mountain View, California company was using early language models, such as Google’s BERT, to build better chatbots and search engines for customers. Specifically, Moveworks realized that if you took a pre-trained model like BERT and fine-tuned it using an enterprise’s own data, then the model could not only exceed its out-of-the-box capability, but it also exceeded the capability of older RNN and NLP techniques.
Building a Business
This new class of language models were very sophisticated, Moveworks Co-founder and CTO Vaibhav Nivargi told BigDATAwire back in June 2022. "They capture a lot of knowledge because they’re trained with hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters now, so it is impressive to see," he said.
Thanks to this realization, the company built a business where it used language models to create custom chatbots and conversational interfaces for companies that were suffering from a shortage of customer service representatives. Nivargi said its AI-powered agents could automate 70% to 80% of the work at large companies.
The Acquisition
Moveworks built chatbots and conversational interfaces for some very large companies, including Hearst, Instacart, Palo Alto Networks, Siemens, Toyota, and Unilever. That not only gave the company exposure to data from many different industries, which helped its technologists get better at serving the next customer, but it also exposed Moveworks to all sorts of backend databases and enterprise applications.
The capabilities of these large language models (LLMs) exploded, as we have documented in these pages and over at our sister site, AIWire, and Moveworks’ business grew too. In early 2024, Moveworks President and Co-founder Varun Singh told BigDATAwire about a copilot that could handle the duties of 36 different human agents.
"It’s completely insane in terms of its ability to discern and do actions across range of different applications and auto selecting the right plugins," Singh said. "It’s working. And frankly, I don’t think that’s too much at this stage, in terms of how far you can push this technology."
Conclusion
Moveworks’ work eventually gained the attention of ServiceNow, the SaaS giant that had $10.9 billion in revenues in 2024 and currently has a market cap of $174 billion. ServiceNow saw that Moveworks could bolster its own AI strategy, so it offered to buy the privately held company for $2.85 billion.
FAQs
Q: What is Moveworks?
A: Moveworks is a company that develops conversational interfaces, or chatbots, to augment human call-center workers.
Q: When was Moveworks founded?
A: Moveworks was founded in 2016.
Q: What is the transformer architecture?
A: The transformer architecture is a type of neural network that dispenses with convolutions and recurrence and relies on an attention mechanism to process input sequences.
Q: What are large language models (LLMs)?
A: LLMs are sophisticated language models that are trained with hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters and can capture a lot of knowledge.
