News Analysis
Research Report
The ROI of Employee Experience
"Disjointed tools lead to slow decisions, no decisions or bad decisions."
When Pyramid Analytics CEO Omri Kohl said that, he described exactly why ServiceNow just spent hundreds of millions to acquire his company. Slow answers kill deals. Miss the window to act and the data becomes debris.
ServiceNow announced the acquisition on Feb. 12, picking up the Israeli analytics firm for what Globes estimates is a few hundred million dollars. The exact number hasn't been disclosed, but numbers matter less than what ServiceNow plans to do with Pyramid and whether they can actually execute.
Traditional BI's Speed Problem
Here's the problem ServiceNow is looking to solve. Most business intelligence (BI) tools are powerful but slow. Someone in HR wants to know which departments have the highest turnover. That typically means submitting a request to the data team, waiting while analysts write SQL queries, then waiting again while those get refined. Maybe, just maybe, an answer arrives in a week or two. Gaurav Rewari, ServiceNow's SVP of data and analytics, laid this out plainly in his blog post announcing the deal. By the time the insight shows up, the moment to act has usually ended.
Pyramid removes that delay completely. Founded in 2008 by Kohl, the company has raised roughly $250 million, including a $50 million round from BlackRock. More than 2,500 organizations use it, including Dell, Hallmark, VW and HP. The company's 110% net retention rate is hard to ignore. Customers aren’t just sticking around, they’re expanding their usage.
Instead of navigating dashboards or waiting on specialized teams, users ask questions in plain English. Which suppliers pose the highest risk? Where is customer churn accelerating? The platform responds with visualized answers. No SQL. No three-day email chain with the data team.
What Changes for ServiceNow Customers
For ServiceNow customers the impact will be less about features and more about proximity. Analytics will move directly into the flow of work instead of living in a separate system. Pyramid's no-code data prep tools will make it possible to pull from multiple sources without writing or maintaining code pipelines. More importantly, the results won't just sit there. ServiceNow's AI agents will be able to act on what they find opening tickets, routing issues, recommending fixes without needing human intervention unless an actual decision has to be made.
This is where the acquisition aligns with ServiceNow's longer trajectory. When Bill McDermott joined ServiceNow as CEO in late 2019, he wasn't subtle about his ambition. He described his goal as turning the company into the "defining enterprise software company of the 21st century," drawn by what he called its "real purpose" — making work work better for people. The intent was never just better IT workflows. It was expanding ServiceNow beyond its IT roots into a platform for the entire enterprise. Pyramid fits into that expansion. If workflows are going to operate autonomously rather than just efficiently, they need intelligence.
The integration plugs into what ServiceNow calls its Workflow Data Fabric. The name sounds like marketing speak, but the concept is straightforward. AI agents need consistent definitions across the organization. Customer churn risk has to mean the same thing in sales as it does in support, otherwise automation just spreads confusion faster. Pyramid's semantic layer creates a shared language for business metrics across systems and departments. Without that, speed just adds to disagreement.
Pyramid Fits Into a Bigger AI Vision
ServiceNow already has task-specific AI agents in production. The company currently offers Now Assist, which handles tasks like case summarization, chat responses and code generation. With the Moveworks acquisition closed in December, ServiceNow gained technology that can understand natural language requests and route them to the right systems.
But those agents are working with whatever data infrastructure customers already have in place. Pyramid changes that equation by giving agents a consistent, trustworthy data layer to work from. That's the future state ServiceNow is building toward; agents that don't just respond to requests but can proactively surface insights and take action.
This is where ServiceNow's approach diverges from traditional BI plays. Microsoft with Power BI can trigger workflows through Power Automate, but it requires separate integration work. Salesforce bought Tableau for $15.7 billion back in 2019 and has been working to connect it with Salesforce Flow, yet analytics and workflow still operate as separate layers that need configuration and care.
ServiceNow is betting that insight and action in the same platform, without integration headaches, is what changes behavior.
Neither Microsoft nor Salesforce built their businesses around workflow first. ServiceNow did. That difference matters more as AI assistants take on work autonomously. When analytics and execution live in separate systems, friction is inevitable. ServiceNow is trying to collapse that distance to zero. Whether that works in practice remains to be seen.
A Buying Spree With a Pattern
The Pyramid deal doesn't stand alone. ServiceNow has been spending aggressively. The $7.75 billion Armis acquisition for cybersecurity closed in December 2025. Moveworks for $2.85 billion brought agentic AI into the platform that same month. Then there's Veza for $1 billion for identity security, along with data.world for data cataloging. Each targets a different layer. Pyramid will fill the intelligence piece that makes the rest usable. Good AI agents still need good data. Without it, automation just accelerates bad decisions.
There's no shortage of money chasing this problem. Global spending on big data and analytics hit $215.7 billion in 2021 and continues to grow at double digits. Enterprises aren't cutting that spend, they're questioning why it hasn't had more impact. ServiceNow wants to argue that the problem isn't the data or the analytics. It's the distance between insight and action.
The Hard Part: Making It Work
That pitch runs straight into reality. Many enterprises already have Power BI or Tableau deeply embedded. Analytics infrastructure is expensive and risky to rip out. Consolidation sounds attractive until it collides with change management, lost costs and internal ownership feuds. ServiceNow has to prove the unified platform delivers enough value to justify the disruption.
Execution is the real test. ServiceNow now has to turn its many acquisitions into something customers actively want to use, rather than tolerate. Integration is where strategy gets exposed. Kohl is expected to stay through the transition, and Pyramid's roughly 200 employees across Israel, the US, UK, Netherlands, UAE, and Germany will fold into a company with more than 30,000 people. ServiceNow hasn't detailed the long-term leadership structure yet, and those details tend to matter more than press releases suggest.
If ServiceNow pulls this off and can demonstrate that insight-to-action actually happens faster on a unified platform once Pyramid is fully integrated, the argument becomes compelling. Enterprises are drowning in data they can't act on quickly enough. But that "if" is doing a lot of work.
Redefining What ServiceNow Is
ServiceNow isn't staying in its lane anymore. The company started as an IT service management platform. Now it's positioning itself as an "AI control tower" — a central system that connects data, intelligence, security and action across the enterprise. That's not a new category so much as an attempt to become the category itself.
The competitors aren't obvious because the space is still forming. Oracle, SAP, Salesforce and IBM all have pieces of this. None are assembling them the way ServiceNow is attempting. Newer entrants like UiPath focus on automation but lack the workflow foundation. ServiceNow is betting that owning workflow, adding intelligence through Pyramid, securing it with Armis and Veza, and powering it with Moveworks' AI agents creates something no competitor currently has — a platform where asking a question, getting an answer and taking action happens in one continuous motion.
The strategy makes sense. The market is there. Technology pieces are there. Whether ServiceNow can integrate Pyramid's 200 people smoothly, get customers to actually adopt the new capabilities and prove the semantic layer creates the shared language AI agents need is a different question entirely.
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Enterprises are already spending more than $200 billion yearly trying to close the gap between data and action. ServiceNow thinks they can consolidate that spend onto one platform. Now it's just execution.
Editor's Note: Catch up on how other legacy tech companies are reinventing themselves:
- Why Hyland's New CEO Says 'ECM Expertise Is One Thing We Don't Need' — A new leadership team, a future vision focused on content intelligence, a customer base hungry for innovation: Hyland is primed for its great pivot.
- Inside Microsoft's New AI Era: MAI-1, Voice-First Workplaces and the End of OpenAI Dependence — Microsoft's MAI-1 and MAI-Voice-1 models mark a major shift in its enterprise AI strategy and is yet another move away from its OpenAI dependence.
- Why OpenText Fired Its CEO After 13 Years: The End of the Buying Spree — Mark Barrenechea's 13-year run as OpenText's CEO came to an abrupt end on August 10. What that means for the ECM giant.