Nexus vs Moveworks: The 10% Conversation vs the 90% Behind It
Moveworks (now ServiceNow) handles IT support conversations. Nexus deploys autonomous agents across every department with embedded engineers. Compare both.
Last updated: February 2026
Quick honest summary
Here is the uncomfortable truth about conversational AI: the conversation is only about 10% of the problem.
When an employee submits an IT ticket or asks an HR question, the dialogue itself (understanding the request, confirming details, providing an answer) is the easy part. The other 90% is the complex work that has to happen behind that conversation: pulling data from three different systems, validating it against business rules, making a decision about how to proceed, handling the exception when something does not fit the standard path, routing edge cases to the right person with the right context, and actually executing the action. Conversational AI platforms are architected around the 10%. Agents are architected around the 90%.
Moveworks built its reputation as a conversational AI platform for internal IT support: resetting passwords, answering policy questions, routing service tickets. It has since expanded to cover HR, finance, and facilities inquiries, and in November 2025 launched tools for building scoped assistants across departments. In December 2025, ServiceNow completed its $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks, making it part of the ServiceNow platform. What Moveworks does well is the conversation layer: understanding what an employee needs and either answering it or routing it. What it was not designed for is the autonomous process execution behind that conversation.
Nexus is a different category. It is an enterprise AI solution that combines an agent platform with Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) who embed with your team to identify the right use cases, build and deploy agents, and manage the organizational change that makes AI stick. Nexus agents complete entire business workflows autonomously across any department: sales, marketing, customer support, HR, operations. The model is platform plus service, not software alone. Nexus agents can converse through any channel (Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, email, phone), but the conversation is just the interface to deep autonomous process execution: collecting data across systems, validating it, making decisions within guardrails, handling exceptions, and taking action without waiting for a human to do the work the ticket describes.
If your primary need is an AI assistant for employee self-service within the ServiceNow ecosystem, Moveworks addresses that 10% well. If you need autonomous agents that complete the entire workflow a ticket represents (the other 90%), across multiple departments and systems, with a team of engineers embedded alongside yours to make it work, that is what Nexus is built for.
Side-by-side comparison
| Dimension | Moveworks (ServiceNow) | Nexus |
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| What it is |
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| How it works |
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| Work completed behind the conversation |
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| Autonomous process execution |
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| Exception handling |
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| Who builds and owns it |
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| Service model |
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| Scope of automation |
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| Deployment model |
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| Integrations |
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| Pricing model |
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| Security and compliance |
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| Vendor independence |
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When Moveworks (ServiceNow) is the better choice
It is worth being straightforward about where Moveworks is strong. If the 10% (the conversation) is genuinely your bottleneck, and the 90% behind it is already handled well by your existing teams and systems, Moveworks is a solid choice for that scope.
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Your primary goal is employee self-service for IT and HR. If your biggest challenge is IT ticket volume, repetitive HR policy questions, or facilities requests, and the work behind those tickets is already well-handled by your human agents, you just need a better front door. Moveworks has years of training data and proven deployment in this specific domain. It processes hundreds of millions of interactions annually across 5.5 million employees. For organizations where the conversation layer is the bottleneck (not the process execution behind it), this solves a real problem.
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You are deeply committed to the ServiceNow ecosystem. With the acquisition complete, Moveworks will offer the tightest integration with ServiceNow's ITSM, HRSD, and workflow platforms. If your organization already runs on ServiceNow and you want a conversational AI layer that is native to that stack, the integration path is natural.
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Your AI priority is internal employee experience, not cross-department workflow automation. If the business case is specifically about reducing resolution times, improving employee satisfaction with internal services, and creating a single front door for employee requests, Moveworks is purpose-built for that scope. The question to ask: are your biggest AI opportunities in the conversation, or in the work behind it?
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You have a large IT organization that can own the deployment. Moveworks is traditionally deployed and managed by IT. If your IT team has the capacity to own and administer the platform, and the use case stays within their domain, the operating model fits.
When Nexus is the better choice
Enterprises that partner with Nexus tend to share a pattern: their biggest AI opportunities are not in the conversation. They are in the 90% behind it, the complex work that spans departments, systems, and decision points. These organizations need AI that completes work, not AI that talks about work.
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Your bottleneck is the work behind the conversation, not the conversation itself. This is the primary lens. When a customer onboarding request comes in, the conversation ("What plan are you interested in?") is straightforward. The work behind it (pulling data from three systems, validating eligibility, checking inventory, running compliance rules, routing exceptions, updating records) is where the real complexity lives. If your highest-value AI opportunities involve that kind of multi-system, multi-step process execution, you need agents designed around the work, not around the conversation. Nexus agents execute entire business processes end-to-end: collecting data, validating, deciding, handling exceptions, and acting autonomously.
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You need autonomous agents across multiple departments, not just an employee help desk. Customer onboarding, sales intelligence, proposal generation, marketing operations, compliance monitoring, HR coordination. Moveworks is expanding beyond IT, but its architecture is designed around the conversation, not around the work. See how Nexus compares to other conversational AI platforms like Kore.ai and Ada across these same dimensions. When the work requires autonomous multi-system orchestration with decision logic and exception handling, the conversation layer alone does not address the 90%.
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You need a partner, not just software. This is the fundamental difference. Nexus embeds Forward Deployed Engineers with your team. They help you identify the highest-impact use cases (typically the ones where the 90% is most painful), design agents that fit your specific operations, handle integration complexity, run pilots without requiring your internal resources, and manage the organizational change that determines whether AI actually gets adopted. Deploying AI at scale is 10% technology and 90% organizational change. Nexus is built around that reality.
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You want customer-facing AI, not just internal AI. Moveworks is designed for internal employee experiences. It does not handle customer-facing workflows. Customer-facing processes are almost entirely about the 90%: the behind-the-scenes orchestration of onboarding steps, compliance checks, order processing, and exception routing. Nexus agents operate on both sides: Orange deployed customer-facing onboarding agents (50% conversion improvement) alongside internal support agents (40% capacity freed). Same platform, same governance, both directions.
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You are concerned about ServiceNow lock-in. Many enterprises originally chose Moveworks because it was independent and could sit on top of whatever tools they had. That has changed. ServiceNow now owns the product roadmap, and industry analysts note that pricing is likely to shift toward bundled SKUs, non-ServiceNow integrations may receive less investment over time, and replacing Moveworks later becomes both technically and financially expensive once it is deeply embedded in ServiceNow's stack. Nexus is platform-agnostic. For enterprises weighing ecosystem independence, our enterprise AI platforms comparison covers this theme across multiple vendors. It connects to your systems without requiring commitment to any single vendor.
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Business teams need to own the AI, not just consume it. Moveworks is typically deployed by IT, for employees. Nexus agents are built and owned by the business teams who understand the workflows, the people who know where the 90% is most broken. At Orange, the business team (not engineering) built and deployed customer onboarding agents. At Lambda, the Head of Sales Intelligence (not an engineer) built their research automation agent. Business ownership is what drives adoption and sustained impact.
What enterprises experienced
Orange Group: autonomous agents across customer-facing and internal operations
Orange, a multi-billion euro telecom with 120,000+ employees, did not need a better IT service desk or employee self-service assistant. An IT support tool like Moveworks could have handled internal ticket routing, but Orange's challenge was the 90%: the multi-step, multi-system work behind customer onboarding, order processing, and complaint escalation that no employee-facing conversational AI was designed to complete.
Their business team built customer onboarding agents using Nexus, deployed in 4 weeks. The results: 50% conversion improvement and $4M+ incremental yearly revenue. They also freed 40% of their customer service team's capacity with agents for order processing and complaint escalation.
The pattern here matters. Orange built agents across customer-facing and internal operations. Not an assistant for one department. Autonomous agents across the workflows that drive revenue and operational efficiency. 100% adoption because agents live inside the channels teams already use (WhatsApp, internal systems). Every agent decision is logged, traceable, and auditable. When the agent is confident, it proceeds. When uncertain, it escalates with full context. Governance woven into the work itself.
Forward Deployed Engineers from Nexus worked alongside the Orange team throughout: identifying the right use cases, designing the agents, managing the deployment, and optimizing after launch. This is the service layer that makes the technology deliver.
Lambda.ai ($4B+ AI company): chose to buy, not build
Lambda is a $4B+ AI infrastructure company with world-class AI engineers. If any company could build sales automation agents internally, it is Lambda. AI is literally their business.
Their CTO considered building internally and concluded the opportunity cost was too high. Every hour their engineers spent on internal automation was an hour not spent on their core AI infrastructure product.
Lambda's challenge was pure 90% work. Researching enterprise accounts is not a conversation problem. It is a process execution problem: pulling data from multiple sources, cross-referencing signals, identifying patterns, scoring opportunities, and synthesizing analysis. No amount of conversational AI solves this. They also considered building in-house but concluded the opportunity cost was too high.
With Nexus, their Head of Sales Intelligence (not an engineer) built the AMO Enterprise Evolution agent. It monitors 12,000+ enterprise accounts annually, identifies buying signals and competitive intelligence, and delivers the kind of analysis that would require 2 hours of manual work per account. The result: $4B+ in pipeline opportunity identified, 24,000+ research hours added annually (equivalent to 12 full-time analysts), and $7M+ projected annual value. Lambda is now expanding to a fleet of agents across sales and marketing.
A European consulting firm (400+ employees): 5 agents across the entire business
This firm did not have a conversation problem. They had a 90% problem. Proposals took days because of the multi-step process behind them: gathering requirements, pulling consultant profiles, matching skills, generating documents. Interview processes were manual. Consultant staffing was slow. HR questions went unanswered.
They built 5 agents with Nexus covering their entire consulting lifecycle: interview automation, CV generation, project matching, proposal generation, and HR support. Proposal turnaround dropped from days to hours. Tens of thousands of hours freed monthly across the organization.
This is the difference between AI that handles the 10% (the conversation, the question, the request) and AI that handles the 90% (the actual work behind it), delivered with embedded engineers who make it stick.
Key differences explained
Designed around the conversation vs. designed around the work
This is the core architectural difference, and the 10/90 split makes it concrete.
Consider what happens when an employee submits "I need access to the analytics dashboard." With conversational AI, the system understands the request (10%), confirms which dashboard, maybe checks a knowledge base, and either grants access directly or creates a ticket for someone else to handle. The conversation is managed well.
Now consider the 90% that might be required behind that request: verifying the employee's role and clearance level across the HR system, checking whether their manager has pre-approved analytics access, determining which of four dashboard tiers matches their role, provisioning credentials in the analytics platform, updating the access log in the compliance system, notifying the security team if the access level is elevated, and handling the exception when the employee's department code does not match any existing approval template.
Moveworks is architected around the first part. It is a conversational AI assistant. An employee asks a question, and the system resolves it or routes it. The interaction model is: person asks, AI answers. Even with its expansion beyond IT into HR, finance, and facilities, the fundamental pattern is employee self-service. For known request types with straightforward resolution paths, it works. When the work behind the conversation involves multi-system orchestration, conditional logic, and exception handling, the request gets routed to a human who does the actual work.
Nexus agents are architected around the second part. They execute multi-step business processes end-to-end: collecting information, validating against systems, making decisions within guardrails, handling exceptions intelligently, escalating when uncertain, and executing actions across multiple systems. The interaction model is: agent completes work. Nexus agents can converse through any channel (Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, email, phone), but the conversation is just the interface. Behind it, the agent orchestrates the full workflow autonomously.
Orange's onboarding agent does not wait for an employee to ask a question. It autonomously collects customer information, validates data against systems, checks compatibility, routes exceptions, and escalates complex cases with full context. Lambda's research agent autonomously monitors 12,000+ accounts and surfaces buying signals without anyone asking. These agents handle the 90%. That is fundamentally different from answering "how do I reset my password?"
Software vs. solution (the FDE difference)
Most enterprise AI vendors sell software and disappear. Moveworks is a software product with standard enterprise support. You license it, your IT team deploys it, and you manage it. This works when the problem is the 10%: deploy a conversational layer, connect it to your systems, and let it handle employee requests.
When the problem is the 90%, software alone is not enough. The complex work behind conversations (multi-system data collection, validation logic, exception handling, decision frameworks) is different in every organization. It requires people who understand your specific operations, systems, and edge cases. This is why Nexus embeds Forward Deployed Engineers with your team from day one.
FDEs are real engineers who help you identify the highest-impact use cases (typically where the 90% is most complex and painful), design agents that fit your specific reality (not generic off-the-shelf), handle integration complexity across the systems where the real work happens (so your team does not have to learn a new platform), and run pilots without requiring internal resources.
This extends beyond initial deployment. FDEs provide change management guidance (framing the change, training teams, building confidence through small wins), ongoing optimization (analyzing performance, refining logic, scaling to new processes), and continuous support as your needs evolve.
This is why Nexus has a 100% POC-to-contract conversion rate. Every pilot converts because the engagement model is designed to deliver measurable value, not just provide access to software.
The ServiceNow acquisition: what changed
ServiceNow announced the Moveworks acquisition in March 2025 and completed it in December 2025 for $2.85 billion. For enterprises that chose Moveworks as an independent platform, several things have shifted.
Product direction. Moveworks is now part of ServiceNow's strategy to "redefine how employees engage with work" within the ServiceNow platform. Product roadmap decisions will increasingly serve ServiceNow's ecosystem goals. The deepest innovation will likely benefit ServiceNow customers first.
Pricing. Industry analysts note that pricing is expected to shift toward bundled SKUs tied to ServiceNow modules, move away from standalone negotiation flexibility, and increase at renewal as Moveworks is positioned as a strategic add-on rather than an independent platform.
Integration priorities. Moveworks historically integrated with a range of systems: ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, BMC, and others. Many customers chose it precisely because it could sit on top of whatever tools they had. With ServiceNow as the owner, there is legitimate concern about whether non-ServiceNow integrations will receive the same investment over time.
For non-ServiceNow customers. ServiceNow has publicly committed to supporting existing Moveworks customers who do not use ServiceNow. The long-term question is whether that commitment holds as the platforms converge, or whether non-ServiceNow customers eventually face a choice: migrate to ServiceNow or look for alternatives.
Nexus is independent and system-agnostic. It connects to ServiceNow, Salesforce, SAP, HubSpot, Jira, custom APIs, and 4,000+ other systems. The same agent can pull data from your CRM, validate against your ERP, communicate via WhatsApp, and update your ticketing system. No ecosystem lock-in.
Ticket deflection vs. business process completion
This maps directly to the 10/90 split. Ticket deflection measures how well AI handles the conversation: how many requests were understood and resolved (or routed) without human intervention. That is the 10%. It is a real, measurable outcome for IT operations.
Business process completion measures how well AI handles the work: how many end-to-end workflows were executed autonomously, including data collection, validation, decision-making, exception handling, and action. That is the 90%.
Moveworks measures the first. Nexus measures the second. Orange generated $4M+ in incremental yearly revenue because agents completed customer onboarding workflows end-to-end, not because they deflected onboarding questions. Lambda identified $4B+ in pipeline opportunities because agents autonomously researched 12,000+ accounts, not because they answered sales team questions about accounts. A European consulting firm cut proposal turnaround from days to hours because agents executed the entire proposal generation process, not because they responded to "how do I write a proposal?"
The question for enterprises: where is the value in your AI investment? In handling conversations better, or in completing the work those conversations represent?
Frequently asked questions
What does the ServiceNow acquisition mean for current Moveworks customers?
ServiceNow completed its acquisition of Moveworks in December 2025 for $2.85 billion. In the short term, the product continues to work as before. ServiceNow has stated that non-ServiceNow customers will continue to have access to the full Moveworks AI Assistant. The longer-term questions center on product direction, pricing shifts, and whether non-ServiceNow integrations will receive the same level of investment. Enterprises that want platform independence, need AI beyond employee self-service, or are concerned about deepening ServiceNow dependency may want to evaluate alternatives before the platforms converge further.
Moveworks now claims to work beyond IT. How is Nexus different?
Moveworks has expanded into HR, finance, facilities, and recently launched tools for building "Scoped Assistants" for various departments. This is real progress on the conversation layer. The difference is architectural: Moveworks is still designed around the 10% (understanding and responding to employee requests). Nexus is designed around the 90% (the complex work behind those requests: collecting data across systems, making decisions, handling exceptions, and taking action autonomously). Expanding conversational AI to more departments means more departments get a better front door. It does not mean the work behind that front door gets automated. Additionally, Nexus includes embedded Forward Deployed Engineers who work alongside your team, which is a fundamentally different engagement model from licensing software.
Can Nexus handle IT support and HR, or is that only Moveworks?
Yes. Enterprises use Nexus agents for internal support, HR questions, and employee self-service. A European consulting firm built an HR support agent alongside their sales, proposal, and staffing agents, all on Nexus. The difference is that Nexus handles IT and HR as part of a broader enterprise platform, not as the entire scope. You get one platform for employee-facing and customer-facing workflows across every department.
We chose Moveworks before the acquisition. Should we switch?
That depends on where your biggest AI opportunities are. If the conversation layer (the 10%) is genuinely your primary challenge, and you are comfortable committing to the ServiceNow ecosystem, Moveworks may continue to serve that purpose. If your highest-value opportunities are in the 90%, the autonomous process execution across sales, marketing, customer support, HR, and operations, or if you need AI that completes customer-facing workflows, or if vendor independence matters to your procurement strategy, it is worth exploring what a department-agnostic platform with embedded engineering support looks like. Every Nexus engagement starts with a 3-month proof of concept tied to measurable outcomes.
How does pricing compare?
Moveworks uses enterprise licensing tied to employee count, typically $100-200 per employee annually with multi-year contracts. Post-acquisition, pricing is expected to shift toward bundled ServiceNow SKUs. Nexus charges per-agent, tied to value delivered rather than headcount. Orange generates $4M+ yearly revenue from agents that cost a fraction of what per-employee licensing across 120,000+ employees would represent. Every engagement starts with a 3-month POC tied to specific outcomes, so the math is clear before you commit.
We need both IT support and agents for other departments. Do we need two platforms?
You can use Nexus for both. Nexus agents handle the conversation (the 10%) and the work behind it (the 90%) on a single platform. Enterprises deploy Nexus agents for internal support (IT, HR, employee questions) alongside agents for customer-facing workflows (onboarding, sales research, proposal generation) and operational workflows (compliance, data processing, staffing). A European consulting firm runs 5 agents across their entire business on a single platform. One platform, every department, no fragmentation, with Forward Deployed Engineers supporting the whole journey.
What if we are not a ServiceNow customer but were considering Moveworks?
This is worth careful consideration. Moveworks historically worked across multiple ITSM platforms, which was part of its appeal. With ServiceNow as the owner, the long-term investment priority will naturally favor ServiceNow's ecosystem. If you are evaluating conversational AI for employee self-service and your ITSM is not ServiceNow, you may want to consider whether a platform that is ecosystem-independent offers a more sustainable path. Nexus connects to any ITSM, CRM, ERP, or communication tool, and the engagement includes Forward Deployed Engineers who handle the integration complexity.
Worth exploring?
If Moveworks solved the 10% (the conversation) but your enterprise is ready to tackle the 90% (the complex work behind it), it might be worth seeing how Orange built autonomous agents that complete customer onboarding and support workflows end-to-end with $4M+ in yearly revenue impact, or how Lambda (a $4B+ AI company) chose Nexus over building internally because their challenge was process execution, not conversation.
Every engagement starts with a 3-month proof of concept tied to specific outcomes. Forward Deployed Engineers work alongside your team from day one. You see the value before you commit.
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