ServiceNow Inc

Intuit shares plunged 11% in premarket trading after the financial technology platform issued fiscal 2027 revenue guidance of $23.279 billion to $23.512 billion, below the $23.7 billion analysts expected, though its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings and revenue beat estimates. The disappointing outlook dragged other software stocks lower, with the iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF down over 1%, ServiceNow off more than 2.5%, and Workday and Salesforce each down 2%. Zoom Communications fell 7% after its third-quarter earnings per share guidance of $1.46 to $1.48 came in short of the $1.50 FactSet consensus. Kohl's declined 5% after reporting a 0.9% drop in second-quarter comparable sales, worse than the 0.6% decline expected, but the retailer raised its full-year outlook, partly due to $150 million in tariff refunds, and restarted share buybacks of up to $100 million in 2026. On the upside, J.M. Smucker climbed 5.6% after fiscal first-quarter revenue of $2.22 billion topped the LSEG consensus of $2.13 billion, SolarEdge jumped nearly 7% following a UBS upgrade to buy on a new FCC policy, and Semtech rose more than 5% after beating earnings estimates with adjusted EPS of 71 cents versus 61 cents expected. Box gained over 2% on revenue beat, while Boston Scientific fell more than 3% after disclosing a cybersecurity incident causing product disruptions, and SAP dropped almost 4% after a UBS downgrade to neutral on slow agentic AI delivery.

Sustainable Growth Advisers, in its second-quarter 2026 investor letter, disclosed that it met with ServiceNow President and Chief Legal Officer Hossein Nowbar to discuss the company's recent acquisition activity and the need for clearer shareholder communication. SGA said management disagreed with its characterization that the acquisition strategy had become more aggressive, describing the transactions as an unusual convergence of several deals rather than a fundamental change in approach. The investment firm emphasized that the lack of timely communication surrounding these transactions contributed to investor uncertainty and undermined shareholder confidence, and it encouraged ServiceNow to provide more proactive disclosure around significant strategic decisions. ServiceNow shares closed at $128.48 on August 21, 2026, with a market capitalization of $132.85 billion.

Atlassian Corporation reported fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 revenues increased 28% year over year, with cloud revenues up 31% and RPO up 44%, as strong AI adoption helped drive customer expansion. More than 80% of Fortune 500 companies now use Rovo, and Rovo-assisted actions increased 50% sequentially, while customers using Rovo are growing ARR at more than twice the rate of non-adopters. The Teamwork Graph now spans more than 200 billion objects and connections, and management said AI and the Teamwork Graph are among the top two reasons customers upgrade to the cloud. Atlassian faces stiff competition from Salesforce, whose Agentforce ARR surpassed $1 billion in the first quarter of fiscal 2027, and ServiceNow, whose AI ACV crossed $1 billion during the second quarter of 2026 and is expected to exceed $1.5 billion by year-end. TEAM shares have returned 0.5% year to date, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for fiscal 2027 earnings is $5.52 per share, revised down 7.9% over the past 30 days.

Parnassus Investments Chief Investment Officer Todd Ahlsten warned that Salesforce and ServiceNow could face growing pressure on their seat license business models as AI agents reduce the need for human software users. Ahlsten said on Bloomberg Tech that the seat license model is going to be under a lot of pressure, citing the rapid growth of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google's Gemini. He argued that if AI allows companies to get more work done without adding employees, they may no longer need to keep adding Salesforce or ServiceNow licenses alongside headcount. Bain & Company found that about 65% of more than 30 SaaS vendors introducing generative AI had adopted hybrid pricing, layering AI usage or feature-based charges on top of traditional seat pricing. Salesforce said its Sales and Service products were still seeing year-over-year seat growth, and its 10 customers making the heaviest use of its AI agents increased their total Salesforce spending by 1.5 times over the previous year, while ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said roughly half of net new business revenue now comes from non-seat-based models.

Palantir's U.S. commercial revenue surged 149% year over year to $764 million in Q2, a growth rate that starkly separates it from ServiceNow's mid-20% subscription growth. ServiceNow reported total revenue of about $3.9 billion with subscription revenue up roughly 23% in constant currency, and its AI annual contract value crossed $1 billion, but growth remains tied to its large installed base. Palantir's total revenue rose 93% to about $1.94 billion, and it raised its full-year U.S. commercial forecast to more than $3.42 billion, implying at least 134% growth for 2026. ServiceNow's remaining performance obligations reached about $29 billion, with current RPO at about $13.2 billion growing just over 21%, underscoring its durability versus Palantir's hypergrowth.

CloudSEK has identified more than 2,500 organisations that may have been potentially affected by a major AI supply chain incident involving LiteLLM in March 2026, with approximately 434,000 automated software-development pipelines linked to the exposure. The potentially affected organisations span critical industries including technology, cybersecurity, banking and financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, consulting, logistics, and enterprise software, with high-confidence matches associated with major global organisations including NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics, Cisco Systems, Siemens, S&P Global, ServiceNow, Deloitte, Vodafone, X Corp, Zscaler, FedEx, Volkswagen, Thales and London Stock Exchange Group. The incident occurred after cybercriminal group Team PCP compromised LiteLLM, and malicious versions were reportedly available through the Python software repository PyPI for only around 40 minutes, yet CloudSEK's analysis identified approximately 434,000 CI/CD pipelines potentially connected to the exposure. Potentially accessible information included cloud credentials, source-code access, server keys, software-development secrets, AI API keys and other credentials that could give attackers access to critical business systems, and CloudSEK stresses that appearing in the dataset does not automatically mean an organisation was successfully breached but should be investigated urgently. CloudSEK has released a free exposure-checking tool to help organisations determine whether credentials or infrastructure associated with them appear in the identified dataset.

Salesforce is the better buy over ServiceNow right now, according to an analysis comparing the two agentic AI software stocks. Both companies have embraced agentic AI, with ServiceNow guiding for subscription revenue to reach at least $30 billion by 2030 and AI accounting for 30% of annual contract value by then, while Salesforce's Agentforce performed 3.8 billion discrete tasks in the first quarter of fiscal year 2027, up 111% from the prior quarter. However, ServiceNow trades at more than 56 times earnings with analysts projecting 24.6% average annual earnings growth, whereas Salesforce trades at just over 18 times earnings with 16.1% projected growth, offering a wider margin of safety. ServiceNow shares are nearly 60% below their high and Salesforce shares are about 57% off their high amid AI-fueled selling of software stocks.

Salesforce has secured a $1.6 billion, three-year contract with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The Missionforce platform will be used to modernize care and service delivery for more than 17 million veterans, focusing on AI-powered workflows, 24/7 care coordination, and secure cloud tools across the VA system. The contract extends an existing foothold into a single, unified Missionforce layer that touches scheduling, benefits processing, contact centers, and analytics across 170 medical centers and more than 1,100 outpatient clinics. The deal highlights how Salesforce is positioning Missionforce and Agentforce as full-workflow platforms in competition with suites from Microsoft, Oracle, and ServiceNow. Investors may watch how execution, security, and reliability develop over the three-year term, as these factors can influence Salesforce's role in future public sector and healthcare work.

U.S. stock indexes retreated as crude oil prices and bond yields climbed. The S&P 500 fell 0.13%, the Nasdaq 100 dropped 0.48%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average edged up 0.15%. WTI crude surged more than 2% to a six-week high after the U.S. and Iran downplayed peace prospects, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield to a two-month high of 4.65%. Software and cybersecurity stocks led the decline, with ServiceNow, Workday, Datadog, and Palantir Technologies down over 3%. Markets awaited Alphabet's earnings after the close for signs of returns on its artificial intelligence investments, as it plans to more than double capital spending to as much as $190 billion this year.