Ema vs Moveworks (2026)

Two connector counts are given, 250+ prebuilt integrations and 1,000+ prebuilt connectors, without being reconciled or listed in full; the likeliest reading is applications against endpoints or actions, but Ema does not say. Named systems of record include Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, Workday and Snowflake, plus Teams and Slack.

Agents complete tasks end to end, reading documents, logs, data and policies for context and then acting across HR, ticketing and collaboration platforms, as in the published example of checking a customer record, drafting a reply, routing it and sending it within one run. Customers can build any other connector in minutes, so coverage is not limited to what Ema ships. Ema also offers its own inbound API for EmaFusion, and work can arrive through Teams, Slack and voice.

Sourceema.ai homepage Connect every system section with /blog EmaFusion postread 2026-09-12

Hundreds of named enterprise systems are connected under one layer, across seven classes, and the Assistant takes action in them, from resetting access to updating CRM records. Service desk and ITSM tools include ServiceNow, Jira, Freshservice, Ivanti Service Desk, BMC Helix Digital Workplace, ManageEngine and Cherwell. HR and finance cover Workday, Coupa, SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass and Oracle, and Salesforce covers CRM.

Identity and access providers include Ping Identity, Duo and BeyondTrust. Content and collaboration tools are Box, Confluence, Quip, Google Drive, LumApps, Igloo, Interact, Axero and Brightspot. Mail, calendar and chat cover Microsoft Outlook, Exchange Online, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Chat and 8x8, and knowledge and data sources include Databricks, Upland RightAnswers, ComAround and BrainStorm QuickHelp, with DocuSign for signatures.

The Assistant is linked to thousands of action plugins and resolves requests end to end, resetting access and provisioning tools for IT, updating CRM data for sales, and automating expenses, purchase requests and approvals for finance. Those are authenticated writes into systems Moveworks does not own, and the Reasoning Engine chooses each tool call at run time rather than having it wired in advance.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/ai-assistant and /platform/integrations; moveworks.com/us/en/platform/integrationsread 2026-09-12

The Generative Workflow Engine is Ema's orchestrator, and it lets any team create AI agents conversationally without writing code. It does not follow a fixed script. It interprets a request, breaks it into steps and generates the workflow to carry them out across systems, adjusting as results come back. A customer inquiry, for example, becomes five steps across three systems, reading the message, checking the customer record, drafting a reply, routing it for approval and sending it, with a person approving in the middle.

Customers work in four phases, Build, which goes from plain-language intent to a working AI employee in minutes, then Optimize, Personalize and Scale. Ema says the platform is engineered for thousands of workflows and millions of runs, and its employee experience suite has been rolled out across 200,000+ employees. AI Employees collaborate with both people and other agents, and configurable approval chains let a workflow pause on a person and resume. Retry and failure handling are not described.

Sourceema.ai homepage One platform every workflow section, with the Ema listing on Microsoft Marketplace and /blog AI Employee Builder postread 2026-09-12

The Reasoning Engine plans each request at run time, breaking it into steps and choosing the tools that carry them out across enterprise systems. It is an agentic AI system that orchestrates enterprise-ready LLMs and built-in tools for AI agents.

It identifies the employee's overall goal, works out the steps needed and breaks complex issues into smaller parts, then selects the tools for each, automating processes with many steps under strict security protocols and real time governance. Moveworks describes this as automation across the enterprise that plans, executes and adapts as it goes, and the Assistant handles complex requests in depth with extended thinking. Plans are built at run time, not coded in advance.

An employee asks, the Reasoning Engine plans, and agents built or installed through Agent Studio and the Marketplace carry out the work, while admins govern from a central console and plugins act in the systems of record. Developers can extend the sequence by building and deploying agents that plan, reason and execute securely across enterprise systems, and one example covers IT, HR and finance in a single conversational request. ServiceNow, which acquired Moveworks, adds orchestration across departments on its own platform.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/reasoning-engine, /platform and /platform/ai-assistantread 2026-09-12

Work arrives through Teams, Slack, voice and more, through what Ema calls one digital front door, alongside 250+ prebuilt integrations. The employee experience suite reaches a workforce of 200,000+. Ema calls itself an always on builder and claims thousands of workflows and millions of runs, but scheduled runs, cron cadences, event subscriptions, webhook triggers and conditional firing are not described.

Sourceema.ai homepage Connect every system sectionread 2026-09-12

The Assistant reaches employees without being asked, through nudges and broadcasts, on web, chat and mobile among other surfaces, in over 100 languages. It anticipates what comes next and sends proactive nudges for recurring or time-sensitive tasks. Employee comms, a separate capability, lets internal communications teams broadcast timely, targeted messages to all or some users so they never miss a reminder to act. Each broadcast is a scheduled send to a chosen audience.

Employees can reach the AI Assistant on web, chat or company portals, as well as intranets, browsers and mobile. The Conversations API embeds the Assistant in applications Moveworks does not own, and a dedicated AI Assistant on web ships as its own release. The Reasoning Engine acts on requests from any of these surfaces, and nudges key on recurring and time sensitive conditions.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/ai-assistant, /platform and /platform/internal-communicationread 2026-09-12

Answers draw on the customer's enterprise context, not generic templates. Ema uses organizational context and policy-based reasoning to personalize each response, handling differences by region, employee band and department, so an HR agent can give a French employee the French leave policy.

That context comes through 250+ prebuilt integrations, including Workday, ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce and Snowflake, and the platform reads documents, logs, data and policies before acting. RBAC and ABAC permissions down to individual actions limit what an answer can draw on. No maintained store, index, knowledge graph, sync model, freshness or citation behavior is described.

Sourceema.ai/employee-experience and homepage Personalize sectionread 2026-09-12

Answers come from the customer's own connected systems, filtered to what each asker may see, and a dedicated authoring product keeps that corpus up to date. Enterprise Search gives instant, context-aware answers across business apps, tailored to role, region, language and access level without relying on exact keywords or rigid filters.

The AI Assistant connects to the systems and content sources the customer uses, and a grounded knowledge system ties answers to the most up-to-date and trustworthy documentation available, with fact verification among the AI safeguards. Knowledge Studio generates grounded knowledge articles to fill content gaps and improve self service for FAQs, so the content grows over time, with gaps found from what employees actually ask. Retrieval respects permissions, so two people asking the same question can get different results. This is a retrieval structure over the customer's own estate that lasts between runs and scales far past any context window.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/enterprise-search, /platform/ai-assistant, /platform/ai-knowledge-management and /platform/securityread 2026-09-12

Continuous analysis and auto-refinement are promised so that performance compounds over time, and Ema says its agentic systems keep learning from their current and past environments and get better with time. That learning is built into the product, not state anyone can retrieve. Whatever is kept is scoped by RBAC and ABAC permissions down to individual actions, with single tenant isolation up to fully air gapped.

No retention period, expiry, purge route or deletion path for agent state is stated, though a Data Processing Addendum and Privacy Center are linked, and there is no way to read or edit what an agent has kept, since the only API covers EmaFusion, the model layer. The immutable audit trail does keep every agent decision, tied to each run, but it is a record, not working memory.

Sourceema.ai homepage Optimize and Trusted by design sections, with /blog EmaFusion postread 2026-09-12

The Assistant uses four kinds of memory, and none is a lasting store per user, since conversation context is cleared every 24 hours. Semantic memory is knowledge of the content, entities and terminology the organization uses, shared across the organization rather than kept per user.

Episodic memory is billed as recalling past conversations with the user, but it is defined as awareness of the current conversation, meaning what questions and answers have been exchanged and what decisions have already been made. Context is automatically cleared every 24 hours from the reasoner, so anything older than a day is gone.

Procedure memory is knowledge of the tasks that can be performed and the business processes or rules to follow, meaning the plugin catalog and the customer's configured rules. Working memory is awareness of which operations are in progress and at what stage, with a framework that tracks variables such as business object IDs, which is run state inside a single execution. The context window is assembled fresh on each turn and the engine reads everything every turn, so nothing is carried in from an earlier store.

Sourcehelp.moveworks.com/agent-studio/agentic-ai/memory-constructs, /assistant-behavior-framework and /agentic-reasoning-engine/how-the-reasoning-engine-worksread 2026-09-13

Every agent decision is captured in an immutable, traceable audit trail, with configurable human-in-the-loop approval chains. The customer decides where each approval sits, and a chain can have several approvers in sequence. Approval is part of the workflow itself, so in Ema's example of reading a message, checking the customer record, drafting a reply, routing it for approval and sending it, the run pauses on a person at step four and resumes before the send.

RBAC and ABAC governance sets permission levels from the organization down to individual actions, so an agent's authority is capped per operation and stays bounded after approval. PII detection and redaction strips sensitive data before it reaches a public model. AI Employees work alongside people at checkpoints, and a centralized agentic control plane lets teams monitor, govern and audit them. Escalation when an approver does not respond, timeouts and override audits are not described.

Sourceema.ai homepage Trusted by design section with the Ema listing on Microsoft Marketplaceread 2026-09-12

Guardrails surround what the agents do. A content moderation system filters harmful or inappropriate content, prompt protection guards against prompt injection attacks, and query risk assessment identifies and mitigates risks in user queries. Fact verification and identity validation add further checks, with authentication and authorization handled by deterministic systems and source-of-truth methods rather than LLMs. The Reasoning Engine operates within scoped action boundaries enforced at the infrastructure level.

Each of these limits what the agent may do, but there is no person in the loop. There is no approval queue, checkpoint or escalation on a risk threshold, and no human role is named, so no one signs off before the Assistant resets access, provisions a tool, updates CRM data or completes a purchase request, all actions it takes end to end. Enterprise permissions and scoped access govern who can reach what, and governance from ServiceNow belongs to the acquirer's platform.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/security and /resources/blog/why-autonomous-ai-agents-need-new-enterprise-security-modelread 2026-09-12

Ema holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 42001, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27701, CSA STAR, EU AI Act and GDPR certifications, with NIST also listed and a trust center at trust.ema.ai. ISO 42001 is the AI management system standard, covering how a platform governs its models, and together with EU AI Act alignment and ISO 27701 for privacy information management it addresses the specific risks of autonomous agents.

Customers control access through RBAC and ABAC governance, with permission levels from the organization down to individual actions, which bounds an agent mid run. PII detection and redaction removes sensitive data before it reaches a public model, which matters because EmaFusion routes across a hundred external models.

Ema also publishes a Data Processing Addendum, a Privacy Policy and a Privacy Center, describes its encryption as top tier, and offers customizable private models, on premises and air gapped delivery, an immutable audit trail and configurable approval chains.

Sourceema.ai homepage Trusted by design section, /employee-experience, /blog EmaFusion post and the Ema listing on Microsoft Marketplaceread 2026-09-12

Moveworks publishes ten certifications with their scopes and auditor marks. The ISO/IEC set covers 42001 for AI management, 27001, 27017, 27018 and 27701, SOC 2 Type 2 spans security, confidentiality, availability and privacy, CSA STAR Level 2 is held at Gold, and FedRAMP, GDPR and CCPA complete the list.

Controls cover access to how user data is processed and stored, encryption at rest and in transit, masking of sensitive PII, and identity validation that uses deterministic systems and source-of-truth methods for authentication and authorization, securing access to systems and data without LLMs. The design follows zero trust, never trust and always verify, with least privilege access and responses scoped to each person's permissions.

Assurance work includes application security reviews, vulnerability scanning and external penetration testing, red team exercises against enterprise and AI systems, and a HackerOne bug bounty open to all researchers at every severity level. The certification reports sit behind a Whistic profile reached through a demo request or an account executive. Security that ServiceNow's trust and controls add belongs to the acquirer.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/security and /platform/ai-assistantread 2026-09-12

Every agent decision is captured and traceable in an immutable audit trail, a record that cannot be edited after the fact. The trail follows the agent's decisions, not every user action, and lets the path of a run be reconstructed.

A centralized agentic control plane lets a team monitor, govern and audit every AI application across the enterprise, which matters when fifty plus AI employees run in parallel. RBAC and ABAC permissions down to individual actions tie each action to an identity.

The trail's retention period, export or query options, whether it captures reasoning or only decisions, and whether it depends on the plan are not stated.

Sourceema.ai homepage Trusted by design section, with the Ema listing on Microsoft Marketplaceread 2026-09-12

Every system access and data event is logged for full visibility and can be reviewed to support compliance and incident response. The Reasoning Engine works within scoped action boundaries enforced at the infrastructure level, with detailed audit trails for compliance, so the agent's actions leave a retained, reviewable record.

Reasoning can be inspected per interaction, not only in aggregate, because the AI Assistant shows its work and a reader can follow how a request became an action. Employee Experience Insights gives program owners tools to identify issues, track metrics and improve the assistant with governance and analytics, and a self service admin console centralizes configuration and monitoring. Analytics that ServiceNow adds belong to the acquirer.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/ai-assistant and /resources/blog/why-autonomous-ai-agents-need-new-enterprise-security-modelread 2026-09-12

Customers can deploy Ema in their own cloud, on premises or in an air gapped environment, running it entirely in their own environment and fully isolated when needed. Full isolation means no egress, so the private and customer supplied models Ema offers can carry the workload alone. Ema calls itself the only agentic platform that supports air gapped deployment. There is no published region list or residency choice for the hosted service, and what an air gapped install leaves out is not described.

Sourceema.ai homepage Trusted by design section, /employee-experience, and the Ema listing on Microsoft Marketplaceread 2026-09-12

Hosting is on AWS across seven named regions, with a commitment that customer data never leaves its region and a dedicated GovCloud environment for federal clients. The regions are US Commercial, US GovCloud and Canada in North America, EU Commercial and the UK in Europe, and Australia and Japan in Asia Pacific. All customer data remains in its region and is never transferred elsewhere. Moveworks GovCloud is a dedicated, secure environment built for government agencies and federal clients, backed by FedRAMP authorization. There is no on premises deployment.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/security and /solutions/ai-for-federal-governmentread 2026-09-12

Enterprises can deploy from Ema's library of 50+ pre-built AI employees or build their own with the Generative Workflow Engine. Each is a role that stands alone, so removing the finance AI employee leaves the recruiting one untouched.

Ema groups them by function, Employee Experience, Customer Experience, Finance Operations, Sales and Marketing, Professional Services and Intelligent Actions, with vertical pages for Healthcare and Insurance that work as market configurations. The employee experience offering adapts by region, employee band and department through policy based reasoning.

Ema Recruiter is marketed as a named AI employee, and the platform is sold as AI employees for HR, IT and finance. The library size is given as a count, not listed in full.

SourceEma listing on Microsoft Marketplace, with ema.ai homepage and solution navigationread 2026-09-12

An AI Agent Marketplace at marketplace.moveworks.com offers a curated library of ready-to-use, pre-built, production-proof AI agents that are customizable and free to install, with quick connector setup and MCP. Each agent does work once selected, installs on its own through a stated path with no added license, and can be removed without affecting the rest.

Next to the catalog, Agent Studio lets developers build and deploy AI agents that plan, reason and securely execute actions across enterprise systems, and Knowledge Studio, Quick GPT and Brief Me ship as separately named units. Specialized AI Assistants, which create expert agents, are marked coming soon.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/ai-assistant, /platform/ai-agent-builder and marketplace.moveworks.comread 2026-09-12

EmaFusion combines 100+ models in real time. A small language model blends outputs from public, private, specialized and open source LLMs for each task instead of picking one, balancing accuracy, cost and latency by task complexity. Customers can bring their own models (BYOM), and customizable private models are offered too.

If one model has an outage or slows down, EmaFusion switches to others automatically, with no lock-in. Ema promises no tokenmaxxing alongside outcome based pricing and claims EmaFusion beats the best single model at up to 20x lower cost, claims that have not been independently audited. PII redaction strips sensitive data before it reaches a public model.

Sourceema.ai homepage EmaFusion section with /blog EmaFusion postread 2026-09-12

Several language models are routed by the Reasoning Engine on the customer's behalf, but no provider is named and no choice is offered. The engine orchestrates enterprise-ready LLMs and built-in tools, so routing is plural, done by Moveworks and disclosed. Safeguards protect the LLMs against hallucination, data poisoning and prompt injection, and no customer data is used to train global generative models. Moveworks historically ran on its own reasoning stack.

There is no model picker, admin setting or bring your own key path, no model assigned per agent and no individual provider named. Orchestration is Moveworks' decision, made per task, and Moveworks presents that as value on day one with no model tuning, prompt chaining or advanced engineering required. Support for any model on the ServiceNow AI Platform belongs to the acquirer.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform, /platform/ai-assistant and /platform/securityread 2026-09-12

Ema's one API covers EmaFusion, the model fusion layer, so customers can route inference through Ema from their own stack or use Ema's built-for-humans UI. Nothing says the AI Employees, the Generative Workflow Engine or the agents themselves can be called from outside. There is no endpoint reference, authentication model, SDK, OpenAPI specification, CLI or developer host, no docs site beyond the FAQs at support.ema.ai, and no MCP server. The 250+ prebuilt integrations and 1,000+ prebuilt connectors reach outward into the customer's systems and do not make the platform callable.

Sourceema.ai/blog EmaFusion post with the homepage and site navigationread 2026-09-12

Outside applications can call the Assistant through the Conversations API, which extends it into another application, portal or intranet. Developer resources sit on four hosts, with a Developer Hub at moveworks.com/us/en/developers, help documentation at help.moveworks.com that includes a Moveworks Setup admin reference, a community at community.moveworks.com and training at academy.moveworks.com.

Agent Studio is a build surface where developers build and deploy agents and plugins that act across enterprise systems, and the Assistant is linked to thousands of action plugins. MCP ships as part of quick connector setup on the AI Agent Marketplace, so an outside assistant can reach Moveworks. The Conversations API is described on a product page, and Moveworks names no public reference for it.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/ai-assistant, /platform/ai-agent-builder and the developer estate linked in the site navigation; moveworks.com/us/en/developersread 2026-09-12

A live optimization loop runs on Ema's own AI Employees, listed as Optimize, continuous analysis and auto-refinement so performance compounds over time, one of four platform phases beside Build, Personalize and Scale.

There is no test environment, sandbox, dry run, holdout, A/B comparison, versioning or rollback of an agent configuration, and no score, pass rate or before and after comparison a customer can inspect, so customers cannot see what changed, why, or whether it improved.

Ema's agentic systems keep learning from their current and past environments, and the immutable audit trail records what an agent did, not whether it was right.

Sourceema.ai homepage One platform every workflow section with /blog EmaFusion postread 2026-09-12

Output is checked for accuracy at run time and admins get tools to tune the Assistant, but there is no way to test a change before employees see it. Fact verification improves the accuracy of generated information as a standing safeguard, alongside query risk assessment and a content moderation filter, all of which check what the agent produced.

Around it sits a tuning loop for the Assistant, as Employee Experience Insights lets program owners identify issues, track metrics and improve the assistant, and cutting-edge optimization tools let admins track metrics, resolve issues and make enhancements. There is no test environment, sandbox, holdout or simulation, and no versioning or scored result to compare.

Fact verification gives the customer no verdict to compare across versions, and nothing runs a new or edited agent against a known set before it reaches employees, though these agents reset access and provision tools.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/security, /platform and /platform/ai-assistantread 2026-09-12

Every path in and out of Ema is a connector or an API, with 250+ prebuilt integrations and 1,000+ prebuilt connectors into Workday, ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce and Snowflake, and building anything else in minutes means adding connectors, not driving screens. A third party redesigning its interface does not affect it.

No hosted or local browser, desktop session, remote or local computer control, RPA, recorder or page extension is described. Voice is a channel for reaching an AI Employee, not an agent operating an interface, and running Ema in the customer's environment is an isolated installation, not computer use. Ema sells AI Employees for HR, IT and finance in regulated enterprises, where the work runs against systems of record that have APIs.

Sourceema.ai homepage, /employee-experience and the Ema listing on Microsoft Marketplaceread 2026-09-12

The browser is a place the Assistant lives, not an interface it drives. Browsers are among the access surfaces alongside chat, intranets and service portals, and an AI Assistant on web ships as a destination employees open. On every path the employee opens the surface and types, and the Assistant answers and acts. Actions run through code, as the Assistant is linked to thousands of action plugins and the Reasoning Engine selects the right tools across hundreds of connected systems.

Resetting access, provisioning tools, updating CRM records and submitting purchase requests all run through those connectors and the Conversations API. Nothing clicks, fills in or advances a page, so a change in a target application's markup has nothing to break. There is no hosted or local browser session, desktop control, remote or local computer use, or RPA fallback.

Sourcemoveworks.com/us/en/platform/ai-assistant, /platform and /platform/ai-agent-builderread 2026-09-12