ServiceNow Inc. on Wednesday unveiled an artificial intelligence (AI) agent platform with advanced automation and workflow tools to help customers design an agent or bot in an AI studio.
ServiceNow Studio is a AI-powered workspace where developers of any skill level can build and deploy applications and workflows.
IDC analyst Stephen Elliot called ServiceNow’s product a “big time innovation and productivity opportunity for customers” because it lets them design a agent in an AI studio. “This is where Moveworks is going to play a large role,” he said, alluding to ServiceNow’s $2.85 billion acquisition of AI assistant maker Moveworks on Monday.
“This is really about ease of use, adoption, and accelerating time to business value for ServiceNow agentic AI customers across various use cases,” Elliot, group vice president of market researcher IDC, said in an email. “It maps well to what ServiceNow has been doing. Moveworks also brings over 500 AI expert employees to ServiceNow. Moveworks has been in the space since they were founded in 2016, and they have over 300 customers.”
Jithin Bhasker, group vice president of product management of App Engine at ServiceNow, said the new product “isn’t about the front-office or the back-office, but every corner of the enterprise.”
“Agentic is only as good as data on the platform,” Bhasker said in an interview.
Keith Kirkpatrick, who covers agentic AI for The Futurum Group, said AI is “built directly” in the ServiceNow platform used by hundreds of enterprise customers, offering access to billions of records and millions of workflows. But to compete against Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce Inc., each of which has a large and loyal customer base, ServiceNow has to differentiate its offerings.
“The addition of additional search and AI functionality, such as the ones added through the acquisition of Moveworks, can also be viewed as a positive for the company, which needs to take a balanced approach to innovating internally and through acquisition in order to manage costs and ensure timely integration of new features,” Kirkpatrick wrote in a research note Thursday.
ServiceNow joins a group of tech giants — Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS and Cisco Systems Inc., to name a few — who in recent days laid out their agentic AI plans with products and services. Nearly all are motivated by customer demands and market research that show a surge in use.
The AI agent market is expected to balloon to $40 billion in 2029 from $5 billion in 2024, says AI agent researcher Mark Stansberry.
On Tuesday, OpenAI joined the party. In a blog post, the company said it was releasing its first set of building blocks that will “help developers and enterprises build useful and reliable agents.”
Indeed, more than 60% of digital workers are streamlining work with basic automation and using analytics to build customized dashboards to support business decisions, concludes the 2024 Gartner Digital Worker Survey.
SnapLogic’s AI survey, AI Agents: The Final Frontier of the Enterprise, offers even more compelling insights from 1,000 IT decision-makers in organizations with more than 250 employees.
It found 84% of decision makers trust AI agents more than humans and expect the autonomous agents to save on average 19 work hours weekly. What is more, 79% of IT planners intend to invest more than $1 million in AI agents next year, and 92% believe those agents will propel real business results within a year to 18 months. Companies are looking at launching at least a dozen new AI agents in the next year, and 79% call the technology a top priority for the next 12 months.
