LAS VEGAS — ServiceNow Inc. kicked off its annual artificial intelligence (AI) conference in Las Vegas Tuesday as it has in previous years — with a fusillade of product announcements, partnerships and customer stories.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based software giant started the Knowledge 25 show with news that its ServiceNow AI Platform now has “the ability to put any AI, any agent, any model to work across the enterprise” through new AI agents. The company shared details of more ingrained strategic partnerships with NVIDIA Corp., Microsoft Corp., Google and Oracle Corp. on enterprise-wide orchestration. Additionally, it outlined customer-service deployments with Aptiv, the NHL, Visa Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott christened the launch of AI Control Tower, a centralized command center for any ServiceNow and third-party AI agent, model and workflow on a single unified platform. “We want to unleash you as a business… because in the enterprise, we are the only ones doing (AI),” he said before a standing-room-only gathering of several thousand at the Venetian Resort hotel. ServiceNow executives peg the AI agent market as a $5 billion to $41 billion opportunity by 2030.
AI Control Tower optimizes AI investments and ensures seamless integration into customers’ enterprise strategies. In addition to AI Control Tower, ServiceNow also introduced AI Agent Fabric, a solution that delivers new levels of agent-to-agent and multi-model communication and collaboration. Its partners include Accenture, Adobe Inc., Google Cloud, Box Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., IBM Corp. and Microsoft.
“People are excited, not scared, by AI agents,” Amanda Joslin, senior director of AI agent products at ServiceNow, said in an interview after the keynote. “Some agents may be stronger than others, and AI Control Tower can pluck them out.”
ServiceNow also trotted out CRM AI Agents, a suite of specialized agents designed to autonomously orchestrate and complete tasks across the customer lifecycle — from selling and fulfilling to servicing. CRM is the company’s fastest-growing workflow business with annual contract value of $1.4 billion, up 30% year-over-year.
“Let’s face it, CRM is broken,” Amit Zavery, chief product officer and chief operating officer at ServiceNow, said during the keynote. He said it is often held together with twine and chewing gum.
“As AI agents proliferate across enterprises, coordinating their work becomes as critical and complex as leading human employees, and companies need new tools to direct this new digital workforce,” Zavery said in an earlier statement announcing the news. “With AI Control Tower, businesses can oversee AI work forces in the same way the human workforce is managed, ensuring each agent is aligned, coordinated, optimized, and delivering impact at scale.”
Embedded across all work flows in the ServiceNow AI Platform, AI Control Tower centralizes strategy, governance, performance and management across an AI ecosystem while driving enterprise-grade compliance and accountability.
By 2028, enterprises using AI governance platforms will achieve 30% higher customer trust ratings and 25% better regulatory compliance scores than their competitors, signaling an increased benefit to AI orchestration at the enterprise level, according to market researcher Gartner.
“The research Futurum conducted late last year with enterprise IT decision makers revealed that seeing clear ROI from technology investments was the leading driver of opening up additional budget for enterprise applications,” Keith Kirkpatrick, research director at The Futurum Group, said. “ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower is being positioned as a tool to address this ROI issue, and will also help enterprises confirm whether AI agents are actually helping employees do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.”
ServiceNow also expanded its partnership with NVIDIA to build intelligent AI agents across the enterprise, including Apriel Nemotron 15B, a new high-performance reasoning model that evaluates relationships, applies rules, and weighs goals. Special guest, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, appeared on stage near the end of the 90-minute keynote. It marked at least his third appearance at ServiceNow’s annual conference.
“Every company in the world needs AI agents,” Huang said.
Many enterprise customers may feel “overwhelmed and confused” by the sheer volume of AI agent options and the speed in which AI development is occurring — “seven to 10 times” that of cloud — but they are slowly plowing ahead, says Michael Park, senior vice president and global head of AI Go-To Market at ServiceNow, said in an interview.
Additionally, the company unveiled ServiceNow University, an AI upskilling program for individuals.
ServiceNow’s latest AI splurge comes the same day IBM Corp. belatedly made its claim with an ambitious suite of domain-specific AI agents, called watsonx Orchestrate. Big Blue also made available tools that let organizations build agents in minutes.
