ServiceNow adds agent kill switches as enterprises battle AI governance crisis
16 Sources
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ServiceNow adds agent kill switches to AI control tower
ServiceNow acquisitions Veza and Traceloop join to monitor agents and AI workflows ServiceNow announced an expansion of its AI Control Tower, transforming what began last year as a governance dashboard into what the company now describes as a command center for managing AI assets across an entire
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NVIDIA and ServiceNow Partner on New Autonomous AI Agents for Enterprises
At ServiceNow Knowledge 2026, the companies are extending their collaboration to deliver governed autonomous agents to enterprises, from employee desktops to AI factories. Enterprise AI has learned to generate. It has learned to reason. Now companies are asking the next question: How should AI
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$96 billion giant ServiceNow doesn't see a 'SaaSpocalypse.' It sees the 'hard lift, heavy lifting' phase just beginning | Fortune
For the past four years, enterprise software conferences have been defined by a kind of competitive breathlessness: which company could announce the most AI agents, the boldest automation claims, the most mind-bending demos. At ServiceNow's Knowledge 2026, the company's two top customer-facing
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ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 - the whole darn thing
As FOMO shifts to FOMU (Fear Of Messing Up) and hinders the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), ServiceNow is promising to be the AI hall monitor and security guard, trying to become the mandatory layer through which enterprise AI must pass. ServiceNow's framing - that enterprises
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ServiceNow wants to be 'AI agent of agents' with Otto platform and AI tools
SaaS giant ServiceNow want to move from being the 'platform of platforms' to the 'AI agent of agents' with launch of Otto and wider AI suite. The Las Vegas-based software giant used its annual Knowledge conference to unveil a raft of AI-driven products it says will help enterprises move from AI
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ServiceNow bids to become the control tower for enterprise AI - SiliconANGLE
ServiceNow bids to become the control tower for enterprise AI ServiceNow Inc. today unveiled a broad expansion of its artificial intelligence platform, stressing governance, security and autonomous execution as foundational requirements for enterprise AI adoption. The announcements center on
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ServiceNow just unveiled an AI workforce that can run your entire company: 'Enterprises need AI that senses, decides, and securely acts' | Fortune
ServiceNow used its biggest annual stage to make one sweeping argument: the era of AI as a helper is over. The era of AI as a worker has begun. At Knowledge 2026, held this week at the Venetian Expo Center in Las Vegas, the enterprise software company -- valued at roughly $95 billion and
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ServiceNow's Nick Tzitzon - 'The AI mess will land with IT. We have that history and will solve this for the whole enterprise'
Nick Tzitzon is Vice Chairman at ServiceNow, a position that spans customer relationships, market strategy. Tzitzon has been in the enterprise software business for a long time and he's an executive that has the institutional memory that is valuable during times of disruption. I sat down with
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ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 - beyond pilots: EMEA customers on AI at scale
ServiceNow opened Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas this week with an expanded AI Control Tower and a push to bring its Autonomous Workforce into every major enterprise function. Big platform announcements are one thing, but customer validation is always what diginomica seeks to secure. With that in
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Partners Tout ServiceNow's Innovation Engine: 'Beginning To Unlock The Age Of AI'
'I think [Service Now's expanded capabilities are] going to bring a level of AI capability down to the lowest-level operators and users in the platform, and in doing so, it's going to foster more innovation and more acceptance of these things. We see this as really beginning to unlock the age of
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Knowledge 2026 - CEO Bill McDermott was playing chess last year. Now he says ServiceNow manages everyone else's board
Last year at Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told me his company was "playing chess, not checkers." I took that to mean a game of strategic patience - ServiceNow thinking several moves ahead while competitors reacted to the every latest update in the generative AI boom. He also
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ServiceNow's AI Control Tower: Full-Stack Governance for the Enterprise
AI-native experiences, voice, and intelligent approvals show customers where AI drives the most value and embeds directly into the flow of work Today, at ServiceNow's annual customer and partner event, Knowledge 2026, ServiceNow, the AI control tower for business reinvention, expanded its AI
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ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 - Standard Chartered, Hitachi Energy and State of Hawaii on why governing AI agents matters more than building them
ServiceNow opened its annual Knowledge conference in Las Vegas this week with a pair of major platform announcements - an expanded AI Control Tower and a push with its Autonomous Workforce into every major enterprise function. But vendor strategy is one thing - what customers are actually
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ServiceNow expands AI agent governance through deeper integration with Microsoft
ServiceNow today announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with Microsoft that brings order to the chaos of AI agent sprawl. The partnership includes a deepened product integration between ServiceNow AI Control Tower and Microsoft Agent 365, extending AI Control Tower's existing
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Knowledge 2026 - CEO Bill McDermott says AI intelligence is commoditizing, but chaos is coming
ServiceNow today announced an expansion of its AI Control Tower and Autonomous Workforce products, where it outlined how the platform's AI execution and governance capabilities are extending into every business function. The company's acquisition strategy in recent months is now showing up
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ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 - AI Control Tower expands, Autonomous Workforce reaches every function, and the acquisition strategy starts to add up
ServiceNow has announced an expansion of its AI platform at its annual user conference, Knowledge, in Las Vegas this week - with the AI Control Tower and its Autonomous Workforce seeing significant updates. The push with autonomous AI into every major enterprise function, together with new
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ServiceNow transformed its AI Control Tower into an enterprise-wide command center for managing AI assets, introducing agent kill switches and governance tools to address what executives call an AI chaos crisis. At Knowledge 2026, the company unveiled partnerships with NVIDIA and new autonomous capabilities, positioning itself as the central governing layer for enterprise AI across competing platforms.
ServiceNow Expands AI Control Tower to Combat Enterprise AI Chaos
ServiceNow has transformed its AI Control Tower from a governance dashboard into what the company describes as an enterprise-wide command center for managing AI assets, introducing capabilities that include agent kill switches to address what executives are calling a governance crisis in enterprise AI. The expanded platform, shipping as part of ServiceNow's Australia release and unveiled at Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas, now operates across five areas: discovery, observation, governance, security, and measurement
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Source: CXOToday
The urgency behind these announcements reflects a shift in enterprise priorities. Paul Fipps, ServiceNow's president of global customer operations, shared two stark examples during a standing-room-only customer panel: a CTO at a large financial services company who built 30 production-grade AI agents but couldn't deploy any because he couldn't answer basic questions about what they had access to, and a healthcare CIO who canceled 900 AI pilots because he couldn't govern them
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. These stories illustrate what ServiceNow executives describe as "AI chaos" - the result of enterprises spending two years racing to buy and test tools, spinning up pilots, and building agents without adequate controls .Agent Kill Switches and Real-Time Security Response
The AI Control Tower now includes automated security responses that can detect and neutralize threats without human intervention. During a media briefing, Nenshad Bardoliwalla, group vice president of AI products at ServiceNow, demonstrated how the system detected a prompt injection attack on a pricing agent, identified malicious instructions hidden inside order payloads, mapped the blast radius of affected systems using access graph technology, and presented agent kill switches to disable the compromised agent
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.Two recent acquisitions underpin this security architecture. Veza, acquired in December, contributes an access graph that maps over 30 billion fine-grained permissions across every identity and access path - whether belonging to humans, machines, or AI agents
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. Traceloop, acquired in March, provides deep AI observability by tracking every LLM call running in the system, delivering continuous runtime monitoring with live alerts to replace the periodic manual audits most enterprises still rely on1
.The platform now reaches beyond ServiceNow's own ecosystem with 30 new enterprise connectors spanning Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, along with enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, and Workday
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. This cross-platform approach positions ServiceNow as the central governing layer for enterprise AI, even for customers using competing platforms - a strategic move that could prove decisive as organizations evaluate which vendors control their AI infrastructure .NVIDIA Partnership Delivers Governed Autonomous AI Agents
ServiceNow announced an expanded collaboration with NVIDIA to deliver governed autonomous AI agents across enterprise environments. The partnership introduces Project Arc, a long-running, self-evolving autonomous desktop agent designed for knowledge workers, including developers, IT teams, and administrators
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. Unlike standalone agents, Project Arc connects natively to the ServiceNow AI Platform through Action Fabric to bring governance, auditability, and workflow automation intelligence to every action.
Source: NVIDIA
Project Arc uses NVIDIA OpenShell, an open source secure runtime for developing and deploying autonomous agents in sandboxed, policy-governed environments
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. With OpenShell, enterprises can define what an agent can see, which tools it can use, and how each action is contained. Jon Sigler, executive vice president and general manager of AI Platform at ServiceNow, described Project Arc as "the next step in our ongoing collaboration with NVIDIA, bringing autonomous execution to the desktop"2
.The partnership also addresses the economics of scaling AI agents. As agents become long-running and always-on, token economics become central to enterprise AI viability. NVIDIA's Blackwell platform delivers more than 50x greater token output per watt than NVIDIA Hopper, resulting in nearly 35x lower cost per million tokens
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. For enterprises running agents across millions of workflows, this efficiency translates directly to operational feasibility.Related Stories
ServiceNow Positions Itself as AI Agent of Agents
CEO Bill McDermott framed the company's evolution in ambitious terms at Knowledge 2026, describing ServiceNow as moving from a "platform of platforms" to what he called the "AI agent of agents"
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. The company is targeting more than $30 billion in subscription revenues by 2030, with AI expected to account for over 30 percent of annual contract value5
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Source: diginomica
The centerpiece of this vision is the Otto platform, a new enterprise AI experience platform that brings together conversational AI, autonomous workflows, and enterprise search into a single interface
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. ServiceNow also introduced Action Fabric, an open integration layer that opens the company's full workflow engine to external AI agents through a generally available Model Context Protocol server1
. Agents built on Claude, Copilot, or custom platforms can now trigger governed enterprise actions - not just read and write data, but execute the flows, playbooks, approval chains, and catalog requests that ServiceNow customers have built over years.Amit Zavery, ServiceNow's president, COO, and chief product officer, emphasized the shift in customer expectations: "The era of sidecar AI is over. Customers don't want to cobble pieces together -- they want outcomes"
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. The Context Engine, a proprietary layer built on top of LLMs from partners like Anthropic, Google's Gemini, and NVIDIA's NIM, addresses the probabilistic nature of large language models by providing contextual guardrails they need to function reliably inside a business3
.Addressing SaaSpocalypse Fears and the Path Forward
The announcements come against the backdrop of what has been dubbed the "SaaSpocalypse" - speculation that AI agents capable of automating workflows end-to-end could make sprawling SaaS platforms obsolete
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. The concern has rattled investors and sent valuations swinging across the enterprise software sector, including ServiceNow's market cap, which hovers around $96 billion3
.Fipps pushed back on this narrative directly: "The fear is that somehow a startup will use a large language model, put a lightweight wrapper around it, and ServiceNow will sit on its hands for the next 10 years... It just makes no sense"
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. The evidence, he noted, is that 25,000 customers showed up at Knowledge 2026, the biggest crowd in the conference's history3
.ServiceNow said it uses the AI Control Tower internally to manage over 1,600 AI assets and tracked half a billion dollars in cumulative AI value from internal use cases in 2025
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. The platform now includes cost tracking and ROI dashboards to give finance teams visibility into model spend, tracking token consumption across providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google so customers can predict costs and tie spending to business outcomes1
. Bardoliwalla noted that runaway model spend ranks among the biggest pain points enterprises currently face as they scale AI deployments1
.The question facing enterprises is whether AI agent risk reaches a threshold quickly enough for ServiceNow to capture the governance market before competitors build comparable capabilities . By positioning itself as the governance layer for AI agents built on competing platforms, ServiceNow aims to become the controlling platform even for customers that don't buy its AI products - a strategic position that could determine which vendors ultimately control enterprise AI infrastructure and which agents get deployed in production environments.
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