ServiceNow Unveils AI Agent Orchestrator: A New Era of Enterprise Automation

Unleashing an army of agents, ServiceNow graduates from system of engagement to system of agents

ServiceNow has just announced an army of thousands of AI-powered agents, along with an orchestrator to co-ordinate their actions, and a no-code Agent Studio to create, customize and manage agents throughout their lifecycle. It has also unveiled deeper partnerships with Google Cloud, Oracle, Visa and SoftwareOne. The new capabilities will be available from March to customers who subscribe to its Now Assist generative AI assistant. These announcements build on last September's Xanadu release of its underlying Now platform. The recent acquisition of Cuein, which analyzes conversation data, adds dynamic monitoring of the conversations agents are having with employees and customers. The news marks a strong debut by ServiceNow as a platform delivering agentic AI for the enterprise. The company believes its existing reach across a range of enterprise applications and automations gives it an unrivaled position to bring autonomous agents to processes throughout an organization. Dorit Zilbershot, VP of AI Experiences and Innovation, says: You look across our customers, they have 700 million digital artifacts, and they have 50 million automations. Think about anything -- reset password, returning a laptop, asking for a vacation -- all of those we already have, and our customers already have the information. Our AI agents can tap into that immediately and understand the organizational policies and regulations and processes on day one. But we also understand that we need to come with turnkey solutions for our customers. So we are working towards thousands of AI agents that will be available across the enterprise, being able to touch every corner of the enterprise... With the 20 years' experience that we have in the ServiceNow platform, we're able to understand the different workflows that customers need -- every customer need in the enterprise -- and be able to leverage that. The job of co-ordinating the actions of all these agents falls to the AI Agent Orchestrator, which acts as a 'control tower' so that agents can share information and hand off tasks as they complete more complex workflows. She goes on: It really enables inter-agent communication and centralized coordination. Especially in the enterprise, you don't want those AI agents to just run loose. You want to have this supervisor that is able to understand what is going on, what were the tasks, and how to make sure that all these AI agents work in collaboration towards a single goal. AI agents, with the AI Agent Orchestrator, can start sharing information with each other, hand off tasks, regardless of where the process started, making sure that they can manage both simple workflows as well as very complex workflows. As well as the library of off-the-shelf agents -- to which partners including the likes of Accenture, Cognizant, and Deloitte will add many more of their own -- customers will be able to create and deploy custom agents using the no-code Agent Studio. Using natural language prompts, users will be able to describe the processes they want to build, the role of the AI agents, and the outcome they want to achieve, and the platform then guides them through creating, testing, and activating the required agents. It also helps manage the entire lifecycle, monitoring the performance of agents in use, and on to retirement. This in-flight monitoring helps guard against a proliferation of agents that might duplicate functions or add unnecessary complexity, as Zilbershot explains: You need something that governs and is able to provide recommendations for optimizations, to make sure that customers don't just build AI agents that may do the same things or may be conflicting with each other. We're actually able to manage [and] maintain the health of the system. Like most of its rivals, ServiceNow believes that AI assistants such as its own Now Assist offer only limited productivity gains compared to what is possible with autonomous agents. Speaking to diginomica's Derek Du Preez last year, Pat Casey, CTO and EVP of DevOps at ServiceNow said: If you look at the basket of stuff that people are selling and have available today, whether it's us, competitors, other industry players, it is probably more in the 10 to 20 percent productivity range. For instance: text to code, text to complex object, summarizing tickets, direct question-answer on search portals. But it's not absolutely game changing. If you look at what I'll call the next generation stuff, where you're seeing people, like us, start to dip a toe into a market with these agentic agents -- those are, if we get them right, they're independent agents able to do material business things. But for agents to provide effective automation -- especially when working with an orchestrator across complex workflows -- there needs to be a consistent mapping of the existing landscape of data and processes within the enterprise. In ServiceNow's case, much of this mapping already exists in the automations it has built for customers over the years and the underlying CMDB (Configuration Management DataBase). The Xanadu update to the platform adds important new information to that mapping, in the form of a Knowledge Graph. Zilbershot explains: The CMDB is one of our differentiators, and it's one of the most powerful things that we have in the platform. The ability to connect between services and policies is what resonates with our customers. Now [with the Knowledge Graph] we're adding the ability to also look at users and look at historical actions on top of that, tying all of this together. In a way, you can think about it as the evolution of the CMDB, or this sitting on top of the CMDB, but it's making it a lot richer by putting the person aspect as part of it as well. Reliable data -- as well as strong access controls -- is another essential building block for successful agent automations. This is often a challenge when dealing with the unstructured data in knowledge management systems. She comments: When you have this data and when you have the actions, and you have the engagement -- the fact that we have all three layers positions us to really understand beyond the, 'Here's a knowledge article, you need to look into that,' but actually understand, 'Okay, when was that knowledge article used? How was it used? When it was used, what was the feedback? And was there a follow-up question?' And really look at the full spectrum of the interaction to be able to build the best AI agent to do this autonomously. The acquisition of Cuein contributes some of this context. It is able to analyze natural conversation and can therefore tap into the 'tribal knowledge' embedded in agent conversations and evaluate it based on various factors. This allows it to identify the most successful answers. Zilbershot says: What we want to do with the Cuein acquisition is actually tap into that data source, which is those conversations, those human-to-human conversations, and be able to understand what happened there, what path was the optimal path that the support agent did to resolve the issue? And use that as additional knowledge for our AI agents. We feel like that will be a game-changer for our customers, because we can really learn from what happened in the past... We can tap into tribal knowledge, that was never tapped before, and then use this to quantify and provide visibility and transparency into how AI agents are performing. As well as monitoring human agents, the software can also monitor AI agent conversations and again evaluate how successful they've been. It can also infer CSAT scores for all conversations, rather than relying on just those the customer has opted to complete. She adds: The implied CSAT has actually many factors into it. Even the number of handoffs, how many people had to talk to this employee about their problem? Then you get, obviously, the sentiment analysis. But you also get, what's the quality? Did they come back after with a follow-up question? So all of these, that's Cuein's secret sauce of understanding how to quantify and how to determine the implied CSAT score. There's been a lot of talk recently about how agentic AI is going to obsolete SaaS by replacing all of the existing layers of enterprise applications -- the systems of record that store all the transactions, the systems of intelligence that analyze the data and the systems of engagement through which people interact with all of that. You might think that, as a self-described System of Engagement, ServiceNow faces being rendered obsolete by the advent of Systems of Agents. But here's the thing. Agents can't reliably execute enterprise processes without a lot of information and context about the data, policies and goals underlying those processes. You can't just plop down any old agent and expect them to make sense of it all without some guidance. Here's where ServiceNow has a real advantage, particularly with its reach across multiple applications, whereas rivals in the enterprise applications space have traditionally stuck to their own CRM, ERP or HCM stovepipes. Today's launch is a serious bid to become the System of Agents that automates the entire enterprise, built on a platform that has the context about how everything fits together. Perhaps by introducing its own army of agents, ServiceNow can avoid the 'death of SaaS' -- if that's conceivably in our futures -- by getting there first.

ServiceNow unveils new agentic AI innovations to autonomously solve the most complex enterprise challenges

Latest breakthrough on the ServiceNow Platform acts as the AI agent control tower, one central location to analyze, manage, and govern AI agents across every corner of a business Powerful new AI Agent Orchestrator brings order to chaos, ensuring teams of AI agents work in harmony across tasks, systems, and departments Thousands of pre‑built AI agents for every workflow, plus new AI Agent Studio for building fully customized AI agents, drive exponential productivity at scale With access to billions of pieces of information and fueled by millions of automations, knowledge sources, and tools, ServiceNow AI Agents redefine productivity without limits ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the AI platform for business transformation, today unveiled a series of new agentic AI innovations to autonomously solve the most complex enterprise challenges. This latest breakthrough on the ServiceNow Platform acts as the AI agent control tower -- one central location to analyze, manage, and govern the rapidly evolving world of agentic AI across every corner of a business. These advancements build on ServiceNow's two‑decade expertise in driving exponential productivity across every person and every process by handling complex and ambiguous tasks that traditional automation cannot solve. ServiceNow's powerful new AI Agent Orchestrator ensures teams of specialized AI agents work together across tasks, systems, and departments to achieve a specific goal. In addition, thousands of pre‑built agents across IT, customer service, HR, and more, plus the new AI Agent Studio for building fully customized agents, are ready to take action and drive exponential productivity at scale. Unlike others, ServiceNow AI Agents and their capabilities are built directly into the single, trusted ServiceNow Platform, so customers' existing investments in workflow, automation, and data power agentic AI from day one. With access to billions of pieces of information and fueled by millions of automations, knowledge sources, and tools, ServiceNow AI Agents redefine productivity without limits. IDC1 projects that 50% of organizations will use enterprise AI agents configured for specific business functions in 2025. While this promises a future where AI agents lift the burden of repetitive tasks and give people time back to focus on what really matters, many of today's agents are simply chatbots and not agentic. These single function AI agents fall short of this vision and further add to the hornet's nest of complexity -- fragmented processes and siloed information stuck in outdated systems. Because ServiceNow built agentic AI directly into its platform, ServiceNow AI Agents have access to billions of pieces of information and millions of automations across customers' instances. This enables the AI agents to quickly learn the company's knowledge and start using it right away to take effective action. ServiceNow AI Agents understand and adapt to business needs and take autonomous actions to get work done. With its single architecture, single data model, and single platform, ServiceNow's approach to agentic AI helps drive faster, smarter results across every business process. "In a future with millions of AI agents acting as your new digital workforce, ServiceNow serves as the AI agent control tower, bringing order to chaos," said Amit Zavery, president, chief product officer and chief operating officer at ServiceNow. "Agentic AI without unification creates more complexity within an enterprise. The ability of ServiceNow AI Agents to work together on tasks that draw from multiple systems and departments truly stands out. With a single location to orchestrate agents and prevent sprawl, our AI agents collaborate like active participants at work, acting as true extensions of their human counterparts." Conducting the AI orchestra In this new world of agentic AI, the ServiceNow Platform serves as the AI agent control tower -- a connection layer across every corner of a business -- enabling ServiceNow's new AI Agent Orchestrator to elevate the way organizations operate, transforming groups of AI agents into a symphony working toward a common goal. Unlike single function AI agents that complete only simple conversational tasks, the new ServiceNow AI Agent Orchestrator enables inter‑agent communication and centralized coordination. This ensures AI agents can efficiently share information and hand off tasks regardless of where the process starts, making them indispensable for managing complex workflows. For example, onboarding a new customer or triaging a network security incident are regular occurrences for many businesses, but they are not simple processes. Properly onboarding just one new customer requires coordination across multiple departments -- from gathering customer information for contracts to addressing requests through support teams. AI Agent Orchestrator helps ensure the specialized AI agents handling each of these tasks work together to achieve the broader goal -- getting a new customer up and running smoothly. When a network issue arises, AI Agent Orchestrator manages custom AI agents drawing from sources such as network management software, security information and event management systems, application performance monitoring, and more to work together to stop the problem in its tracks-identifying the issue, creating a resolution plan, and executing it once approved by a human network operator. "At EY, we are committed to being both a pioneer and practical leader in AI development and deployment, creating frameworks that blend ethical governance, innovation with execution," said Raj Sharma, EY Global Managing Partner - Growth and Innovation. "AI agents are critical to empower teams with intelligent capabilities working in collaboration between humans and AI. This is why we are working with ServiceNow and our Ecosystems partners to harness the full potential of agentic AI across our AI platforms at enterprise‑scale, enabling us to integrate and contextualize data across our entire organization in real time, with the high levels of trust and transparency we need built in." New AI agents power the next era of AI With thousands of AI agents on the ServiceNow Platform, ServiceNow continues to roll out more each day. Plus, with an industry‑leading partner ecosystem -- including Accenture, Cognizant, and Deloitte -- actively building and releasing new AI agents on the ServiceNow Store, ServiceNow supports an unmatched combination of AI agent use cases and capabilities to power the millions of business processes ServiceNow customers complete each year. Unlike other agents tied to individual clouds or limited data sources, ServiceNow AI Agents have a unique competitive advantage: 20 years of automation data and outcomes from tackling the most complex enterprise workflow challenges. Powered by insights from structured and unstructured sources, customers get productive AI agents from day one. This latest ServiceNow AI Agent launch will deliver thousands more pre‑trained AI agents for IT, customer service, HR, and more to take action and automate critical business processes at unprecedented speed. "Raleigh is among the fastest‑growing cities in the nation, and we're dedicated to making AI a key driver in enhancing the lives of our employees and residents -- whether through optimizing traffic management or streamlining operations across city departments," said Mark Wittenburg, Chief Information Officer for the City of Raleigh. "While our community as a whole continues to grow, our city operations and back‑office systems are leading the way with innovative technology. With ServiceNow AI Agents, we're excited to deliver even more seamless and proactive services that align with the needs of our increasingly tech‑savvy and forward‑thinking community." Build your own AI agents with AI Agent Studio The new ServiceNow AI Agent Studio extends the power of agentic AI to every user in the enterprise, allowing organizations to create and deploy custom AI agents that are integrated with enterprise‑wide workflows and data through an intuitive no‑code language‑based interface Customers simply describe the outcome they want to achieve, the role of the AI agents, and the processes they want to build through natural language prompts -- not code -- and AI Agent Studio will build a team of AI agents, managed by the AI Agent Orchestrator, that are ready to work immediately driving business efficiency. The platform guides users through creating, testing, and activating AI agents for custom use cases. AI Agent Studio integrates seamlessly with automation tools already on the ServiceNow Platform such as skills, flows, and processes, giving organizations the flexibility to customize AI agents to meet their specific needs. "For over 100 years, Rolls‑Royce has been synonymous with engineering excellence and innovation, powering, protecting, and connecting the modern world. From the meticulous craftsmanship of our engines to the cutting‑edge technology that drives them, we continuously push boundaries to deliver exceptional performance," said Rachel Cameron, Head of Transformational Programmes at Rolls‑Royce. "Rolls‑Royce has always been at the forefront of engineering excellence and innovation, continuously finding ways to improve efficiency, resilience, and employee experience. By integrating ServiceNow AI Agents, we are streamlining operations, reducing manual effort, and enabling faster, data‑driven decision‑making. AI‑powered automation is helping us deflect service desk tickets, optimize workflows, and provide intelligent insights -- allowing our teams to focus on high‑value activities while ensuring our operations remain efficient, secure, and future‑ready. " Workflow Data Fabric fuels AI agents with insights to deliver transformative outcomes What powers ServiceNow AI Agents to deliver transformative outcomes for customers is its unmatched ability to access enterprise‑wide data. Workflow Data Fabric from ServiceNow enables users to seamlessly connect and activate structured and unstructured enterprise data -- no matter where it resides. This unification provides intelligence for people and ServiceNow AI Agents to act on real‑time, actionable insights, driving smarter workflows that solve real business challenges. Additionally, zero copy integrations with Workflow Data Fabric allow businesses to securely connect to their data sources without moving or duplicating data. New partnerships announced today with companies like Google Cloud extend Workflow Data Fabric's capabilities, providing AI agents with an even more comprehensive data foundation they need to identify patterns, derive insights, and perform intelligent workflows, all on the single architecture, single data model, the ServiceNow Platform. Raising the bar of enterprise‑grade agentic AI Today's complex business processes require bold innovation grounded in accountability and compliance. ServiceNow is setting a new standard for enterprise AI, delivering solutions that redefine how humans and machines work together. Available in March, the full suite of intelligent capabilities within ServiceNow AI Agents -- including AI Agent Orchestrator and AI Agent Studio -- will be included at no additional cost for all Pro Plus and Enterprise Plus customers. The consumption‑based model prioritizes customer value and flexibility, extending the value of customers' existing ServiceNow generative AI packages. ServiceNow's recent acquisition of Cuein, an AI native conversation data analysis platform, shows how the ServiceNow AI Agent roadmap continues to advance, and how ServiceNow continues to innovate for its nearly 1,000 signed AI agent customers. As the only platform that encompasses an entire history of billions of workflow executions, ServiceNow stands apart in agentic AI integrations across the full digital footprint of an enterprise and its ecosystem. Only ServiceNow has the power, simplicity, and enterprise‑ready capabilities built for this moment. At every level, ServiceNow AI Agents deliver unmatched capabilities for modern AI‑driven business transformation. Availability ServiceNow AI Agent Orchestrator and AI Agent Studio will be available to customers on the ServiceNow Platform in March 2025.Plan updates to include ServiceNow AI Agents for all Pro Plus and Enterprise Plus customers will go into effect in March 2025. Additional Information Learn more information about our AI agents in ServiceNow's latest blog and AI Agent Broadcast. About ServiceNow ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is putting AI to work for people. We move with the pace of innovation to help customers transform organizations across every industry while upholding a trustworthy, human centered approach to deploying our products and services at scale. Our AI platform for business transformation connects people, processes, data, and devices to increase productivity and maximize business outcomes.