ServiceNow Unveils AI Experience: A New Frontier in Enterprise AI Management

Too many AI tools? This platform manages them all in one place

Broadly, companies are selling AI management tools to businesses. On Tuesday, software company ServiceNow announced the launch of its new AI Experience platform, designed to make businesses' myriad internal AI tools accessible through a single and intuitive user interface. Also: AI agents are transforming the healthcare and life sciences industry The picture the company paints of the modern office worker is someone who's juggling a growing number of AI systems -- as more get added, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage them all. Instead, ServiceNow is offering to help by telling those workers to simply drop the juggling act and let their own AI software pick up where they left off. "AI Experience from ServiceNow is addressing one of the biggest challenges enterprises face today: fragmented, clunky user experiences that slow down work," Amy Lokey, the company's Executive Vice President and Chief Experience Officer, said in a statement. "By creating a unified, contextual, and intuitive AI Experience for the enterprise, we're putting AI into the flow of work." ServiceNow is promoting its new service to industries like customer service and sales, promising productivity gains for employees. Also: Microsoft just added AI agents to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint - how to use them "AI agents take on the manual, repetitive work, like scanning tickets, flagging patterns, and recommending response plans," the company wrote in a press release. "This allows [humans] to focus on complex decisions and real-time improvements." AI Experience is populated by two categories of AI agents, both of which are expected to be made available by the end of this year. The first, dubbed Voice Agents, appear to be more or less your typical chatbot, capable of responding to natural language prompts to retrieve and update data from within a business's internal records. The second, which ServiceNow is calling Web Agents, can pull information from third-party apps, fill out forms, and complete other agentic tasks. Also: ChatGPT can buy stuff for you now - forever changing online shopping The platform also comes with "AI Data Explorer" and "AI Lens" features, both of which create visual representations of trends taking shape within an organization. AI Lens is available now, while the AI Data Explorer tool will also be made available later this year, according to ServiceNow. ServiceNow is essentially marketing AI Experience as a tool that can help businesses manage an ever-growing manifest of AI tools. Other tech developers have had a similar idea: Both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, for example, recently launched virtual marketplaces through which enterprise customers can shop for AI agents. Each of these efforts assumes that businesses, overwhelmed by the sheer variety of AI tools that are now available to them, will be willing to pay to use a service that simplifies the selection, deployment, and governance processes.

ServiceNow thinks you're doing AI fast and wrong

And of course thinks it can help you do it right, once it gets around to delivering Three weeks after releasing one of its biannual platform upgrades, ServiceNow has started delivering an "AI Experience." The Register asked why the company chose to vary its usual release cycle, given its "Zurich" upgrade debuted on September 10 and included the "Builder Agent" vibe coding tool, meaning those users who choose to adopt the new platform - each ServiceNow customer runs a private instance and can change to new versions at a time of their choosing - already have more AI to play with. Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright told us ServiceNow did so simply because it wanted to get more AI into users' hands ASAP, as it believes they want it. So there's another thing AI can do: change established product release cadences. ServiceNow calls its new agentic stuff "AI Experience" and the big ticket item is "voice agents" that allow users to drive workflows by speaking. The company showed a demo of an HR person receiving a notification that a job offer will soon lapse if they do not authorize it and responding by chatting with a bot to explain they are unable to sign off on the offer due to some unknown glitch. The bot authorizes the offer, diagnoses the glitch as crocked firewall config, and sends IT a ticket to fix that up. That ticket ends up in the queue of an IT support person, who sees a recommended fix - rolling back the firewall to remove a recent upgrade that caused problems - and clicks to let an agent make that happen. That sounds great. Shame it's on a to-do list ServiceNow promises to complete before the end of 2025, along with the underlying plumbing to make it possible. The part of the AI Experience the company has ready now is called "AI Lens" and means AI can read things like screenshots or forms and initiate workflows based on their content instead of requiring a sentient meatbag to interpret a document. The Register keeps hearing about organizations abandoning AI projects because they don't pay, and slow take-up rates of the tech. So we asked Wright if that's typical of ServiceNow users. He responded by saying people are not thinking about agentic AI the right way. "People don't get in the AI mindset. They use it for things they did before," he said, before urging: "Don't use it as robotic process automation 2.0." Wright instead wants you to use agentic AI to achieve outcomes. "People will use AI to say, 'When I resolve this incident, write me a summary,'" he said. "Why not amend the query slightly to ask, 'Summarize the incident and advise on how to improve.'" ®

ServiceNow AI Experience - why the new interface is a platform strategy for enterprise dominance

When ServiceNow announced AI Experience earlier this week, the company framed it as a "unified, conversational front door to enterprise AI." But the more telling description came during a pre-briefing, when executives made clear what's really at play here: this isn't just a user interface redesign - it's a strategic move to capture the highest-value layer in the enterprise technology stack. Amy Lokey, executive vice president and chief experience officer at ServiceNow, said during the briefing: We're putting AI at the center of your user experience. Prompts are really replacing pages, conversations replace clicks, and AI becomes your most valuable teammate. It's important to understand the context here. The belief that AI will be the main way users interact with systems, with traditional applications relegated to the background, represents a culmination of years' long strategy. ServiceNow has spent the past decade positioning itself as a "platform of platforms," carefully building integration capabilities and cross-functional workflows while maintaining diplomatic relationships with other enterprise software vendors. Now, with AI Experience, that diplomacy has shifted to something more assertive. But before we get into that, let's address what the UI upgrade aims to achieve. AI Experience brings together five distinct capabilities, each designed to handle different aspects of enterprise work. For starters, AI Voice Agents was demonstrated by Lokey during the briefing using a fictional Adobe employee scenario. In the demo, a manager named Maria needed to approve an offer letter but was locked out of her system due to a VPN outage. Through a voice interaction, the AI agent not only approved the offer on her behalf but also identified a VPN issue, filed a high-priority IT ticket, and handled the entire resolution workflow - all without Maria needing to access any traditional application interface. Lokey said: Even while Maria was on the go and completely locked out of her system, her voice agent was still there to help, immediately understood the challenge, and orchestrated resolutions across workflows. This isn't just voice recognition - it's cross-system orchestration using natural language. AI Web Agents take this further by navigating third-party applications and websites without requiring APIs or formal integrations. During the briefing, Lokey showed how a Web Agent could authenticate with New Relic, restore an expired integration, stream telemetry data into a dashboard, and then work with another AI agent to analyze that data and propose a fix - all autonomously. She said: Imagine hundreds or even thousands of Web Agents doing work on your behalf -- installing security patches, onboarding new hires, updating CRM records, or closing out finance approvals. AI Lens, meanwhile, addresses a different problem: extracting actionable information from visual inputs. For instance, when support teams receive screenshots of error messages, Lens can scan the image, interpret the error code, and suggest fixes without requiring users to manually transcribe or describe the problem. According to the press release, this capability "turns what users see -- screens, forms, and dashboards -- into instant action, eliminating manual effort and accelerating decisions." The technical architecture underlying these capabilities is also worth pointing out. As Amit Zavery, president, Chief Product Officer, and Chief Operating Officer, explained during the briefing: This is not just a layer which is bolted onto legacy tools. We have been building this thing from the ground up as an AI-native platform and experience which is really built for the enterprise. What ServiceNow understands - and what its competitors are also scrambling to address - is that in an agentic AI future, whoever controls the engagement layer captures the most value. Traditional enterprise applications, even dominant ones, could risk becoming commoditized data repositories if users primarily interact with AI agents rather than clicking through application interfaces. These agents don't just assist with tasks within individual applications. They orchestrate work across systems, accessing ServiceNow's Workflow Data Fabric to pull information from connected sources and execute actions across departmental boundaries. As I noted in my coverage of the Zurich platform release in September, ServiceNow's platform foundation provides advantages that become more apparent in the context of agentic AI deployment. Unlike vendors who have built departmental applications and are now attempting to connect them, ServiceNow has spent years building cross-functional workflows and data integration capabilities. Lokey emphasized this distinction during the briefing: ServiceNow delivers a uniquely differentiated AI experience because it's built into our platform, giving enterprises the power to act, not just analyze. The difference between recommendation and action - between an AI assistant that suggests next steps and one that actually executes workflows across multiple systems - is fundamental to ServiceNow's positioning. Nowhere is ServiceNow's strategic intent clearer than in its application of AI Experience to CRM. The company is explicitly positioning its CRM offering - powered by AI Experience - as a replacement for what it calls "legacy SaaS systems that passively track customer interactions." During the briefing, Terence Chesire, vice president of CRM and industry workflows, didn't mince words about the competitive target: Legacy CRM is broken. What was meant to provide a 360 view and drive loyalty and productivity has become a digital filing cabinet tracking activities where employees are forced to put in data but get very little value out. This represents a direct challenge to the dominant CRM vendors in the market. Some were surprised when ServiceNow announced its CRM intentions last year, but if you understand the core strategy (enterprise platform dominance), then it's obvious that ServiceNow needs the CRM piece of the puzzle. As I reported from Knowledge 2025 in May, CEO Bill McDermott has shifted his rhetoric considerably over the past year. When I asked him directly about Salesforce, his response was telling: Does Salesforce still matter? I think that the customer will always decide who matters. I think that on a system of record level, they're a very large company. And I think as a system of record there might be a place for them. The "might be" does a lot of work in that sentence. What McDermott is suggesting - and what AI Experience enables - is a future where CRM vendors become databases that feed ServiceNow's workflow automation platform, rather than the primary systems where work gets done. Whether that becomes reality remains to be seen, but it's clear what the intention is. ServiceNow's new AI-powered Configure, Price, Quote solution, built on its recent acquisition of Logik AI, demonstrates how AI agents can handle complex sales workflows -- quote generation, approval routing, cross-system data retrieval. Chesire explained how this changes the sales process: Rather than a catalog with many features and functions that a sales representative needs to wade through, here we see a simple, clean interface that wraps those into attributes-based configurations. According to the press release, customers like Pure Storage and Thrive are already exploring how AI Experience "extends to ServiceNow CRM" to simplify customer service processes and transform call center experiences. Paolo Juvara, chief digital transformation officer at Pure Storage, stated: The new AI Experience, which extends to ServiceNow CRM, offers a simple yet powerful user interface so we can keep delivering seamless, enjoyable experiences for our customers. As I wrote following my conversation with Paul Fipps, president of global customer operations, at Knowledge, large organizations operate, on average, hundreds of applications - a level of fragmentation that creates significant operational costs and prevents the cross-functional data flow necessary for effective AI implementation. Figuring that problem out will be key to the AI success that vendors are selling to buyers. McDermott has been increasingly explicit about this. At Knowledge, he told me: CEOs are saying, I want my OPEX model down; I don't want to pay for applications that aren't adding value. He cited examples of customers consolidating over 250 applications onto ServiceNow, and a bank with 175 instances of CRM where the CEO questioned the value of "triple digit millions" in spending. McDermott believes that htis creates the economic conditions for ServiceNow's pitch. Rather than undertaking costly system replacements or upgrades, enterprises can implement ServiceNow's AI-powered workflow layer above existing systems - theoretically gaining new capabilities while reducing their application footprint. ServiceNow's AI Control Tower is also an important piece, as it provides the governance framework that makes this consolidation possible. As Dorit Zilbershot, group vice president of AI experiences and innovation, explained during the briefing: We want to address these challenges by providing a holistic operating model for agent interoperability, helping customers connect, orchestrate and govern their AI agents, regardless of vendor and department. This positions ServiceNow not just as another AI vendor, but as the orchestration layer that determines which agents - and by extension, which applications - deliver value. During the briefing, Zilbershot demonstrated the AI Control Tower's auto-discovery capability, showing how it can automatically identify AI agents from different systems and provide centralized visibility into which models they're using, what evaluation datasets were created to test them, and what risk and compliance profiles they carry. It's hard to deny that ServiceNow's vision is compelling. And makes theoretical sense, in an ideal world. However, there are execution challenges at hand. First, there's the organizational resistance. Even if ServiceNow's technical capabilities are superior, enterprises have decades of investment -- financial, political, and operational -- in existing systems. Departmental leaders have built careers around specific platforms. Changing how work gets done requires more than technology; it requires organizational transformation. Second, enterprises are already struggling to demonstrate ROI from AI pilots. The gap between ServiceNow's ambitious vision and enterprise reality athis yeart this moment in time can't be dismissed. Technology leaders I spoke with at Knowledge earlier broadly agreed with the consolidation narrative but were caught in "build versus buy" debates, weighing both approaches against cost pressures and the need for demonstrable returns. Third, ServiceNow faces the challenge of convincing non-IT buyers. As analyst Rebecca Wettemann noted in her Knowledge retrospective, ServiceNow needs to appeal to sales, service, and marketing leaders, "enabling their IT champions to credibly pitch the value of using ServiceNow beyond IT use cases." During the briefing, when asked about data quality and availability - foundational concerns for CRM success - Chesire pointed to ServiceNow's Workflow Data Fabric and the Data.World acquisition. But he acknowledged the challenge: In customer service, we see human agents needing at least four or more applications to resolve a customer issue. So we know that data needs to be brought into a single place and provided either to the AI agent or to the human agent. Equally, ServiceNow's aggressive positioning won't go unanswered. Salesforce, SAP, Workday, and other established vendors are making their own agentic AI plays. They have existing customer relationships, departmental champions, and - critically- the data that their applications generate. What ServiceNow is betting on is that its cross-functional platform position, built methodically over a decade, gives it an orchestration advantage that departmental applications can't easily replicate. As Zavery put it during the briefing: Anything which is outcome-driven, action-oriented, and involves complex orchestration, that's where we really shine. ServiceNow's AI Experience launch represents the execution of a strategy that's been years in the making. Whilst some might see it as simply a UI update for AI, it's important to understand that by positioning a conversational AI interface as the primary engagement layer for enterprise work, ServiceNow is making a calculated bet that control of the user experience determines platform value in an agentic AI future. This is a platform strategy rather than just a product launch. ServiceNow isn't simply adding AI features to compete feature-for-feature with other vendors. It's attempting to redefine the enterprise software stack itself, positioning its workflow automation platform as the orchestration layer that sits above -- and potentially replaces -- traditional departmental applications. Whether this vision becomes reality depends on factors beyond technology: organizational willingness to change, competitive responses from entrenched vendors, and ServiceNow's ability to scale its implementation approach. However, as I've said before, what's clear is that ServiceNow is no longer playing the diplomatic "platform of platforms" game. The company is making an explicit play for dominance, and AI Experience is the vehicle for that ambition.

ServiceNow's new AI Experience puts agentic automation at the fingertips of every office worker - SiliconANGLE

ServiceNow's new AI Experience puts agentic automation at the fingertips of every office worker ServiceNow Inc. has been at the forefront of the artificial intelligence push over the last couple of years, infusing AI models into almost every aspect of its software, which helps businesses to automate their workflows. Now, having built a solid AI foundation, it's aiming to simplify the way employees interact with the technology with a new "AI Experience." Building on the success of its Now Assist generative AI models, the AI Experience provides a more "intelligent entry point" that enables employees to use those capabilities more intuitively, to find information, delegate tasks to AI agents, and collaborate with them. ServiceNow said today that the AI Experience, which will be available later this year, spans the entire ServiceNow platform, including its new customer relationship management offering, uniting all of its AI capabilities into a streamlined, conversational user interface. ServiceNow sees the AI Experience as the new user interface for anyone interacting with its platform, eliminating the fragmentation that plagues office workers today. As ServiceNow Chief Executive Bill McDermott pointed out earlier this year, the average enterprise employee uses 17 applications on a daily basis, and is constantly switching between those platforms. Yet much of that effort can be automated. The challenge is to implement AI in a way that's accessible to every employee, and it's one that ServiceNow has been grappling with for quite a while. The AI Experience appears to be its solution, converging data, AI models, AI modalities, platforms and workflows into a single, conversational interface. ServiceNow Executive Vice President and Chief Experience Officer Amy Lokey said the AI Experience is intended to replace "clunky user experiences" that have become almost standard for enterprise workers today, hindering their productivity. "By creating a unified, contextual, and intuitive AI Experience for the enterprise, we're putting AI into the flow of work, meeting users where they are and empowering them with access to workflows, data and AI agents," she explained. "ServiceNow has the platform to unify people and AI so they can collaborate naturally, getting end-to-end tasks completed in AI Experience, without friction." Intelligent, role-aware AI agents sit at the heart of the new AI Experience. They're designed to work side-by-side with employees to complete mundane business tasks, solve problems and increase their productivity. For instance, there are AI Voice Agents that provide hands-free support to workers, helping them to retrieve information they need, update company records and troubleshoot any technical problems they might have with the software and systems they use. AI Web Agents, meanwhile, are designed to help employees complete tasks across the web and third-party software applications. They can do click on buttons, fill out online forms and navigate various apps and systems in order to perform the work they're instructed to do. Another key component of the AI Experience is the AI Data Explorer, which can be used to dig up insights based on records held in ServiceNow and external platforms. Employees can use it to investigate trends, pinpoint the root cause of problems and document their findings without having to exit their workflow. Finally, there's AI Lens, an agent that can transform what employees see, such as screens, forms and dashboards, into actions. Companies have the flexibility to choose which large language models they feel are most suitable for powering their AI Experience agents. The choices include ServiceNow's Now Assist family of LLMs, and also those from third-party providers like OpenAI, Anthropic PBC, Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. To ensure companies remain in control of their AI agents, ServiceNow's AI Control Tower oversees their deployment, providing safety rails to ensure everything is compliant. The company said the AI Experience integrates with every type of enterprise workflow, highlighting how it transforms its new customer relationship management platform into a "revenue-driving AI operating system" that uses automation to resolve customer problems faster and increase brand loyalty. Customer service can be automated across every channel, including phone and chat, with AI agents handling whatever issues they can, only handing off to a human support agent when the problem is too complex. Meanwhile, sales teams can leverage a new Configure, Price, Quote tool in the AI Experience to generate customized price quotes for each customer they're dealing with. That means human sales representatives can focus more of their time on building and growing relationships. In this way, the AI Experience transforms ServiceNow's CRM from a static system of record into an "AI-first system of action," where AI agents automate manual and repetitive work such as scanning tickets, flagging patterns and recommending responses and solutions. Problems will be solved much faster, and employees can remain focused on customers, the company said. Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said ServiceNow is showcasing its vision of how AI agents will be integrated with enterprise work processes in future. For now he said he's reserving judgment, but predicts that over time, the company's entire portfolio of workflow automation services will evolve into app-oriented agents. "You can think of them as a set of tools, accessed via voice, that learn from humans as they operate in the web browser and other systems, understanding data and images," he said. "We will see them for real in early 2026 when they're slated for release, at which point they'll have to prove their mettle in the day-to-day operations of ServiceNow's customers." Some of the world's biggest technology firms have already embraced the AI Experience. Adobe Inc. Vice President of Digital Employee Experience Toni Vanwinkle said he's seen a massive improvement in how his technology team serves the company's workforce. The AI Experience helps "anticipate and prioritize service requests more effectively, automate resolutions across systems and deliver real-time insights so our teams can personalize support at scale," he said.