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ServiceNow unveils new AI capabilities

ServiceNow's AI Platform announcement during Knowledge 2025 shows an evolution in IT service management -- one that prioritizes predictive capabilities and true autonomy.

Jon Brown
By
  • Jon Brown, Senior Analyst
  • Enterprise Strategy Group

    We provide market insights, research and advisory, and technical validations for tech buyers.
Published: 13 Jun 2025

ServiceNow unveiled its new AI Platform at Knowledge 2025, the company's annual customer and partner event, held in Las Vegas in May. This platform represents a significant step toward ServiceNow's vision of becoming the central hub for AI-driven, end-to-end enterprise workflows.

For IT professionals, the promise of AI in the ServiceNow product line is to eventually deliver "autonomous IT." This means zero outages, downtime or service desk incidents through the use of AI's predictive capabilities and deep AI agent integrations across IT service management (ITSM), IT operations management (ITOM), IT asset management and ServiceNow's other major product areas.

ServiceNow emphasized AI as a collaborative tool rather than a technology that would replace humans. The company presented its AI-enabled platform as a means for uniting intelligence, data and workflow across enterprises.

According to Pablo Stern, executive vice president and general manager of technology workflow products at ServiceNow, this combination of "powerful AI agents with [our] proven enterprise workflow capabilities" redefines what's possible, enabling IT to become "truly autonomous: able to reason, take action and drive outcomes ... tailored to your organization, on your terms."

Of course, these autonomous AI agents require some form of management and measurement of their activity to prove they're compliant and accurate. To that end, ServiceNow announced AI Control Tower, which delivers new capabilities in AI governance and management to AI agents, models and workflows -- whether they're ServiceNow native agents or from a third party. Specifically, AI Control Tower claims to enable businesses to oversee AI workforces similarly to how they manage human workforces, ensuring agents are aligned, optimized and delivering measurable impact at scale.

The effect on IT professionals could be large and positive. ServiceNow announced new AI-driven IT offerings with a goal to transform IT into a fully autonomous entity with "zero outages, zero downtime and zero service desk incidents," according to the company. This shift to autonomous operations is a lofty goal, but if ServiceNow is successful, autonomous IT might transform IT operations. For ITSM and ITOM teams, this means the following:

  • Enhanced automation.
  • Predictive capabilities to address problems before they affect the business.
  • More intelligent workflows for when work needs to be done by humans.

Evolution in IT management

To me, the shift toward autonomous IT operations represents a potentially significant evolution in IT management. Traditional ITSM focused on standardizing processes and improving efficiency. Modern ITSM and ITOM tools added automation to streamline those processes with positive results that are clearly reflected in our research at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia. Now, ServiceNow's autonomous IT vision aims to eliminate many processes through AI-driven predictive capabilities.

As they evaluate ServiceNow's vision -- and others' -- that uses AI extensively, IT leaders should make sure they develop a practical path from their current operations processes to one that likely includes autonomous agents. Any planned implementation should align with broader organizational objectives and respect compliance constraints, as well as have a clear way to measure and document ROI. Thought should also be given to skills development for staff who might be building and managing these new agents, as well as for staff no longer tasked with "firefighting."

ServiceNow's announcements signify a fundamental shift from reactive IT support to autonomous operations, potentially transforming IT departments. With AI-powered predictive capabilities, the vision of zero outages and incidents, while lofty, gets closer to being achievable. IT leaders should carefully evaluate how these innovations align with their strategic objectives to capitalize on this transformative potential.

Jon Brown is a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia, where he researches IT operations and sustainability in IT. Brown has more than 20 years of experience in IT product management and is a frequent speaker at industry events.

Enterprise Strategy Group is part of Omdia. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.

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