‘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 AI, and I think it serves the bigger missions that we’re seeking to accomplish,’ says Jon Reynolds, co-founder and CEO of ServiceNow partner Naitiv.
ServiceNow Tuesday opened its Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas with a massive blitz of new technologies aimed at showing that it is a leader in bringing AI to the enterprise.
The star of the show was ServiceNow’s new Australia release of its Now platform, which builds on multiple innovations the company introduced in early 2026, said Nenshad Bardoliwalla, group vice president of AI.
The innovations include Autonomous Workforce, which offers AI agents that think, act and work as part of a team along with human employees; added technology from its Moveworks acquisition, which develops front-end AI assistant and conversational enterprise search capabilities across all of an enterprise’s systems; integrating Moveworks into ServiceNow’s EmployeeWorks ahead of schedule; Context Engine, which shows AI who owns what to help determine actions; and Build Agent skills to let developers build AI agents with any development tools they prefer and then deploy and govern them, Bardoliwalla said in a pre-show press conference.
[Related: ServiceNow CEO: We Are ‘On Track For Our Best Year Ever’]
“Together with a new commercial model that bundles everything customers need to deploy AI quickly, we’ve made it clear: The era of ‘sidecar AI’ is over,” he said.
What ServiceNow is doing in terms of the expanded capabilities it is bringing to its road map and the infusion of AI now across every SKU is exciting, said Jon Reynolds, co-founder and CEO of Naitiv, a Denver-based solution provider and ServiceNow channel partner.
“I think it’s 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,” Reynolds told CRN. “We see this is really beginning to unlock the age of AI, and I think it serves the bigger missions that we’re seeking to accomplish.”
Enterprises are saying that AI is everywhere, but it isn’t connected, governed or finishing the work, Bardoliwalla said. ServiceNow is looking to fix that with a significant upgrade to its AI Control Tower, which was introduced at last year’s Knowledge conference. Bardoliwalla said the new AI Control Tower has evolved from a focus on visibility and management into a more comprehensive end-to-end offering with four new integrated capabilities:
- Sense, which uses Workflow Data Fabric to look over thousands of systems to train AI models based on an enterprise’s real data in real time with trusted definitions rather than data found on the internet.
- Decide, in which ServiceNow’s Context Engine uses information from the 95 billion workflows and 7 trillion transactions it runs annually to connect relationships, policies and historical decisions so agents provide decisions that are aligned, predictable and auditable.
- Act, where capabilities like ServiceNow’s Autonomous Workforce, Agent Orchestrator, Agent Studio and agentic playbooks execute work end to end to provide autonomous execution to build new workflows with AI inside the guardrails of enterprise security, governance and policy.
- Secure, ensure every AI system, asset and identity is compliant, secure and aligned with a company’s strategy.
The new AI Control Tower works across five different dimensions, Bardoliwalla said.
- Discovers AI assets running across an enterprise, and not just within ServiceNow, including from any vendor.
- Governs all types of AI, not just agents, but models, datasets, prompts, even classic machine learning models. ServiceNow is also introducing five new risk frameworks aligned to NIST and the EU AI Act standards.
- Secure, which uses ServiceNow’s Veza acquisition to extend identity access governance to hyperscaler AI environments so that every connected device, agent, model and action has scope permissions, least privilege enforcement and auditable identity chains.
- Observe, which uses ServiceNow’s recent acquisition of Traceloop for deep AI observability to provide continuous monitoring with live alerts to watch agents think, see where they’re making decisions and course-correct while they run.
- Measure, which provides tracking and ROI dashboards to give users financial control so they know exactly what tokens and assists are consumed to predict spending and optimize usage.
AI Control Tower gives ServiceNow a commanding position in the marketplace, Reynolds said.
“I don’t see another workflow platform at their level of prominence with the data model they hold or with the areas of business they impact,” he said. “This really is their calling card. It’s something that allows ServiceNow to be the ‘control tower’ of the enterprise.”
AI Control Tower represents the ability to provide control, orchestration and visibility to AI working across the enterprise while ensuring humans remain in the loop, Reynolds said.
“That is what’s going to unlock true autonomous AI where we can now begin to safely, ethically and responsibly remove humans from those loops,” he said.
Identity security is crucial for agentic AI where an application might have a primary agent that then generates subagents, and for a period of time the attack surface is expanded and then contracted, said Andrew Paolino, general manager for the U.S. for Konversational, a Dublin, Ireland-based solution provider and ServiceNow channel partner.
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“What’s cool about Veza is that when you pair that with AI Control Tower, you’re telling a powerful story because now not only are you understanding where AI is in the environment and what it’s doing the environment, but you’re actually erecting guardrails around the AI as well,” Paolino told CRN. “To me, that’s a pretty interesting pairing in those use cases.”
ServiceNow is shifting to meet customers’ evolving requirements around agentic AI and agents that need to be managed, said Jason Rosenfeld, chief growth and alliances officer at San Diego-based solution provider and ServiceNow partner NewRocket.
“The AI Control Tower component is going to be really important,” Rosenfeld told CRN. “There’s a lot of messaging around AI Control Tower, and ultimately ServiceNow is positioning itself to be the orchestration and governance company for the enterprise, which is different from its historic focus on being the workflow company. Their messaging has completely shifted. I think it is the right messaging.”
The insight that AI Control Tower will provide is not only in the ServiceNow realm but across capabilities, said Jarred Pippy, COO of Everforth GlideFast, a Waltham, Mass.-based solution provider and ServiceNow channel partner.
“We’re potentially going to have customers on Salesforce using agents or Workday using agents,” Pippy told CRN. “Having a product like AI Control Tower for governance and usage and getting insight is something we’re going to pitch to our customers. We’ll be happy to see that taking off in the near future.”
Bardoliwalla also introduced ServiceNow Otto, which unifies Moveworks and Now Assist into a single governed AI experience and entry point.
“ServiceNow Otto is ServiceNow’s new AI experience that turns intent into enterprise work for every person and across every workflow,” he said. “Talk, chat, search, browse, analyze or build with ServiceNow Otto. You start it. ServiceNow Otto finishes it across every system and workflow involved on the platform that already runs your business.”
ServiceNow Otto started with Now Assist, which adds AI and GenAI into every workflow on the Now platform, Bardoliwalla said.
“Then we added the AI experience as a unified front door with new modalities like voice, the Data Explorer, Lens and web agents,” he said. “Moveworks brought the missing piece, a world-class conversational experience for employees. Otto unites all of it on a new AI-native architecture [with] truly agentic AI, multimodal interactions across every channel, and autonomous orchestration for complex work.”
Rosenfeld said NewRocket is already actively working with the Otto collaboration between Moveworks and Now Assist.
“I think it’s incredibly important for clarity for customers and partners to understand how this all works together,” he said. “We’ve been a Moveworks partner prior to the acquisition, and the question was, ‘How is this all going to work together?’ I think the front door will be Moveworks, the interface that customers work with, but Now Assist is doing all of the actual work by AI in the background and feeding the Moveworks agents. That clarity and how that’s architected is really important for customers and for partners.”
ServiceNow’s acquisition of Moveworks was a great move and will make ServiceNow Otto a very useful tool for AI, Pippy said.
Moveworks allows users to, in a single frame, search across platforms, he said.
“If you’re a user, think of it as sitting in a ChatGPT screen, and it’s like, ‘Hey, I have questions on this deal,’ and it can systematically go look in Salesforce and pull that information for you,” he said. “Or if you need approval for a new computer, it will go into ServiceNow where those approvals are. ‘Hey, I need to get a [purchase order],’ and it can go look in Coupa or Fieldglass or some other tool to pull that information. That’s what Moveworks’ selling point is. It allows the user to stay in one place but be able to take action on everything from that single pane. That’s the future of where AI is going. ServiceNow, with that acquisition, is in a very good place, and we’re happy to be on that journey with ServiceNow.”
ServiceNow Otto is a complete modernization of the entire user interface and experience, bringing it much closer to how most people are now interacting with a lot of technology, particularly with conversational AI, to corral multiple chatbots from several AIs together in one seamless experience, Reynolds said.
“An example use case is, ‘Transform the workspace of a claims processor,’” he said. “Your average claims processor has eight to 10 tabs in use at any one time, upwards of 20 tabs, different portals, and they’re bouncing between them. I’m able to take this same exact UI, same exact capability, and now create a modern experience for that operator. The operator can just chat and send off communications to their customers, receive files back, and upload them to portals, and conduct AI analysis without leaving the chat screen. It’s a huge step forward in the UI space.”
For the billions of autonomous agents that need to access the ServiceNow platform in a quick, frictionless and secure way without the full sophistication, the company also introduced the ServiceNow Action Fabric, which Bardoliwalla said is a new way for any external AI agent such as Claude or Copilot or a customer’s own agent to drive real governed enterprise actions on ServiceNow through its MCP Server.
“Others let agents read and write data,” he said. “We let agents execute governed work. Our flows, our playbooks, approvals, catalogs, the full system of action, and all through the AI Control Tower so actions are identity-verified, permission-scoped and fully auditable. What we’re hearing consistently from customers is that most organizations have more AI in production than they’ve inventoried or accounted for, and that anxiety around control, security and trust isn’t going away. It’s getting louder. At the same time, AI agents are taking real actions, moving real money, and affecting real people. But most of those agents are running without a system that governs them. That’s not agentic business. That’s agentic chaos.”
