ServiceNow’s AI Playbook: Move Faster, Govern Everything, Lean On Partners

ServiceNow’s Global Partner Summit is focused on how it is sharpening its AI strategy, simplifying partner engagement and helping its channel partners drive value to customers through AI Control Tower, CRM, security, governance and faster enterprise AI deployment.

At ServiceNow’s Global Partner Summit, the company said it is looking to improve partner engagement with its AI-powered NOW platform and related technologies as it moves to make it easier for channel partners to work with the company.

ServiceNow President of Global Customer Operations Paul Fipps told CRN that the Global Partner Summit, held this week in New York, comes as the company has experienced a huge acceleration of AI moving from experimentation to production inside the company and in the broader market.

“AI is now a total addressable market, or TAM, of $600 billion for the company’s workflow, CRM and security businesses,” Fipps said.

That growth stands in contrast to the so-called SaaSpocalypse fears that AI will take over white-collar work and reduce head count, Fipps said.

This has opened major opportunities for channel partners to not just engage with ServiceNow in the implementation side but go instead from the start of the deal cycle all the way through implementation.

“Increasingly, customers are demanding it because partners are helping redesign how the customer’s business processes work, particularly in an AI-first world, and that is actually driving much of the ROI that we’re seeing happen inside the platform,” he said. “When partners engage, our deals get twice as big. But I always say that’s because our customers are seeing exponential value as well.”

AI is not eliminating partner revenue, Fipps said.

“We see the opposite happening,” he said. “It’s actually changing where the value sits, moving way upstream in terms of architecture transformation, orchestration and governance.”

The market is getting bigger and partners becoming more important, not less, Fipps said. For example, he said over 90 percent of ServiceNow’s net-new business has a partner in the mix.

“Partners are not just accelerating deal cycles or increasing deal size, but from a ServiceNow standpoint are actually helping introduce us to new customers,” he said. “More than half of our net-new logos are partner-sourced, so that ecosystem is bringing ServiceNow into the conversation. Partners are not sitting on the sidelines of the go-to-market motion. That have been the traditional role of partners in the past, but they’re fundamental to how we grow ServiceNow.”

The Product Side Of The ServiceNow Global Partner Summit

One area ServiceNow points to as examples of where partners are advancing the company’s AI-focused platform is security, particularly after the company acquired Veza for its identity security technology and Armis for its exposure management technology, Fipps said.

“I would definitely call ServiceNow a security company,” he said. “If you actually pulled out our security business measured against top 10 security companies in the world by revenue, we’d be, I think, the eighth largest pure-play cyber company, growing the fastest. ... The idea is we integrate Armis and Veza. It all comes together with AI Control Tower. Every CIO and CISO wants their security operations next to their IT operations.”

AI Control Tower, introduced in June, has also become a big focus at this week’s Global Partner Summit, Fipps said. ServiceNow AI Control Tower is a centralized command and governance workspace built on the ServiceNow Platform that helps organizations discover, manage, secure and monitor AI models and agents across the enterprise.

ServiceNow channel partners have already made AI Control Tower a centerpiece of their offerings, he said.

“They are taking it to market in a co-selling motion,” he said. “We’re leading with AI Control Tower. The reason is the core customer of ServiceNow [has been] the CIO, and CIOs right now are trying to figure out how to take experimental AI capabilities, launch them in production, do it in a governed and controlled and an increasingly secure way to protect themselves from threat vectors like Mythos.”

ServiceNow is also focusing much of the product side of its Global Partner Summit on the company’s burgeoning CRM business, Fipps said. In the last quarter, CRM was a part of 16 of the company’s top 20 deals as it ties the technology to its broader AI-native workflow platform, he said.

The Program Side Of The ServiceNow Global Partner Summit

Michael Park, ServiceNow senior vice president of global partnerships and channels, said the pace of change is forcing the company and its partners to move quickly but deliberately to take advantage of the $600 billion market opportunity. The Global Partner Summit, he said, targets the top 5 percent of ServiceNow’s partners, including companies with multibillion-dollar ServiceNow practices that are expanding at or above ServiceNow’s own growth rate. Some are growing closer to 50 percent, and Park said the difference is that those partners are not simply implementing the platform but co-innovating around it.

“ServiceNow has to continue to make sure it positions its partners to be true AI consultancies in helping customers transform,” he said. “The key to all this as we discussed at Global Partner Summit is how we continue to hit the ‘easy button’ for our partners. We’ve met with hundreds of partners and have been getting a good feel for the challenges they’re facing.”

Park said the emphasis is not just on speed, but on velocity, as in moving fast in the right direction so partners can help customers realize value more quickly. That means simplifying the products ServiceNow builds, the programs it runs and the enablement it provides. The broader theme, he said, is that change is constant and ServiceNow must reduce complexity wherever it can.

At the summit, ServiceNow is bringing in product leaders to share road maps around agentic AI. Park said those road maps go beyond customer-facing product features and include ways ServiceNow is embedding AI agents into its own platform to make deployment easier for partners and customers. Certifications, enablement, accreditations, deal registration and deployment methods are all part of that simplification effort.

“We’re also starting to engage our partners in helping them understand how to use the ServiceNow platform together with other capabilities via our AI Control Tower,” Park said. “One of the key things we’re seeing out in the customer segment now is everybody trying to build AI use cases on multiple tools and multiple platforms. There’s an emerging need for a more common way to manage security and compliance across all the AI.”

That, Park said, creates an opening for ServiceNow partners to move beyond individual AI tools to help customers manage AI across platforms. Partners can use their existing ServiceNow expertise to help customers register, administer and govern AI built on Bedrock, Azure AI, Anthropic, OpenAI and other technologies through a common layer for security, compliance and management. The goal is to give CISOs, legal leaders and executives a control plane for AI regardless of where it is built, he said.

“This is a big deal because we have to secure the enterprise, and the easy button is to put the ServiceNow AI Control Tower over all of it,” Park said. “What we want ServiceNow partners to do is bring the ServiceNow platform into that ecosystem to help customers get to value faster. … So we’re moving from a world where we were just centered on what we do to a world where the platform is now hooking into all AI happening everywhere and providing governance, security and compliance overall.”

For partners, Park said ServiceNow is continuing to simplify accreditations and broaden training across more of the company’s technology footprint. He pointed to a technology center in India that is helping administer technical skills and said ServiceNow is using AI agents to automate more of the administrative work involved in doing business with the company so partners and ServiceNow can spend more time with customers.

The Global Partner Summit brings together ServiceNow’s top 100 partners and their senior executives to align on strategy, preview the product road map and discuss where the platform is headed. Park said the event also gives ServiceNow a forum to guide partners on shifts such as managed services and the broader move toward AI-led services.

“The programs are an important aspect of what we do, right?” Park said. “What we’re learning is that to really shift the ecosystem, we have to think broadly beyond just a program. We have to think about product readiness programs to support that.”

Park said change management also needs to become part of partner training because AI transformation requires more than applying an inference model to a problem. Partners have to understand the job to be transformed, how to apply the tools, how to secure them, how to make them relevant for the enterprise and how to help customers manage organizational change, he said.

“ServiceNow is one of several platforms that can help customers accelerate value, and the importance for the partner is their knowledge of how to use the ServiceNow platform and other platforms and other AI capabilities together to create that accelerated expectation of value that the customers are demanding right now,” he said.

Park said summit sessions cover security, CRM, AI Control Tower and profitability, each with time for partner feedback. He said those discussions build on partner advisory councils, one-on-one meetings and extensive field engagement. The summit sets strategy before partners enter budget season, while the January partner kickoff focuses on tactical program changes.

“Our partners do 90 percent of our deployments,” he said. “It’s a big number, so it’s really important that we think about velocity and how we simplify the way we inform, transmit, enable information to the partners at this AI speed. Because if it’s complex, you just can’t get across fast enough.”

Focus On AI

ServiceNow is focused solidly on AI and finding ways to bring all its assorted technologies to partners at the Global Partner Summit, said Tracey Cesen, founder and CEO of Pittsburgh-based ServiceNow-focused solution provider Forever Human, who attended the event.

“What they’re trying to do is get in front of partners with how the narrative starts to come together,” Cesen told CRN. “I think they’re looking for help from the partner ecosystem and feedback.”

Partners, Cesen said, are seeing the promise of ServiceNow.

“The question is, can you move fast enough to grab market share? … They’re really just trying to go soup to nuts with that, which I get.”

ServiceNow lives in a fast-moving environment because of the fast changes in AI, Cesen said.

“We want to make sure that we have the latest and greatest information to position to our clients,” she said. “And of course, we’re also working to get our name out there in the partner ecosystem within ServiceNow and within the clients.”