ServiceNow Launches Major Focus On Agentic AI With Emphasis On Channel Partners
‘As we kick off 2025, we're confident AI will shape the rest of the year, although in this world of AI, things change so quickly. We also know that we’ll continue pivoting as needed to keep pace with the market and customer demand, and we'll ensure that partners are always in lockstep with us through that journey,’ says Jen Odess, ServiceNow’s vice president of partner experience.
AI-focused business transformation technology provider ServiceNow used its annual sales kickoff conference to unveil a major expansion of its global partner program with an eye on making it easier for its channel partner community to take better advantage of AI.
ServiceNow on Tuesday also introduced to the 800-plus solution provider attendees of the conference new incentives for the company’s Now Assist GenAI-powered application to help increase their credibility and expertise with the technology, and expanded the specializations partners can get across GenAI.
The move comes as the IT industry is rapidly moving towards the adoption of agentic AI, said Jen Odess, ServiceNow’s vice president of partner experience.
[Related: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott: ‘We’re Putting AI To Work For People’]
Agentic AI is AI that can autonomously make decisions without continual human interaction.
ServiceNow is looking to be a leader in providing agentic AI to its customers and partners, Odess told CRN.
“We’re going to put our partners at the forefront of that journey,” she said.
ServiceNow also discussed the company’s new customer excellence group that repositions resources to show how customer-obsessed ServiceNow has become, Odess said.
“We’re really focusing on getting our customers to value with their ServiceNow purchases,” she said.
ServiceNow also showed a new focus on the overarching partner experience, as well as the actual enablement to put partners on their AI journeys, said Odess (pictured).
“As we kick off 2025, we’re confident AI will shape the rest of the year, although in this world of AI, things change so quickly,” she said. “We also know that we’ll continue pivoting as needed to keep pace with the market and customer demand, and we'll ensure that partners are always in lockstep with us through that journey.”
As part of that focus, Odess said, ServiceNow is moving the conversation beyond Now Assist to focus on agentic AI, with an emphasis on three components: AI agents, workflows where Now Assist is embedded, and its Workflow Data Fabric data layer based on its RaptorDB database.
“Those things together are what will really differentiate us with agentic AI,” she said.
Odess said to think of ServiceNow’s AI agentic strategy in terms of why, how, who, and what.
“The ‘why’ is the use cases, such as the overall business problems or goals we're trying to solve for,” she said. “That's where you start, the use case you want to develop. And from there, there is this AI agent orchestration layer, which is the ‘how.’ This is orchestrating and planning a team of AI agents to address the given use case. From there, the orchestrator engages with the ‘who,’ which is all of the AI agents, whether they are AI agents working autonomously or AI agents that are being governed by humans. And those AI agents are pulling from the ‘what,’ which is the tools such as the scripted AI or conversational components of our workflows.”
ServiceNow this week officially launched its previously announced Workflow Data Fabric technology, an enhanced integrated data layer unifying business and technology data across the enterprise to power workflows and AI agents with real‑time, secure access to data from any source.
“Workflow Data Fabric is a huge component of really getting to true accelerated agentic AI, because Workflow Data Fabric was in the middle of AI agents and workflows,” Odess said.
The company in March also plans to release its AI agent studio, she said.
“We're talking a lot about the power of ServiceNow as agentic AI for 2025, and really trying to be clear about how all these pieces together differentiate us against our competitors and put us at the front of the market,” she said.
ServiceNow is committed to ensuring channel partners are at the forefront of the move towards agentic AI, Odess said.
“We’re getting really creative on how we bring the content, the learnings, the activations from the workflow and product teams directly to our partners in real time, so partners will more and more see what I would call enablement and activations,” she said.
All of that resides in a one-stop shop in the ServiceNow AI Navigator partner success center, which was unveiled last fall at the ServiceNow Global Partner Ecosystem Summit, or GPES, and which has since been given a new user interface and expanded content, Odess said.
One new addition to ServiceNow AI Navigator is a series of free-of-charge virtual enablement sessions focused on delivering quick wins for implementing AI agent productivity, employee productivity, and developer productivity for customers who have already bought generative AI from ServiceNow, she said.
ServiceNow is also planning to hold a partner AI day coinciding with the company’s ServiceNow Yokohama release, which is slated to happen sometime this quarter, Odess said.
“Partners will get a prescriptive agenda of the core family release and assets, along with a dedicated virtual partner session and announcements and activations to go along with it, which will help us bridge more real time what partners need to know from sales kickoff to knowledge,” she said.
ServiceNow Tuesday also launched its AI agent gallery which has over 60 use cases of AI agents, AI skills, and AI solutions all built by ServiceNow, along with a roadmap filled with partner and customer use cases that will be added to the gallery, Odess said. Related to that is the new move to add 16 custom partner AI dedicated skills to the ServiceNow store, she said.
“We're now going to start rallying loads of partners to build thousands of AI agents in 2025,” she said. “The AI agent gallery is really about making AI real. It's like proof of AI. Partners have been begging for these use cases, so we finally brought that to life. And for fun we also launched an AI demo throw down. We want partners to all submit the ways they position and sell generative AI to their customers. We're going to do a really fun global competition, and the winner of this AI demo throw down will be announced on-stage at ServiceNow Knowledge and get a hefty donation to a nonprofit in their name from us and some other fun things.”
ServiceNow also used the sales kickoff to introduce some general partner program updates, although with the company’s focus on AI and related workflows, there is a big AI impact, Odess said. These include:
- Automatic approval for deal registration for net-new logo customers.
- An increase in the ServiceNow Now Assist demo instances for all partners from the previous maximum of two per partner to a number of instances, which varies according the partner’s program tier.
- Including Now Assist AI instances with every vendor instance from vendors in ServiceNow’s Build program to eliminate channel partners’ barriers to building custom skills and turning those skills into AI agents.
- Rewarding partners who help customers move undeployed backlogs of the company’s technology to live production.
- New partner incentives that increase ServiceNow’s incentive budget by 4X for 2025. Partners can now earn rebates of up to $70,000 per deal and can be rewarded with up to $5,000 when meeting certain quality deployment criteria, Odess said. “A partner could earn up to $175,000 in credits to invest back into their practice for the year,” she said.
- A new growth incentive of up to $100,000 for increasing a channel partner’s business year over year, as well as an approved deal registration reward of 3 percent on the first-year net-new ACV (annual contract value) for up to $75,000.
Cognizant All In On ServiceNow
Jason Wojahn, CEO at Thirdera, which was acquired by Cognizant in late 2023, told CRN that ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric and agentic AI moves are important pieces to the vendor’s overall push to help channel partners take advantage of AI.
“They bring together so many different pieces of their investments in the Now platform,” Wojahn said. “We're excited about it because it does really two things for us. It allows us to increase the edges of ServiceNow and the way we can move and manipulate contextual data in what will, ultimately, I think, come with formation of what I think of as an enterprise workflow library. You could almost abstract yourself from apps and just work on workflows and roles and the ability to automate support that. And the agentic AI piece is key to partners in helping them predict the next best task or accelerate more manual pieces of work that don’t have to be touched by human.”
Workflow Data Fabric and agentic AI is ServiceNow’s foreseeable future, Wojahn said.
“This is their big bet on its platform, and it’s going to mature over the next three to five years,” he said. “So for us, it's huge. We're actually doing ServiceNow’s internal implementation of Workload Data Fabric. They’re going to be a ‘lighthouse’ customer for themselves and our ‘lighthouse’ customer. We've also built several logistic AI bots and just moved some out onto the ServiceNow store in concert with ServiceNow to scope the buyers and show the ecosystem what was possible with these bots.”
Cognizant continues to heavily invest in its ServiceNow relationship, Wojahn said. Cognizant this month released Stores 360, a set of IP and applications focused on modernizing retail and store operations using ServiceNow as the core platform.
“That's another evolution in this industry of looking at the world through the lens of enterprise library of workflows, and having those come together by service line, by product, and by industry,” he said.