ServiceNow’s New Yokohama Release: Focus On Agentic AI, Automation

‘[ServiceNow is] serving as the AI agent control tower for enterprises, bringing order to chaos as the one central location to analyze, manage and govern AI agents. And that’s why our AI agents don’t just automate. They orchestrate,’ says Amit Zavery, ServiceNow president, chief product officer and COO.

Digital transformation and workplace automation technology developer ServiceNow unveiled the latest version of its Now platform, touting the availability of a strong agentic AI focus with new AI agents to go with new bundles of a number of its offerings.

The Yokohama release of the ServiceNow Now platform brings together some technologies that have been in limited release to make them available to the company’s entire customer and partner base, said Amanda Joslin, senior director of AI agent products for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company.

“We’ve had it under limited availability up to this point with our partner community,” Joslin told CRN. “We’ve done a lot of work with getting partners and some key customers up to speed. This is our general availability release, and we really see this as building upon our success in the industry with enterprises and their workflows. We see agentic AI being able to supercharge workflows and take this to the next level and be the connective layer across the enterprise for all workflows.”

Agentic AI is AI that can autonomously make decisions without continual human interaction. It does so by combining machine learning, natural language processing and automation to make those decisions.

Enterprise customers vary in their readiness to take advantage of agentic AI, but some are already experimenting with the technology, said Jason Wojahn, CEO of Thirdera, which was acquired by Cognizant in late 2023.

“We are actually building agentic AI bots for ServiceNow, on their behalf, currently for their internal use,” Wojahn told CRN. “And we have some customers that are beginning to use agentic AI across the platform in more of a pilot kind of capacity. It is relatively early. And then we have some customers on the other end of the spectrum where we’re spending more time talking about helping them get AI-fluent and AI-ready and understand what agentic AI would mean to them.”

Everybody knows what AI is but are more familiar with learning models and algorithms and things of that nature, Wojahn said.

“While those are important, far more important is the way AI is generating its intelligence, your underlying data model and your underlying business value and workflows where it can bring or add value and provide governance,” he said. “We want to make it more and more relevant, more and more accurate, and expand its boundaries.”

Amit Zavery, ServiceNow president, chief product officer, and COO, told analysts and reporters in a prelaunch conference that ServiceNow is focused on a future where AI agents work autonomously with and for people to unlock outcomes and transform business.

Many AI agents are currently stuck in the same isolated systems that have created siloed ways of working for decades and add complexity instead of reducing it, Zavery said.

“You have heard us say ‘AI is only as good as the platform it runs on,’ and the ServiceNow platform is the connective layer across every corner of the enterprise, which is uniting people, the processes, the data and devices,” he said. “And we are serving as the AI agent control tower for enterprises, bringing order to chaos as the one central location to analyze, manage and govern AI agents. And that’s why our AI agents don’t just automate. They orchestrate. They act with full context and drive real outcomes in ways no one else can and for a future with AI agents acting as a new digital workforce.”

ServiceNow is building multi-agent systems that control workflows and independently solve tasks with proper governance backed in, with three things that set ServiceNow apart from the rest of the industry in regard to AI, Zavery said.

First, he said, ServiceNow AI agents are built directly into the ServiceNow platform with access to billions of records and millions of workflows. Second, customers get a smarter, faster version of what they’re already using without any disruptions. And third, they get AI that connects the entire business with orchestration capabilities that connect every function through AI-powered workflows.

“The beauty of our approach is that we meet customers wherever they are in the AI journey and accelerate their path forward,” he said.

ServiceNow is using its own AI agents today to transform its business processes, create better user experiences and drive value, Zavery said.

For example, customer service AI agents are significantly improving case deflection by three times, while IT support AI agents have improved case deflection rates by 80 percent. In the go-to-market area, AI agents have eliminated the need for commission request tickets, he said.

“Bottom line: ServiceNow doesn’t just talk about AI,” he said. “We deliver it.”

The Yokohama release of the ServiceNow Now platform includes the company’s AI Agent Orchestrator and AI Agent Studio, both of which were introduced in January, said Dorit Zilbershot, the company’s group vice president of AI experiences and innovation, during the prelaunch conference.

“The AI Agent Orchestrator ensures that AI doesn’t just work in silos,” Zilbershot said. “We want to make sure that our customers can introduce agentic AI into the enterprise [and] make sure they can solve even the most complex problem. That’s where the AI Agent Orchestrator comes into play. It’s able to monitor, it’s able to oversee, it’s able to develop the plan for all these different AI agents to do the work correctly, to achieve a business outcome. Our agentic workflow really positions ServiceNow as the AI agent control tower for the enterprise, giving customers the ability to run these AI agents confidently across the enterprise.”

AI Agent Studio lets customers build, integrate and customize AI agents that are always connected, always optimizing and always properly governed, Zilbershot said

ServiceNow is also introducing hundreds of additional AI agents to the enterprise.

“These are preconfigured, out-of-the-box ServiceNow AI agents leveraging our expertise in the market across different use cases of the enterprise,” she said. “We will have SecOps AI agents that are designed to streamline the security incident life cycle, allowing SecOps teams to focus on high-priority threats rather than time-consuming repetitive tasks.”

ServiceNow is also adding accessibility features to help innovation work for everyone, Zilbershot said.

“We’re introducing voice input that enables hands-free interaction to summarize incidents, generate knowledge articles and more just by speaking,” she said. “We’re also introducing the ServiceNow text suggest so customers can customize their reading experience on the ServiceNow platform and across Chrome and edge browsers for better adaptability and readability.”

The Yokohama release of the ServiceNow Now platform aims to redefine how AI agents work, supercharge workflows and integrate real-time data, increase business connectivity and elevate the customer experience in two major ways, said Amy Lokey, ServiceNow’s executive vice president and chief experience officer.

The first is service observability via a single system, Lokey said during the prelaunch conference.

“Companies juggle dozens of monitoring and observability tools,” she said. “We unify them into a single source of truth. AI-driven insights are pinpointing root causes faster. They’re assessing the business impact, and they’re resolving issues before they escalate.”

The second is ServiceNow’s self-service portals, Lokey said.

“Self-service portals in ServiceNow Now sales and order management help companies drive more business and increase revenue,” she said. “Built into the ServiceNow CRM and industry workflows, these portals feature new capabilities that allow customers to place orders, configure products and track statuses, all in one place and at any time and without the need for a sales or support agent at every step in the process.”

When it comes to pricing, ServiceNow is looking to encourage agentic AI adoption across the board, Lokey said. This includes making sure that AI agents are part of customers’ Pro Plus and Enterprise Plus licensing models. The company is also looking at bundled Now Assist SKUs where AI agents and the agentic AI technology will be included, he said.

“Existing customers of Now Assist, as well as anybody who buys Now Assist and the Pro Plus or Enterprise Plus, will get the AI agents as part of the package,” he said. “There is a limit to the amount of credits available as part of Now Assist in terms of how many calls you make to the AI agents. So it’s a subscription model with some consumption kind of mindset built in. And if you run out of those credits or consumption of those units, you can buy an additional SKU for extra usage as well.”

For the channel, ServiceNow has been working on preparing partners over the last couple of months, Joslin said.

“We’ve done some enablement sessions specifically for partners and also worked deeply to enable a couple of key initial channel partners to be ready for this as well,” she said. “The new release will be available to ServiceNow’s entire partner community. In fact, we’ve done launches and enablement sessions for the entire community, but we partnered closely with a couple of key channel partners just to make sure we have the right information going out for them.”

Key opportunities for channel partners include being able to build and test AI agents as well as take advantage of new capabilities, Joslin said.

“We’re going to have enhanced insights on analytics via our dashboards to be able to visualize the usage, the quality and all of that,” she said. “I can see partners really digging in to help customers understand the value they’re getting.”