ServiceNow intros AI agent studio and orchestrator
The platform provider's new studio enables users to create agents. The orchestrator lets agents communicate with each other. The vendor is embedding the technology in its platform.
Cloud-based automation platform ServiceNow on Wednesday introduced a new AI Agent Orchestrator, new prebuilt AI agents and an AI Agent Studio.
The AI Agent Orchestrator helps manage different types of AI agents, brings order to the deployment of multiple agents, and helps customers direct and manage agents used in different departments within a business. Agents can also communicate with one another, share information and hand off tasks regardless of where the process starts, the vendor said.
ServiceNow uses generative AI models from Nvidia, Microsoft and other vendors to power its AI services.
The vendor's customers also now have access to thousands of prebuilt AI agents across different applications in IT, customer service and HR, according to ServiceNow.
The vendor described the AI Agent Studio as a kind of centralized AI agent control tower. With the studio, users can manage the lifecycle of AI agents, from creating and testing AI agents to deploying, monitoring and even retiring AI agents.
ServiceNow AI Agents are built into the Now Platform, so customers have access to billions of digital artifacts already created by ServiceNow customers.
A hybrid choice
Customers can also choose the level of agent oversight they want, ServiceNow said.
AI agents can either work in supervised mode, which means they need human approval for everything they do, or they can run as fully autonomous models behind the scenes on behalf of people.
"We see that the world is going to be a hybrid of both of these," said Dorit Zilbershot, vice president of product management for AI at ServiceNow. "This introduces a new way of collaboration between AI and humans."
There are going to be millions of agentic agents, and besides the data ... we're going to have to manage and orchestrate these things.
Stephen ElliotAnalyst, IDC
The introduction of ServiceNow AI Agent orchestrators continues the conversation about agentic AI and this year as the year of AI agents, an outgrowth of generative AI technology.
And agentic orchestration is a logical outgrowth of the need for AI agents to flow across apps, according to observers.
"There are going to be millions of agentic agents, and besides the data ... we're going to have to manage and orchestrate these things," said Stephen Elliot, an analyst at IDC. "There's a lot behind successful, highly valued outcomes that these AI agents will need to perform, so the orchestration layer is increasingly critical."
Differentiator and challenges
While ServiceNow is not the only vendor working with AI agents and embedding them in its platform -- Oracle is also embedding AI agents in its Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications suite, and Salesforce has Agentforce -- its plethora of data makes it a differentiator in the agentic AI market, said Keith Kirkpatrick, an analyst at Futurum Group.
"They have years and years and petabytes upon petabytes of data, processed workflow data to really build these agents on, so it's actually going to be pretty seamless for them," he said.
Not only does ServiceNow have access to a lot of data, but it is also able to bring that data together on a unified platform, with a unified data model, Elliot said. This differs from other vendors that rely on other data models and different data architectures.
"[Vendors are] building value that's compounding because of the data, the way it's organized," Elliot continued. Agents are only as good as the data they use, he said. The data helps the agent drive a valuable technical outcome or output in creating a decision a human can work with.
Despite having a data strategy that sets it apart, ServiceNow still needs to work on brand awareness so that users can understand how ServiceNow works across applications, Elliot said.
ServiceNow offerings on the Now Platform include IT service and operations management, customer service management, HR management, security operations, risk and compliance, workplace service delivery, and field service management.
"There's a lot of data scientists and data administrators, maybe even AI administrators, that maybe don't even have a contextual awareness of what ServiceNow brings to the table," he said.
There is also the hurdle of making sure users are gaining measurable value from the technology, Kirkpatrick said.
"The biggest challenge is going to be, how do you stimulate usage of this technology to really get organizations confident that it works, that it actually delivers value? How do you do that while also trying to generate incremental revenue from AI?" he said.
City of Raleigh
The City of Raleigh, N.C., has found ServiceNow's platform useful, and city officials said they are looking forward to using the new AI agents and agentic orchestration feature on the platform.
Raleigh uses ServiceNow's Now Assist platform internally. The platform boosts employee productivity, according to the city. The platform will now include and be strengthened by the new agentic features, according to ServiceNow.
The city also plans to create a new customer portal using the ServiceNow Platform that will be community-facing. Previously, the city used ServiceNow to develop an internal product that created keyword searches.
"We're just seeing that as the technology is improving around us, ServiceNow is thoughtfully bringing that into their products," said Mark Wittenburg, Raleigh's CIO.
ServiceNow also revealed that Google Cloud customers have access to the Now Platform and its full suite of workflows on Google Cloud Marketplace. The vendor also expanded its Workflow Data Fabric capabilities with a new Oracle integration.
Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems.
