LAS VEGAS — ServiceNow’s AI Management Tower strengthens enterprise governance controls and displays AI ROI, however business consultants stated enterprises nonetheless must see extra real-world worth demonstrations to get off the sidelines with AI brokers.
AI Management Tower will soak up some options that ServiceNow rolled out with its AI Agent Orchestrator earlier this 12 months, akin to AI ROI reporting and correlation between AI utilization and enterprise efficiency metrics. Going ahead, technical and developer-focused analytics will stay within the beforehand launched Now Help and AI Agent Studio instruments to assist agent creation and tuning workflows, in line with a ServiceNow spokesperson.
AI Management Tower, in contrast, is supposed to provide enterprise managers a centralized view of all of the generative and agentic AI belongings in use throughout an enterprise, together with third-party instruments and related knowledge. Along with ROI knowledge, akin to hours saved by utilizing AI instruments, AI Management Tower will present AI adoption charges, danger and compliance points.
“This has been high of thoughts for all of our clients as they begin adopting generative AI and agentic AI,” stated Dorit Zilbershot, group vice chairman of AI experiences and innovation at ServiceNow, throughout a media prebriefing final week. “They wish to perceive, ‘Is it actually working? Is it actually serving to my staff?'”
There’s a actual concern about bringing issues into manufacturing, as a result of everybody desires to see the assured outcomes. Keith KirkpatrickAnalyst, The Futurum Group
“There’s a actual concern about bringing issues into manufacturing, as a result of everybody desires to see the assured outcomes,” stated Keith Kirkpatrick, an analyst at The Futurum Group.
Nonetheless, this reluctance might create a chicken-and-egg state of affairs as a result of early experimental use circumstances will not ship massive effectivity positive aspects, he stated.
“You are not going to see 10x effectivity positive aspects till you’ll be able to incorporate a number of workflow brokers … [but] many of the brokers cannot deal with that kind of multithreaded downside,” Kirkpatrick stated. “We’re simply not anyplace close to the purpose the place we’re getting a totally autonomous service expertise.”
Some AI agent early adopters have begun to measure the worth of AI, however warning that it is nonetheless early for the expertise. ServiceNow’s AI Agent Orchestrator has solely been usually obtainable since March 12, stated Dave Kanter, senior managing director and international workforce lead for ServiceNow accomplice Accenture’s ServiceNow enterprise group.
“We’re beginning these with simply a few reasoning steps and choice factors alongside the best way,” Kanter stated of ServiceNow AI brokers, which Accenture is testing for incident response. “We’re going after incident sorts that occur 5% to 7% of the time, which is a whole bunch or hundreds of instances monthly, and measuring the outcomes carefully on one or two choice steps.”
Nonetheless, Kanter stated he is inspired by the outcomes of including generative AI to 2 steps of the incident response course of for Accenture’s IT assist desk, the place the corporate runs ServiceNow’s Now platform internally for its 801,000 staff. Because it added incident summarization for assist desk professionals responding to new incidents and for postincident critiques, it has seen a ten% lower in its imply time to restore points, Kanter stated.
ServiceNow’s AI Management Tower studies on AI ROI metrics akin to hours saved.
Nonetheless, IT professionals might want to see extra examples like this from industries much like their very own earlier than they increase adoption of AI brokers, stated Neil Ward-Dutton, an analyst at IDC.
“What all our clients are crying out for is, ‘Present us examples of corporations which have really succeeded with these things, the place we will see not solely what they achieved — did they scale back their danger? Did they enhance the standard of their service? Did they possibly make more cash? — but additionally, what did they do to get there?’ As a result of the journey shouldn’t be simple,” he stated.
AI Agent Cloth weaves in MCP, Agent2Agent protocol
With AI agent orchestration, governance and knowledge companies, ServiceNow is placing items in place much like different giant IT distributors that aspire to be the overarching management aircraft for enterprise agentic AI workloads, Ward-Dutton stated. Opponents on this space embody different IT and repair administration distributors akin to Appian, Atlassian and UiPath, in addition to enterprise utility distributors akin to Salesforce, Oracle and SAP, and eventually, main cloud and productiveness suite suppliers akin to Microsoft and Google.
Like many of those rivals, ServiceNow touts connectors to third-party AI brokers that it could orchestrate inside its platform. This week, it additionally previewed AI Agent Cloth, which can incorporate rising business requirements for interagent communication, akin to Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP) and Google’s Agent2Agent protocol, for which ServiceNow was a launch accomplice final month. AI Agent Cloth is slated for launch within the third quarter, however it will likely be longer earlier than both open supply protocol challenge is prepared for enterprise manufacturing, Ward-Dutton stated.
“MCP could be enterprise-ready in one other 12 months or so,” he stated. “However proper now, any critical vendor must have their very own [tools] as properly.”
ServiceNow rolled out new AI governance and orchestration instruments at its Information 2025 convention.
It can additionally take extra time for a dominant AI orchestration platform to materialize, however ServiceNow has the benefit of a 20-year historical past of automating IT and enterprise workflows, in line with Kirkpatrick.
“Like a number of different massive distributors, ServiceNow is attempting to place [itself] because the ‘platform of file,’ with [comprehensive] entry to related knowledge,” he stated. “That is the place ServiceNow likes to type of plant a flag within the floor and say, ‘Now we have all this course of knowledge constructed on years and years of working with organizations, so we perceive what workflows are utilized in IT companies.'”
Beth Pariseau, a senior information author for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism masking DevOps. Have a tip? E-mail her or attain out @PariseauTT.
