ServiceNow and Microsoft have expanded their strategic alliance with an emphasis on enhancing front-office business processes. The catalyst: Microsoft Copilot and the company’s AI agents.
A Strengthened Relationship
Most recently, the integration of ServiceNow Now Assist with Microsoft 365 Copilot helped customers to facilitate smoother workflows and enabled self-service capabilities within Microsoft applications. One use case, cited by ServiceNow, is the ability for users working in Microsoft Teams to use Copilot to access the ServiceNow knowledge base.
“With Copilot as the user interface for AI, we’re ushering in a new ecosystem of AI agents that allow for increased interoperability with partners like ServiceNow,” said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president, business and industry copilot, Microsoft.
“Our strong partnership and shared vision with ServiceNow provides an opportunity to help customers transform their business processes with Copilot and agents.”
With the expanded partnership, ServiceNow and Microsoft aim to address the front office with Microsoft Copilot and ServiceNow AI agents.
This collaboration leverages the distinctive capabilities of both platforms, enabling automated front-end agents to resolve customer issues in Copilot while integrating back-end workflows. As with all AI agents, the ultimate aim is to enable these two technologies to execute tasks on behalf of employees.
“A strong partnership between ServiceNow and Microsoft means customers gain the best of both worlds: seamless, secure, and smart workflows,” said Jon Sigler, senior vice president of Platform and AI at ServiceNow.
“By combining our strengths, we’re enabling organizations to harness AI and automation in ways that fundamentally change how they work —reducing complexity, driving productivity, and helping teams move faster. This partnership isn’t just about technology; it’s about setting customers up for long-term success in a digital world.”
Third-Party Agent Network
ServiceNow is not the only independent software vendor (ISV) developing an agent or connector for Copilot. At the recent Microsoft Ignite conference, the company announced that agents from 70 ISVs had been developed, many of which will be easily recognizable to customers.
For example, the Cohere agent for Copilot utilizes Cohere’s advanced LLMs, along with multilingual retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and grounding technology, to provide secure and customizable access to company data for timely decision-making.
Additionally, Workday’s agent in Copilot integrates a company’s Workday and Microsoft 365 data to help managers conduct performance reviews, simplify HR tasks, and improve employee productivity.
Closing Thoughts
Microsoft has certainly ramped up its commitment to agentic AI and is bringing along its partners for the ride. The shift is from employee productivity to front-office autonomy, and it’s quite a shift indeed.
Just a couple years after the rollout GenAI, we’re seeing the Cloud Wars Top 10 leader dedicate the majority of its conference programming to the automation of tasks that, not long ago, could only be carried out by the human workforce.
With its Now Platform, ServiceNow is the perfect complement to Microsoft’s ambitions for Copilot. Not only does the platform enable Microsoft to deliver the benefits of Copilot in the back end, but ServiceNow’s reach across the enterprise ensures that front-office and customer-engagement activities can be bundled into the same package.
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