With businesses expected to unleash hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of AI agents over the next few years, ServiceNow and Workday are promising to create uber-agents that will control and manage this workforce revolution that is rapidly changing the way the global economy operates.
Several Cloud Wars Top 10 companies are powering this AI agent explosion, including Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft as well as both Workday and ServiceNow. But while these intelligent and autonomous agents offer enormous potential for helping businesses accelerate and optimize operations and decision-making, the scale and scope of this new way of doing business could result in some unintended consequences ranging from inconvenient to downright dangerous.
Workday frames the situation this way:
“As the number and complexity of AI agents grow, organizations of all sizes face a new set of challenges: managing their deployment, ensuring their security and compliance, optimizing their impact, and managing costs. Without a centralized approach, they risk fragmented operations, increased security risk, and difficulty measuring the true value of their AI investments.”
And here’s how ServiceNow describes this imminent danger:
“These single-function AI agents fall short of this vision and further add to the hornet’s nest of complexity—fragmented processes and siloed information stuck in outdated systems…. ‘In a future with millions of AI agents acting as your new digital workforce, ServiceNow serves as the AI agent control tower, bringing order to chaos,’ said Amit Zavery, president, chief product officer and chief operating officer at ServiceNow. ‘Agentic AI without unification creates more complexity within an enterprise.’ “
What we’re seeing here is a very responsible approach to managing the transition from the euphoria of an initial vision — “Agents can do everything!! — to the necessity of successful execution — “Nobody’s ever done this before so we better get it right!”
At the same time, it also represents big steps forward for both companies as they rethink and refine their positions for the AI Era:
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- Workday: After 20 years as an enterprise-applications provider Workday now bills itself primarily as a “platform company” in keeping with its ambitious moves into GenAI solutions, AI-enhanced applications, agentic AI, and an increasing desire among customers to use the Workday Extend platform to enhance applications and now agents. With fiscal-Q4 numbers coming out next week and expected to show that Workday subscription revenue has topped $2 billion for the first time, Workday is using this debut of its new Agent System of Record service to showcase its ongoing ability to meet new and strategically vital requirements from customers.
- ServiceNow: Since joining ServiceNow as CEO more than five years ago, Bill McDermott has been a relentless champion for AI in the enterprise and has now positioned the company as the “AI platform for business transformation.” Within that, ServiceNow is promising to be the “AI agent control tower” for customers by offering a unified capability to monitor and govern the tens or hundreds of thousands of agents that every large corporation will soon have.
Before offering my overview on where this is all headed, here’s a little more detail on the approach each company is taking:
ServiceNow’s AI Agent Orchestrator “…ensures teams of specialized AI agents work together across tasks, systems, and departments to achieve a specific goal. In addition, thousands of pre‑built agents across IT, customer service, HR, and more, plus the new AI Agent Studio for building fully customized agents, are ready to take action and drive exponential productivity at scale.”
Workday’s Agent System of Record “…will provide an efficient, secure way to onboard new AI agents, define their roles and responsibilities, track their impact, budget and forecast their costs, support compliance, and foster continuous improvement. By providing a single system for managing AI agents being used across a company’s workforce, Workday will give IT and business leaders transparency and control over the impact of AI agents on work.”
Final Thought
I’ve always felt that talk about “hype cycles” and then the inevitable descent into “troughs of disillusionment” was more than a tad academic. I suppose we could avoid both by dreaming little tiny dreams, risking little and reaching only tentatively so as to avoid — heaven forbid — having to adjust and adapt and optimize along the way.
I like what we’re seeing from both Workday and ServiceNow because their launches neither ask customers to want less and expect less, nor do they doom customers to unavoidable next-stage wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Some markets proceed in minute, predictable, and mechanistic steps, and they never experience highs that are very high and they never experience lows that are very low. And as a result, they never advance much or grow much or innovate much.
The Cloud Wars represent the complete antithesis of that humdrum pace. And I certainly hope they always do.
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