As part of an initiative labeled the AIExperience, or AIx, ServiceNow this week is detailing AI-powered products that automate often laborious functions, enhance the management of rapidly evolving AI agents, and raise the competitive stakes with Salesforce in the CRM market.
The workflow automation leader outlined functions that can be automated through new AI agents, including a voice agent for conversational customer experiences, enhancements to its AI Control Tower platform for more proactive agent management, and new autonomous CRM capabilities the company is pushing to differentiate from “legacy” CRM.
Collectively, ServiceNow executives said AIx — and the products supporting it — advance the positioning of their platform as a “system of action.”
Agents
As AI from a wide range of vendors proliferates, ServiceNow is delivering agents that reflect its core areas of expertise, as well as management tools to better govern a wide range of agents customers may use, including those of ServiceNow, other software vendors, or agents that are internally developed.
ServiceNow’s five new agents are:
- AI Voice Agent for voice-driven self service
- AI Data Explorer for developing data insights
- AI Lens for extracting data from any screen, form or image
- AI Web agent that navigates the web like humans
- AI Build Agents for creating apps using natural language
Here’s additional detail on two of those agents:
In demonstrating AI Voice Agent, ServiceNow used the example of a business manager needing to approve a job offer on a tight deadline while being remote and unable to access the company portal to give approval electronically. The manager is able to speak with the voice agent, which called up the offer, confirmed the details, and approved it on the manager’s behalf. In addition, agents in the demo were able to diagnose the portal access issue and initiate corrective action in the affected IT systems — also without human intervention.
AI Data Explorer uses AI to spot patterns and prevent problems before they happen, letting teams uncover insights in the flow of their work, instead of toggling between systems or utilizing external tools for those insights. A tech support manager, for example, could use AI Data Explorer to analyze critical incidents and identify those that need the most near-term attention or to recognize patterns that are consistent among incidents
Managing Agent Complexity
ServiceNow executives noted that agent sprawl is cropping up as companies race to deploy agents from a range of vendors in addition to building their own, resulting in data and process silos. They noted that experimentation and deployments have exploded, with a general lack of governance on communication frameworks including use of protocols such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A).
“We want to address these challenges by providing a holistic operating model for agent interoperability, helping customers connect, orchestrate and govern their AI agents, regardless of vendor and department,” said Dorit Zilbershot, Group Vice President, Product Management, AI Experiences & Innovation. “We want to make sure that whether it’s MCP, A2A or any other agent…we hide the complexity, giving our customers the optionality to choose how their AI agents will collaborate across enterprise.”
To address the issue, which other software giants are tackling as well, the company introduced Agent Fabric, aiming to hide the complexity that can arise from agentic silos while also providing options for how agents collaborate. In a demo, ServiceNow showed agents from multiple vendors collaborating to address a failure that could have interrupted a cloud service; that outcome was avoided through the “distributed intelligence” of agents working together to initiate a restart.
Agent Fabric is part of the AI Control Tower, which ServiceNow also enhanced with the ability to auto-discover AI agents from different systems. Once auto-discovery is set up, agents created in different systems become available within ServiceNow, where they can be managed from a single location, Zilbershot said.
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Autonomous CRM
ServiceNow officials asserted that CRM in its current form is broken, saying it’s inadequately connected to the systems that employees use to take action for customers. “So instead of driving better customer and employee experiences, it’s actually causing manual work, swivel chairing and painfully slow resolutions,” said Terence Chesire, Vice President, Product Management, CRM & Industry Workflows, in clear allusion to Salesforce, which ServiceNow has increasingly targeted with its CRM messaging.
They asserted that their Autonomous CRM, by contrast, results in:
- AI agents making self-service tangible and increasing productivity
- Unifiying customer data from various systems to power AI
- Automating workflows to accelerate service delivery and sales cycles
One new deliverable as part of autonomous CRM is CPQ, or Configure Price Quote for ServiceNow. It’s built on the tech acquired from Logik.ai earlier this year.
Chesire said with ServiceNow CPQ, sales reps can configure quotes from a single view that includes previous chat history and provides recommendations for a customer, rather than needing to wade through a catalog with a wide range of features and functions. This eliminates the need for spreadsheets and outdated processes requiring lots of seller input.
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