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ServiceNow Gives a Lesson on How to Lean into Disruption
In the ever-evolving landscape of SaaS platforms, it’s essential for companies to not only keep pace with technological advancements but also anticipate and adapt to disruptions. Recently, ServiceNow has demonstrated its ability to do just that by shifting its focus towards agentic transformation, which is a cornerstone of their strategy.
As I evaluate the SaaS platforms, I’ve noticed that the agentic story has been heavily focused on automation of end-user tasks and personal productivity. Typically, this includes canned agents targeted at common business tasks to help customers get started. However, these features are becoming table stakes for both ServiceNow and its competition.
What sets ServiceNow apart is their more strategic and enterprise-focused approach. For instance, they’ve introduced more robust AI Agent Studio tooling, which unifies workflows and agents in one interface. This update also includes the addition of agent-to-agent collaboration, a feature that I previously covered in an article about horizontal AI development platforms like AWS Bedrock.
Furthermore, ServiceNow has made significant strides in backend analytics with their Moveworks Employee Experience Insights solution. This tool is capable of prioritizing, aligning, and aggregating corporate data better than simply using RAG attached to an AI chatbot. What’s truly fascinating is how AI can be used to gather issues and find trends; it helps identify where employees are asking the most questions or struggling with a process.
This shift towards team and corporate productivity rather than individual-level automation represents a significant paradigm change in agent functionality. I like to think of this as an agentic feedback loop, where agents not only automate processes but also aid in optimizing them.
Governance and management are crucial for successful deployment of agents within the enterprise. Without attentive governance, lowering development barriers to create agents could lead to infrastructure sprawl and potential security gaps. The new ServiceNow release includes agent governance features, including new role definitions in the security model and cataloging and workspace functionality. Additionally, Moveworks already has approvals built into workflows to manage business processes via agents.
Areas for Attention
ServiceNow has demonstrated remarkable progress by building competitive SaaS features while also expanding into horizontal AI platforms. While I’m impressed by their strategy and specific steps taken, I would like to suggest a few areas of attention:
1. **Beware of going too broad too fast**: ServiceNow is executing across multiple fronts – including the AI and agentic disruption, as well as expansion beyond IT service management. It’s essential that the team can allocate priorities effectively to avoid diluting their focus.
2. **Offering a more futuristic viewpoint**: While ServiceNow has excelled in articulating and delivering its strategy, I believe they should strive for a more aspirational and visionary approach. This could be achieved by showcasing the potential of completely autonomous agents or exploring innovative applications like self-healing infrastructure agents or robotic process automation.
3. **Targeted agent development platform**: It’s unclear whether the addition of AI and agentic features over the past year has led to net-new customer growth or strengthened existing relationships. ServiceNow might consider standalone offerings (possibly from Moveworks) that don’t necessitate the full ServiceNow platform. This could potentially attract new customers who aren’t already ServiceNow shops, offering a long-term migration path.
In contrast, other SaaS platforms like Salesforce require the use of their core platform to deploy its Agentforce capabilities.
ServiceNow’s commitment to embracing AI and agentic transformation is commendable, as it has chosen not to deflect or deny the threat posed by AI but instead integrated it into their offerings. Their recent moves reinforce the company’s conviction in this direction. I hope they can maintain the necessary conviction to thrive in the next wave of computing.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2025/03/25/servicenow-gives-a-lesson-on-how-to-lean-into-disruption/
