At Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow unveiled its evolution from workflow automation leader to enterprise AI orchestration platform. With 25,000+ attendees, it showcased solutions for securely scaling AI across front, middle, and back-office operations.
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Summary
At its annual Knowledge 2025 conference, which attracted over 25,000 attendees, ServiceNow clarified how it was redefining its strategic vision – not just as a leader in workflow automation but in becoming an AI platform at the core of orchestrating, governing, and scaling enterprise AI across the front, middle, and back office. Building on its deep roots in workflow digitization and automation, ServiceNow is squarely targeting a pressing enterprise challenge: turning AI aspirations into a secure, scalable, and outcome-focused operational reality. This piece highlights the major announcements made by ServiceNow at Knowledge 2025 and how they impact the vendor’s broader enterprise AI platform strategy.
A unified orchestration platform for AI, data, and workflows
At the core of ServiceNow’s AI strategy and approach is the ServiceNow AI Platform. Officially introduced at Knowledge 2025, this is more than just a ServiceNow rebranding exercise. It is a new platform foundation that infuses AI capabilities extensively and deeply into the workflows that ServiceNow enables across the enterprise. A vital element of this AI foundation is the ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric, which the company introduced last year, that helps businesses connect and contextualize important data. At Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow announced it was expanding on this capability with a new Workflow Data Network that allows third parties to map their systems and data into the ServiceNow AI Platform and Knowledge Graph. With this new capability, vendors offering technologies that are commonly adopted alongside ServiceNow, including CRM, IT, HR, and intranet solutions, can now achieve deeper integration at the data layer. This Workflow Data Network facilitates real-time data unification and triggers workflows based on insights. Integrating these external data sources means that ServiceNow’s AI agents can now act on previously unstructured and siloed data with greater intelligence and precision. Businesses benefit by being able to integrate different applications more deeply and richly. ServiceNow also announced its intention to acquire Data.world to enable rich data catalog and governance capabilities within Workflow Data Fabric. As AI is playing an increasingly valuable role in data and system interactions for employees and customers, ensuring AI agents can reference as much data as possible is essential. This capability establishes a consistent and referenceable data fabric between ServiceNow and third-party applications, enabling businesses to maximize the value of their technology ecosystems.
The shift from fragmented AI to orchestrated intelligence is underway
One of ServiceNow’s more notable announcements from the event was the launch of AI Agent Fabric, which builds further on this integrated workflow and technology value proposition. The AI Agent Fabric enables AI agents to work together in a more coordinated way. The capability allows ServiceNow agents to communicate and automatically hand off tasks to third-party agents from partners such as Microsoft, Google, and Box. For example, a ServiceNow triage agent may diagnose an issue and pass it to an Azure AI agent to resolve a server failure, while also keeping human agents informed about critical decisions. As digital workflows commonly span multiple systems, AI agents must be able to operate seamlessly across them, which is precisely what the AI Agent Fabric enables. To complement this capability, ServiceNow’s AI Agent Orchestrator now offers expanded functionality, enabling customers to deploy their own domain-specific AI agents across various business units, including IT, CRM, and HR. The Orchestrator allows organizations to tailor AI agents to their specific needs and workflows, ensuring that each business unit benefits from the customized AI solutions that drive efficiency and productivity.
Insights from the ServiceNow CEO
In an analyst Q&A session at Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott shared how ServiceNow is uniquely positioned in the AI race due to its deep IT expertise and traction. He mentioned how IT will play a key role in AI strategy and how the capability is orchestrated and managed across functions. McDermott emphasized that ServiceNow’s heritage and presence in IT positions it as the AI orchestration platform of choice for businesses. He also highlighted the importance of the Apriel Nemotron 15B reasoning model, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA. This model is designed to power a new generation of AI agents, enabling them to process traditionally unstructured corporate data that often remains untouched – such as video, voice recordings, social media interactions, and marketing insights. By leveraging this advanced AI model, businesses can enhance decision-making, improve workflow execution, and deliver personalized outcomes across various business units.
Why is this important?
Collectively, these new features and change in strategic direction from ServiceNow underscore its ambition to become a central enabler of AI deployment and orchestration across enterprises. This shift is timely, as the wave of new AI capabilities available to businesses is increasing confusion as they face growing complexity in managing AI investments with risks of fragmentation and interoperability challenges – which ServiceNow is aiming to help businesses avoid.
Bringing order to enterprise AI with the ServiceNow AI Control Tower
The most notable challenges businesses face in maximizing return on investment in AI capabilities center around security, governance, and the sprawl of different AI models and solutions now being used. An interesting category of new technology capability is emerging that helps businesses centralize visibility and management into the different AI capabilities being used across the business. The new ServiceNow AI Control Tower serves as a centralized command center, offering businesses a single-pane-of-glass approach to oversee key AI elements, including solution health, adoption patterns, and governance. It can be leveraged to track how impactful AI solutions are by monitoring essential metrics, including hours saved, speed of issue resolution, and compliance adherence. Additionally, ServiceNow Control Tower helps manage, secure, and optimize AI agents, models, and AI-enabled workflows across the enterprise.
Insights from the ServiceNow CEO
McDermott emphasized how important it was to ServiceNow’s AI vision to support businesses in embracing an enterprise-wide focus and approach to integration with AI rather than aligning with fragmented AI projects and siloed AI technology ecosystems. Its capabilities here, including the AI Control Tower, will be important given the economic opportunity tied to AI that ServiceNow is looking to tap into. For example, Omdia forecasts that the AI software market alone will reach $218bn by 2029.
Why is this important?
This is more than just another new solution – it represents a new operational discipline for businesses focused on AI ecosystem management and governance, and ServiceNow wants to be at the center of this evolution. Omdia believes ServiceNow is well positioned to execute this vision, given its broad enterprise presence and ability to power operations across multiple business units. Beyond its workflow capabilities, ServiceNow functions as a true business platform, integrating deeply and seamlessly with other important enterprise technologies across different categories. This centralized role within the enterprise gives ServiceNow a competitive edge over other solutions supporting AI ecosystem management.
The Salesforce showdown is on as ServiceNow expands its CRM capabilities
Back in 2017, just before ServiceNow’s strategic transition from pure IT service management (ITSM) platform to broader enterprise workflow and AI-powered automation leader, I remember thinking the company was ripe for acquisition, with Salesforce as the most likely suitor. Fast forward to today, and ServiceNow has charted its own path, growing annual revenue from just under $2bn in 2017 to almost $11bn by the end of 2024. At Knowledge 2025, the company made its ambitions clear: it’s doubling down on the CRM market – Salesforce’s heritage – as its next major growth frontier. In its push to expand CRM market share, ServiceNow is focused on the resolution of customer issues by reimagining CRM through its workflow and AI expertise.
ServiceNow is positioning its offering beyond that of a traditional CRM platform, leveraging its expertise as a leader in automation to help businesses orchestrate front, middle, and back-office operations. Here, ServiceNow will leverage its AI, automation, and digital workflow capabilities to better connect teams from across sales, service, fulfillment, IT, and more in a single platform. ServiceNow’s AI capabilities are a key aspect of its CRM proposition. In the context of customer service, these agents will be used to triage, escalate, and onboard new customers. In field service, ServiceNow’s AI agents can automate scheduling, skills matching, parts delivery, and documentation. In sales development, ServiceNow’s AI agents can be used to engage and qualify early-stage leads.
ServiceNow is also introducing industry-specific AI agents and workflows across banking, telco, and manufacturing industries, as well as the public sector. Earlier this year, ServiceNow also announced its intention to acquire Logik.ai – a vendor that supports businesses in transforming complex sales processes and product configurations with its configure-price-quote (CPQ) solution. CPQ is a mission-critical element of the sales process, especially in industries such as telecoms where there are many complex products and services.
Why is this important?
ServiceNow’s expanded investment in CRM cannot be understated ‒ not just because of its revenue growth potential but also due to its impact on the competitive landscape in CRM and customer engagement. By design, ServiceNow’s CRM offering is not built around traditional constructs that have formed the foundation for many solutions in this market. ServiceNow is focused on integrating workflows and services, expanding automation capabilities, advancing the use of AI agents, and unifying data models across the front, middle, and back office, enabling end-to-end connectivity for organizations.
No other vendor currently offers the strength and breadth of back-office workflow digitization and automation delivered by ServiceNow, and the vendor is clearly looking to leverage this strength to expand into the front office to capture market share from competitors such as Salesforce. However, as Salesforce moves deeper into back-office operations such as IT and HR, ServiceNow must continue to strengthen its core markets. To drive growth and impact, in the realms of CRM and beyond, ServiceNow will need to develop its vertical-first approach and platform capabilities, support enterprise-grade governance and management across areas such as AI, and expand its partner ecosystem.
Insights from the ServiceNow CEO
McDermott highlighted how CRM is often fragmented (with customers having too many technology instances) and too focused on the front office, creating inefficiencies and high costs. He mentioned the “messy middle” problem with CRM, where issues arise when promises made by the front office then need to be actioned in an integrated way with the help of back-office operations. This fragmented approach to CRM, McDermott advised, presents challenges in how AI can be leveraged going forward. He emphasized that ServiceNow is setting itself apart from traditional CRM providers, by focusing on delivering operational workflows and new efficiencies, moving beyond conventional CRM limitations to more integrated solutions and capabilities that have AI at the core.
Final thoughts
The new strategic vision shared by ServiceNow at Knowledge 2025 marks a significant moment in the company’s evolution. From its heritage in ITSM, ServiceNow continues to evolve into a AI platform that supports operational improvements across the front, middle, and back office. Its new investments in enterprise AI operations and customer engagement are also notable as they further strengthen the vendor’s unified approach to data, workflows, and AI capabilities in providing a compelling alternative to traditional siloed solutions across these areas. Its expansion into CRM doesn’t just represent a new market opportunity but also a fundamental reimagining of how customer relationships can be managed through intelligent workflow automation. To fully realize its vision, ServiceNow must ensure it continues to invest in its core strengths while also expanding its role and market awareness around AI orchestration. Features aside, successfully executing on its CRM vision will require ServiceNow to maintain and further develop its partnerships and industry-specific propositions. ServiceNow’s new bold vision, combined with its proven execution capability and strategic investments, mean it is well equipped to deliver on its aspirations.
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Author
Adam Holtby, Principal Analyst, Workplace Transformation
