At Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow made it clear: the way we build, connect, and operate enterprise systems is no longer sustainable.
Fragmentation. Siloed data. Swivel-chair workflows. Disconnected tools.
For years, these have been treated as technical inconveniences. Now they’re barriers to growth.
And as Bill McDermott put it on Day 1:
“21st-century problems cannot be solved with 20th-century architectures.”
Our team was on the ground in Las Vegas to cover all the key announcements and the strategic direction ServiceNow is taking for the years ahead. And for us, it was an especially meaningful occasion: we celebrated another year of partnership with ServiceNow, topped off by a memorable moment: our CRO, Nick Baca-Storni, had the opportunity to meet ServiceNow’s CEO and chairman, Bill McDermott, in person.
Without further ado, let’s get into the key takeaways from Knowledge 2025.
ServiceNow Knowledge 2025: The Opportunity (and the Urgency)
We’re at a turning point. McDermott described AI not as a trend, but as “civilization’s greatest opportunity of this century”—a $22 trillion shift with the potential to eliminate $4 trillion in operating expenses.
Yet that potential is at risk.
Despite massive investments in AI, ServiceNow’s AI Maturity Index revealed that enterprise data readiness dropped 9 points year-over-year. The reason? Tools are getting smarter, but the architecture underneath remains fragmented.
Without orchestration, AI can’t scale.
Without context, agents can’t reason.
And without integration, automation collapses under its own weight.
A Platform Built for Agents: ServiceNow AI Agents
To respond to this, ServiceNow unveiled the AI Agent platform—not just as a new product, but as the foundation for how future enterprises will run.
This platform isn’t about replacing what you have. It’s about making it cohesive. One architecture. One data model. One system of action.
From this platform emerge several key components:
- AI Agent Fabric, a framework where agents operate with shared context.
- AI Agent Orchestrator, which coordinates tasks across multiple agents, including those outside of ServiceNow.
- AI Control Tower, for observability, governance, and compliance.
- AI Studio, where teams can create low-code, natural language-based agents.
- Workflow Data Fabric, enabling agents to access live data without duplication.
- RaptorDB, a new database built for both operational and analytical scale.
- Personal Data Fabric, providing semantic context across internal and external sources.
- Workflow Data Network, offering 100+ prebuilt integrations across the ecosystem.
Through a partnership with NVIDIA, ServiceNow is developing advanced reasoning models capable of understanding and acting on real-world complexity: reading contracts, interpreting data in tables and charts, analyzing documents with mixed formats (like PDFs).
This is far beyond basic prompt/response AI.
It’s a platform where agents can interpret, decide, and take action—even in messy, high-stakes enterprise scenarios.
This is far beyond basic prompt/response AI.
It’s a platform where agents can interpret, decide, and take action—even in messy, high-stakes enterprise scenarios.
Live Demos: What Agents Can Do Today
During the keynotes, one by one, ServiceNow’s product leaders took the stage to show what their AI agents can actually do.
John Sigler and Joe Davis kicked things off with a contract renewal scenario—one that usually requires coordination between legal, procurement, and finance.
In the demo, agents handled the full process in minutes:
- They pulled SLA history from internal systems
- Reviewed contract clauses to assess risk
- Checked payment history from an external ERP
- Invoked a Microsoft agent mid-process to resolve an integration point
- And logged the entire decision trail for transparency
Everything happened autonomously, orchestrated in real time by the AI Agent Orchestrator.
Then, Sigler returned to the stage to show another use case—this time with a focus on software development.
Using AI Studio, he created a “digital developer” agent live.
The task? Scan a GitHub repo, find security issues, research how to fix them, write the patches, and commit the updates.
It completed the entire flow—three fixes, written and pushed—in under a minute.
No switching tools. No waiting. Just an instruction and an agent that could reason, act, and deliver.
Quite impressive, to be honest. And if you’d like to go deeper into the changes that AI is bringing to the software development field, you can take a look at our article: If AI Can Write Code, What’s Left for Developers?
Why CRM Is Officially Broken (At Least as We Know It)
It’s no secret that ServiceNow has been moving steadily into the CRM space.
But what’s different—and worth paying attention to—is the vision behind it.
They’re rethinking what CRM should be in a world where every business function affects the customer experience.
One of the most important admissions at Knowledge 2025 came during a session on customer experience:
CRM, as we know it, no longer works.
“It promised a 360-degree view. What we got was fragmentation and friction.”
Customer service isn’t just about sales anymore. It’s affected by every workflow—IT, finance, HR, supply chain. And yet, these systems are still disconnected. The result?
- Delayed responses
- Inconsistent data
- Lost opportunities
In today’s world, every employee is in the customer experience business, but we’re still operating as if service, sales, and support live in different worlds.
That’s why ServiceNow is rebuilding CRM around workflows—not just interfaces. New capabilities like CPQ orchestration, native integrations with Genesys and NICE, and deeper alignment between service and operations are replacing traditional systems with something much more dynamic: a system of action.
The Architecture of the 21st-Century Enterprise
The deeper message throughout the event was architectural.
We’re witnessing the largest enterprise architecture shift since the rise of the cloud. Traditional stacks—designed around departments and tasks—no longer align with how AI works. Agents don’t stay in one lane. They reason, adapt, coordinate, and take action across domains.
“If people are connected, systems must be too.”
That’s why ServiceNow is advocating for a platform where:
- Agents collaborate, not just execute
- Data is real-time and contextual
- Outcomes replace outputs
- Autonomous orchestration becomes the new operating model
And it’s not just about speed—it’s about resilience. About creating infrastructure where change doesn’t break the system—it fuels it.
Real-World Adoption: What Pacesetters Are Doing
To ground all of this, ServiceNow introduced its AI Pacesetter Awards, recognizing companies already operating in this new paradigm:
- Canada Life: automated catalog creation—200% faster.
- Lloyds Bank: resolved 90% of HR requests through agents, saving 4,000+ workdays.
- Telstra: jumped from 18% to 94% case deflection using AI-powered virtual agents.
And across industries:
- AstraZeneca has agents in R&D, commercial ops, and even patient support.
- UKG uses AI to support 80,000+ frontline customers with shift scheduling and pay optimization.
- Standard Chartered reimagined procurement by having agents surface opportunities automatically.
None of these wins came from adding another tool.
They came from unifying AI, data, and workflows under one platform.
Partner Ecosystem: From Isolation to Agent2Agent Interoperability
Another critical shift: agent-to-agent interoperability.
As Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian shared, most AI agents today are trapped in single use cases, inside single platforms. That limits value.
That’s why Google and ServiceNow announced an open, secure agent communication protocol—to let agents share data, insights, and tasks across systems.
“This is the future of APIs,” said Amit Zavery.
Other partners—Cloudera, Oracle, Microsoft, Databricks, and Redshift—are aligning with this vision, ensuring that AI doesn’t just work, but works together seamlessly, regardless of whether the data comes from internal systems, external sources, third-party models, or any record system or platform in your stack.
The AI Control Layer
The final piece is oversight.
With AI Control Tower, companies can now:
- See which agents are active
- Track which models they use
- Audit actions by department
- Quantify business value by outcome
AI is no longer a black box—it’s a managed digital workforce, with transparency and control built-in.
The Human Side of AI
Despite the tech, the message wasn’t about replacing people.
“There is no artificial intelligence without human intelligence.” said Bill McDermott during the opening keynote.
ServiceNow also launched a free AI Learning Platform, aiming to train 3 million professionals by 2027. Because scaling AI means scaling understanding—across teams, roles, and industries.
Final Thoughts
So the real question isn’t whether you’ll use AI.
It’s whether your architecture, your data, and your teams are ready for what AI now demands.
Is your stack built for agentic AI?
If not, it might be time to rethink your infrastructure to support autonomous agents—because that shift is already happening.
Just look at some of the examples from Know 25.
AI agents don’t mind doing the “soul-crushing” work.
They’re already handling complex, multi-step tasks that used to take days—and doing them in minutes or seconds instead of weeks or months.
One of the clearest examples was what they called the “digital developer.”:
Created on the fly using AI Studio, it scanned live code from a Github repo, identified vulnerabilities, researched how to fix them, and patched the system. What once took hours now takes seconds.
And that’s just one domain.
We’re starting to recover time—real time—across every part of the enterprise.
“We’ve always wanted to build an AI company,” said Bill McDermott.
“One where, if every employee called in sick, the business would still run.”
With the ServiceNow AI Agent platform, that vision is starting to become real.
To make that future possible, companies need to do two things:
✅ Modernize their architecture to support intelligent orchestration
✅ Equip their teams with the right resources—people and strategy
At Inclusion Cloud, we help companies do both as ServiceNow partners.
We provide certified, senior-level ServiceNow experts who know how to implement, extend, and secure this new AI-first architecture.
And we offer strategic consulting to help you redesign your enterprise platforms, workflows, and data layers to support what agents now require: real-time context, interoperability, and the ability to act.
The future isn’t about digital transformation anymore.
It’s about digital orchestration—where systems, people, and AI agents work together to deliver outcomes at scale.