ServiceNow launches major focus on agentic AI with emphasis on channel partners
“We know that we’ll continue pivoting as needed to keep pace with the market and customer demand, and we'll ensure that partners are always in lockstep with us through that journey,” says Jen Odess
ServiceNow used its annual sales kick-off conference to unveil a major expansion of its global partner programme with an eye on making it easier for its channel partner community to take better advantage of AI.
The company also introduced to the 800-plus solution provider attendees of the conference new incentives for the vendor’s Now Assist GenAI-powered application to help increase their credibility and expertise with the technology, and expand the specialisations partners can get across GenAI.
The move comes as the IT industry is rapidly moving towards the adoption of agentic AI, says Jen Odess, ServiceNow’s VP of partner experience.
Agentic AI is AI that can autonomously make decisions without continual human interaction.
ServiceNow is looking to be a leader in providing agentic AI to its customers and partners, Odess tells CRN.
“We’re going to put our partners at the forefront of that journey.”
ServiceNow also discussed the company’s new customer excellence group that repositions resources to show how customer-obsessed ServiceNow has become, Odess explains.
“We’re really focusing on getting our customers to value with their ServiceNow purchases.”
ServiceNow also showed a new focus on the overarching partner experience, as well as the actual enablement to put partners on their AI journeys, adds Odess.
“As we kick off 2025, we’re confident AI will shape the rest of the year, although in this world of AI, things change so quickly.
“We also know that we’ll continue pivoting as needed to keep pace with the market and customer demand, and we'll ensure that partners are always in lockstep with us through that journey.”
As part of that focus, ServiceNow is moving the conversation beyond Now Assist to focus on agentic AI, with an emphasis on three components: AI agents, workflows where Now Assist is embedded, and its Workflow Data Fabric data layer based on its RaptorDB database.
“Those things together are what will really differentiate us with agentic AI.”
Odess says to think of ServiceNow’s AI agentic strategy in terms of why, how, who, and what.
“The ‘why’ is the use cases, such as the overall business problems or goals we're trying to solve for.
“That's where you start, the use case you want to develop.
“And from there, there is this AI agent orchestration layer, which is the ‘how.’ This is orchestrating and planning a team of AI agents to address the given use case.
“From there, the orchestrator engages with the ‘who,’ which is all of the AI agents, whether they are AI agents working autonomously or AI agents that are being governed by humans.
“And those AI agents are pulling from the ‘what,’ which is the tools such as the scripted AI or conversational components of our workflows.”
ServiceNow this week also officially launched its previously announced Workflow Data Fabric technology, an enhanced integrated data layer unifying business and technology data across the enterprise to power workflows and AI agents with real‑time, secure access to data from any source.
“Workflow Data Fabric is a huge component of really getting to true accelerated agentic AI, because Workflow Data Fabric was in the middle of AI agents and workflows.”
According to her, the company also plans to release its AI agent studio in March.
“We're talking a lot about the power of ServiceNow as agentic AI for 2025, and really trying to be clear about how all these pieces together differentiate us against our competitors and put us at the front of the market.”
ServiceNow is committed to ensuring channel partners are at the forefront of the move towards agentic AI, Odess tells CRN.
“We’re getting really creative on how we bring the content, the learnings, the activations from the workflow and product teams directly to our partners in real time, so partners will more and more see what I would call enablement and activations.”
All of that resides in a one-stop shop in the ServiceNow AI navigator partner success centre, which was unveiled last fall at the ServiceNow global partner ecosystems summit (GPES) and which has since been given a new user interface and expanded content.
One new addition to ServiceNow AI navigator is a series of free-of-charge virtual enablement sessions focused on delivering quick wins for implementing AI agent productivity, employee productivity, and developer productivity for customers who have already bought generative AI from ServiceNow, says the VP of partner experience.
This article originally appeared on CRN UK sister website CRN.