“If you look at the AI platform for business transformation, ServiceNow has formed itself as the control tower for AI transformation across all other platforms in the enterprise,” Bill McDermott, ServiceNow’s chief executive, told CNBC in December. “What’s really happening…is [that] work is not happening in a single department. Work goes across every function in an enterprise so it’s our ability to manage the end-to-end task and request management process, and this includes all people, all processes, all data, and all systems.”
Six months later, at its Knowledge 2025 conference, the company is putting that vision into action. It has unveiled new tools designed to help organizations manage the growing complexity of digital labor as agents flood the enterprise. The centerpiece is ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower, a centralized hub for overseeing agents, models, and workflows.
Completing the picture, the tech firm is debuting its take on agent interoperability called AI Agent Fabric. It’s a protocol for agent-to-agent and multi-model communication and collaboration.
These two updates, along with the other announcements ServiceNow is revealing this week, center around its AI platform, according to Chief Innovation Officer David Wright. He points out that ServiceNow has baked the technology into every layer of the platform. “So, whether it’s the [user interface], database, [or] the automation layer, it’s enterprise grade from day one. We can consume all the data that AI needs,” Wright states. “We developed the workflow data fabric to be able to connect to all the data, to be able to unify it, and then be able to activate it. And it doesn’t matter whether that data is structured or unstructured. We can bring it all in.”
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Disclosure: I attended ServiceNow's Knowledge conference as a guest of the company, which paid for my flights and hotel. However, no one at ServiceNow dictated what I should write for this post. These words are my own.A Hub to Manage Your Agents
Ultimately, as AI agents outnumber human workers and are busy completing tasks on and off the ServiceNow platform, organizations need a way to oversee everything. The AI Control Tower is the virtual dashboard for orchestrating the digital labor experience.
“As AI agents proliferate across enterprises, coordinating their work becomes as critical and complex as leading human employees, and companies need new tools to direct this new digital workforce,” Chief Product and Operating Officer Amit Zavery remarks. “With AI Control Tower, businesses can oversee AI workforces in the same way the human workforce is managed, ensuring each agent is aligned, optimized, and delivering impact at scale.”
It’s an extension of ServiceNow’s AI Agent Orchestrator, a tool for harmonizing bots across tasks, systems, and departments. AI Control Tower is built to centralize the entire AI landscape’s strategy, governance, performance, and management, offering enterprise-grade compliance and accountability.
A quick clarification: While ServiceNow has previously referred to its “AI Agent Orchestrator” as a kind of “control tower”—a term once used by Zavery—the AI Control Tower itself is a newly announced product. A company spokesperson confirms that there was never anything formerly going by that name. It was merely a concept until now.
“If you think about AI agents, they are essentially a workforce now. So, you have to have a platform that can manage that workforce, govern that workforce, and see value from that,” ServiceNow’s Senior Vice President for Product Management, Nirankush Panchbhai, states during a press briefing last week. “So the AI Control Tower is your command center to do that for all the AI assets. It brings the best of ServiceNow—the Orchestrator, [and] the [configuration management database], which acts as the system of record, connecting that record to the business value. It brings in the industry-leading compliance and risk governance tools, which we have into the workflow so that you can essentially manage it end-to-end, and then, most importantly, see the value you are getting from AI, and that is one of the big asks which we are seeing from our customers.”
The new offering enables organizations to avoid security and privacy risks, maintain compliance across the AI lifecycle, and support smarter decision-making with built-in guardrails. The AI Control Tower has a real-time dashboard tracking AI performance against key business outcomes and provides operational insights.
As Dorit Levy-Zilbershot, ServiceNow’s group vice president for product management, AI experiences, and innovation, describes it, the AI steward—be it the CIO, CFO, CEO, or CHRO—has a central hub where they can see everything that’s happening across all the AI systems. This includes the number of people onboarded, the number of agents deployed for different systems, prevalent risks, and more. She emphasizes that the AI Control Tower isn’t limited to ServiceNow—it can work across various systems. The hope is that it provides visibility across the entire enterprise so customers will have full governance and understanding.
“This has been at the top of mind for all of our customers as they start adopting generative AI and agentic AI,” she asserts. “They want to understand, is it really working? Is it really helping my employees? And so, based on our experience over the past few years with generative AI and our customer base, we’re able to create these value metrics so we can help our customers fully understand how much they’re benefiting. They can see the adoption and understand the usage across the enterprise. And last, but not least, they can understand the risk and compliance.”
ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower is now generally available.
Supporting Agent Cross-Collaboration
Additionally, ServiceNow is launching its agent-to-agent standard called Agent Fabric. Powered by the Model Context Protocol (MCP), organizations can use this technology to enable agents from ServiceNow and third parties to communicate with each other in real-time. Some of the initial partners include Accenture, Adobe, Box, Cisco, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Moonhub, RADCOM, UKG, and Zoom.
“One of the things that we’re hearing from early adopters is that while it’s great to have all these capabilities on ServiceNow, they want our AI agents to natively interact with other systems, whether they interact with those systems as an external agent or tool,” Levy-Zilbershot states.
ServiceNow says AI Agent Fabric is built on its Workflow Data Fabric, a data layer introduced in October 2024, which unifies business and technology data across the enterprise. The company explains that, with this combination, it can realize its vision of “bringing AI, data, and workflows together for customers to help them supercharge their entire business with intelligently orchestrated agentic AI.”
The introduction of AI Agent Fabric puts ServiceNow in the same company as Google and AGNTCY. These two have publicly released efforts to establish the agentic equivalent of Matter for the smart home. Google announced its Agent2Agent protocol in April, partnering with nearly 60 industry leaders, including many that are now supporting AI Agent Fabric. On the other hand, AGNTCY is an open-source initiative founded by a coalition of tech firms, including Cisco, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Gailieo, and Glean.
When asked how AI Agent Fabric stacks up to other protocols, Levy-Zilbershot shares that for ServiceNow, it’s “less about the protocol and more about the capability.” She points out that the company is working closely with Google and also supports Agent2Agent. In addition, ServiceNow is a fan of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and IBM’s Agent Communication Protocol (ACP). “We really look at ourselves as an open platform,” Levy-Zilbershot claims. “We will be able to support all the common protocols that are available out there, and make sure that our customers can benefit from all these great innovations. So if a system is only supporting a specific protocol, that should not block our customers. We should still be able to connect with that system. And that’s why it’s a fabric—it really includes everything.”
As ServiceNow deepens its AI strategy, tools like AI Agent Fabric will be essential, not only for building and supporting the autonomous agents powering digital labor, but also for staying competitive in the fast-moving enterprise AI landscape.
AI Agent Fabric is available to early adopters today, but will be generally available in Q3 2025.
Featured Image: An AI-generated image of a person inside a control tower supervising a group of robots working outside. Overlaid is ServiceNow's logo. Image credit: Ken Yeung/Adobe Firefly
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