ServiceNow Puts AI in the Driver’s Seat With Autonomous Workforce and EmployeeWorks

The time for piloting AI in the enterprise is over. Businesses now “need AI that gets work done.” That’s the message from ServiceNow President and Chief Product and Operating Officer Amit Zavery, who says companies are demanding measurable gains in productivity and ROI at scale. In response, ServiceNow is announcing its Autonomous Workforce—AI specialists capable of tackling jobs without human handholding.

“The leaders realizing value from AI are investing in platforms where intelligence, execution, and trust work as one system. Our platform was purpose-built for this moment,” Zavery writes in a release. “Autonomous Workforce augments human teams with AI specialists that operate with the scope, authority, and governance enterprise work demands.”

This rollout also marks the first visible outcome of ServiceNow’s $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks. The company is introducing EmployeeWorks, a conversational AI and enterprise search portal designed to give employees a single entry point to work, knowledge, and automation.

The March of the Autonomous Workforce

Like its enterprise peers, ServiceNow is no novice in the agentic game. Its Now Assist bots are built to support IT, HR, customer service, and developer workflows. They’re domain-specific digital workers capable of reasoning over enterprise data and completing multi-step tasks intelligently. These efforts are paying off, with agentic use-case adoption growing 55 times over the third and fourth fiscal quarters last year. ServiceNow anticipates its AI-related offerings will generate over $1 billion this year alone.

Enter the Autonomous Workforce to kick things up a notch. Customer companies can deploy these intelligent specialists into their workflows, each with a dedicated role, whether as an IT specialist, an HR employee service agent, or a security operations analyst. And because they’re not sentient, they can operate 24/7/365 with no regard for sleep. We’re still a long way from AI that can think and operate like a human, but these new AI specialists may help move the needle and stay competitive against the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft.

The first of its kind to debut is a Level 1 Service Desk AI Specialist. While it won’t be available until Q2 2026, this assistant is equipped to resolve common workplace technology issues—such as password resets, software access provisioning, network troubleshooting, etc.—without human intervention as soon as an issue is detected or self-reported by an employee. “The AI specialist can diagnose the problem, determine the right resolution path, take corrective action, and close the incident,” John Aisien, ServiceNow’s senior vice president of product management, explains during a press briefing.

He adds that the assistant does all the work of figuring out how to solve the problem without handing it off to a “sentient human.” It will implement a fix and document the steps it took to resolve the issue before notifying impacted employees. Only if it has tried everything to identify the problem will it gather its findings and hand off the incident to a higher-level human specialist for triage and completion of the assignment.

Despite the autonomy these virtual workers have, ServiceNow asserts that human employees will remain in charge. It clarifies that, even though AI will handle routine, repeatable work within clear enterprise guidelines, humans remain accountable and involved whenever oversight is required. ServiceNow contends that while the bulk of the work is handled by the AI Specialist, the human can focus more on judgment and complex problem-solving, while also thinking more strategically.

The Level 1 Service Desk AI Specialist is only the first of many that ServiceNow will be releasing. Aisien discloses that the “notion of an Autonomous Workforce model will extend across functions—employee, services, security, operations, finance, legal, and beyond. The future of work isn’t about doing more with less, it’s about reclaiming human potential by focusing on what actually moves the business forward.” Developer support is also available, as the company doesn’t plan on building every job function itself. Rather, it’s more interested in creating a platform that makes every job function buildable.

From Task → Role Automation

It’s easy to simply label the Autonomous Workforce as just another type of bot, but ServiceNow disagrees.

“Bots were built to follow scripts. You define every branch, every condition. They can do good things inside the rails, but they’re not very good outside of them,” Nenshad Bardoliwalla, the company’s group vice president of product management for AI products, remarks. “Our specialists are fundamentally different—they are not following a script. They are designed to actually do the job. They understand the context. They can reason across the various systems, handle exceptions, and get better over time. They have the full knowledge of ServiceNow and external content available to them, and they have the resolved incidents that humans and other specialists have done.”

ServiceNow claims that its Autonomous Workforce operates within a clearly defined scope and role, with the role avoiding “critical prerequisites like toxic combinations of entitlements.” By default, they’re unable to move beyond their station, nor can they self-escalate permissions in memory based on reasoning outcomes. Responses are grounded in live enterprise data, including real-time information on assets, ownership, permissioning, previous resolution patterns, and ServiceNow’s context graph.

Over the past couple of years, tech companies have been pushing their visions for how AI will transform organizations—what does Digital Transformation mean in the intelligent age? Some are touting the rise of Frontier Firms, while others are promoting the agentic enterprise. Autonomous Workforce is ServiceNow’s effort to make its mark in this space.

Bardoliwalla contends that current market offerings are focused on individual, discrete tasks but aren’t “tied to the operational fabric and context of the organization.” With Autonomous Workforce, ServiceNow introduces role automation: a digital, virtualized employee representative that works within an organization’s system and is mandated to follow all its policies, regulations, and auditability requirements to function in an enterprise context.

Putting AI Specialists to the Test In-House

And just as Salesforce is doing with Agentforce, ServiceNow is running Autonomous Workforce internally. “Our own Autonomous Workforce already handles more than 90 percent of employee IT requests today, clearing backlog, speeding resolution, and increasing capacity without adding physical human headcount,” Aisien reveals. He goes on to share that the Level 1 Service Desk AI Specialist is now handling IT cases autonomously and resolving them “99 percent faster” compared to human agents.

No word on whether, like Salesforce, these AI assistants will result in personnel reassignment due to efficiency gains.

EmployeeWorks: The Conversational Front Door of the Enterprise?

When ServiceNow acquired MoveWorks in December, the aim was to capitalize on the employee AI interface and knowledge layer. Today, we see that the deal is bearing fruit with the launch of ServiceNow EmployeeWorks, available now.

“Over the last two years, organizations have raced to adopt AI, but in many cases, that rush has created fragmented tools, disconnected AI experiences, partial insights and employees bouncing between systems just to get simple things done,” Bhavin Shah, Moveworks’ founder and chief executive, remarks. But, he continues, “if we want AI to truly become part of the workforce and workflows, it has to start at the conversational front door, a place where employees ask for help. It’s where the work actually begins, where it’s conceived, and first pops into their head.”

EmployeeWorks brings together Movework’s AI with ServiceNow’s AI Experience and Autonomous Workforce. It’s designed to be used wherever employees are already working, including Slack and Microsoft Teams. Think of it as an AI assistant equipped with an agentic reasoning engine that understands intent and can plan and execute to get things done for an employee.

Although workers may see benefits from using EmployeeWorks, its capabilities sound similar to those of Glean, Atlassian’s Rovo, HubSpot’s Breeze, Dropbox’s Dash, and even Salesforce’s Slack. Shah points out that EmployeeWorks supports MCP and A2A protocols and can complete tasks such as opening a policy document in SharePoint, referencing a Slack thread, handling and routing approvals, orchestrating workflows, updating systems, and more.

And for customers worried that EmployeeWorks could be a precursor to folding Moveworks into ServiceNow, Shah reassures them that it will continue as a standalone product. “Organizations can acquire the Moveworks platform as an independent AI solution running on any platform or as an integrated component of their ServiceNow deployment, ensuring flexibility in the enterprise-wide implementations that we’ve become so good at,” he declares.

More Autonomy Requires More Orchestration

“What makes this uniquely powerful isn’t any single experience or agent,” Aisien explains. “It’s that all of this work—human, digital, and AI—is intentionally coordinated, governed, and scaled across the enterprise with the AI Control Tower.”

Introduced in May 2025, the AI Control Tower is ServiceNow’s hub to manage all of an organization’s agents. “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,” Zavery remarked at the time. “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.”

As AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, robust orchestration tooling is vital for organizations, especially if they’re willing to have the Autonomous Workforce handle entire tasks with minimal human handholding.

“AI Control Tower ensures that work moves end-to-end across the enterprise with the right balance of autonomy and human judgment, and it does it security, responsibly, and in line with the real-world business needs and the guardrails that are a prerequisite for you executing work digitally,” Aisien states.

Responding to the SaaSpocalypse

Today’s announcement comes amid concerns of a so-called “SaaSpocalypse,” a time in which SaaS companies are experiencing rapid devaluation in the public markets. The event this time is believed to be triggered by AI. In response to being asked how ServiceNow is navigating the waters, Aisien waves off the chatter as being nothing more than market noise.

“The market’s going to do what the market’s going to do, but what’s real and explicitly measurable is the true business value that we’re delivering for our customers, prospects, and partners.”

He emphasizes that the company “will continue to take advantage of intelligence that arises from this once-in-a-generation set of innovations powered by the foundation models. They are critical spokes that basically enable our hub—the deterministic and agentic execution layer—to spin even more quickly. You can expect more to come as we essentially integrate additional spokes onto the ServiceNow hubs.”

Continuing, Aisien points out that the company won’t stop developing and bringing these spokes, powered by OpenAI IP, Anthropic, Google, etc to market. “We like our positioning. This hub is really where work truly gets done, and as long as we focus on incrementing the value that that hub is delivering to the enterprise, we expect the current trend to essentially become a tailwind that generates value to our customers, partners, and ultimately to our shareholders.”

Featured Image: Credit: ServiceNow