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The average sales rep spends just 10 hours a week actually talking to customers, according to Ipsos research. Security teams watch vulnerability backlogs grow faster than they can triage them. HR desks generate more than 40 million cases a year—most of it routine, repeatable, and stubbornly manual. The problem isn’t talent. It’s that the work eating up the day was never designed by humans in the first place.
ServiceNow thinks it has an answer. When the company introduced its Autonomous Workforce concept in February, it planted a flag: AI shouldn’t just assist, it should finish the job. The opening move was a Level 1 Service Desk specialist, an assistant that’s now available. And on Tuesday, at Knowledge 2026, the company is going much further, expanding its autonomous workforce across IT operations, site reliability, CRM, HR, security, procurement, and risk. It’s essentially every major business function where routine work crowds out meaningful work.
The push toward digital labor isn’t unique to ServiceNow. From Salesforce’s Agentforce and Microsoft’s 365 Copilot to Workday’s Illuminate agents and SAP’s Joule framework, nearly every major enterprise platform vendor seems to have reached the same understanding: AI agents will be shouldering far more operational work than humans do today. For ServiceNow, the answer is role-scoped AI specialists purpose-built to handle the repetitive, high-volume work that consumes human time—freeing people to focus on the decisions and relationships that actually require them.
Referring to technology that merely recommends or surfaces insights, leaving it to human workers to execute, Amit Zavery, ServiceNow’s president, chief product and operating officer, declares, “Advisory AI has run its course…Enterprises need AI that senses, decides, and securely acts in accordance with organizational guardrails.”
The Growing AI Specialist Workforce
Like Salesforce, ServiceNow is a fan of dogfooding its AI agents. For example, it has deployed the L1 IT Service Desk AI Specialist on its help desk and reports that it has successfully resolved support tickets 99 percent faster than human agents. Buoyed by its success, ServiceNow is moving forward with new IT specialists that can handle infrastructure monitoring, site reliability, asset lifecycle, portfolio planning, and more.
Here are the new AI IT Specialists being introduced today:
- AIOps Specialist: Intelligently detects anomalies, correlates events, and triggers remediation.
- SRE Specialist: Tasked with handling incident triage and postmortem documentation from end-to-end, freeing up IT teams to focus on strategic infrastructure investment and not be reactive firefighters.
- Common IT Workflow IT Specialists: ServiceNow says these AI agents will create visibility into hardware, software, and cloud assets across their lifecycle, and connect demand to capacity, budget, and resource availability.
While the L1 IT Service Desk AI Specialist is available today, the other IT AI Specialists won’t be launching until June 2026.
Autonomous CRM
A year ago, ServiceNow unveiled its AI-native Salesforce competitor to the world. But it wasn’t as if the company didn’t have a CRM to begin with. “This is a nine-year overnight success,” Terence Chesire, ServiceNow’s group vice president for CRM and industry workflows, told The AI Economy in May 2025. “We’ve been in the CRM market for that long, with customer service to start.”
ServiceNow’s vision with its CRM is to reframe why the platform is needed. It isn’t to open a ticket or log an interaction; it’s to resolve the underlying request. Chesire says that with legacy CRMs, the software tracks interactions, but doesn’t finish them. Customers get routed, given instructions, or handed off—the resolution still depends on a human navigating multiple disconnected systems. What ServiceNow CRM is built to do is replace the need for workers to rely on spreadsheets, informal workarounds, and shadow systems. Instead, have one platform that owns the entire workflow.
“Manual CRM isn’t working. Customer data is fragmented across systems. Sales reps and service agents are functioning as human middleware—copying, pasting, routing—because their systems do not actually get work done,” Chesire said in a press briefing last week. “The time that should be spent with customers is instead spent serving the CRM system.”
To address this, ServiceNow created the Autonomous CRM. It’s still a CRM at its core, but built around workflow completion rather than interaction logging. AI has made it easier for people to engage with systems through voice, text, or images—but Chesire argues that only exposes a deeper problem. “AI without workflows is just expensive advice,” he says. The problem is what happens after a customer makes a complex request. Resolving it can mean manually navigating operations, legal, inventory, fulfillment, finance, supply chain, and more—each a separate system, each requiring a human to bridge the gap.
“A vibe-coded [user interface] on top of a broken foundation doesn’t resolve the request. It just makes disappointment happen much faster,” Chesire remarks, adding that this is why sales and service leaders aren’t seeing the expected returns from AI. “Bolting AI into a cloud database and a patchwork of apps is the wrong approach—that’s what makes ServiceNow’s Autonomous CRM unique.”
One of the core features of this updated offering is the inclusion of AI specialists trained across the entire customer lifecycle. ServiceNow has developed agents tailored for sales qualification and quoting, order fulfillment, invoice disputes, service, and renewals. Already, this platform is delivering results, with ServiceNow reporting it has resolved 100 million cases, orchestrated over 16 million orders, and configured more than seven million quotes.
The CRM AI Specialists are now generally available.
Autonomous Employee Services
The back office also faces its own challenges, from rising case volumes to service desks dependent on manual triage. ServiceNow has built digital employees with role-specific skills to help alleviate the workload. There are now dedicated AI specialists for HR, workplace services, legal, finance, procurement, supplier management, and health and safety. The company says these agents have successfully resolved 91 percent of cases without reassignment.
All of the employee services AI specialists are now available.
Autonomous Security and Risk
Lastly, ServiceNow is introducing AI specialists to assist security and risk teams with protecting company infrastructure. Today, IT professionals are overwhelmed by rapidly discovered vulnerabilities, supercharged AI-driven attack surface expansion, a growing number of phishing incidents that require probing disconnected tools, and more.
The new Autonomous Security and Risk AI specialists will tackle the growing backlog of work, autonomously triaging and remediating vulnerabilities, investigating and containing [Security Operations Center] incidents, all while keeping humans in the loop.
ServiceNow reveals these security and risk AI specialists will be available for preview in June and is expected to publicly launch in September.
Disclosure: I’m attending ServiceNow’s Knowledge 26 as a guest of the company, with my flights and hotel stay paid for. The AI Economy’s coverage is editorially independent from those that it covers. These words are my own.Featured Image: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott delivers the keynote address at the company's Knowledge 2025 conference on May 6, 2025. Credit: Ken Yeung
