You’re reading an issue of “The AI Economy,” my newsletter exploring the forces shaping the AI era—tracking how AI is rewriting business, work, technology, and culture. Subscribe to get expert insights and curated updates delivered straight to your inbox.
Enterprises have spent the past few years deploying AI across their organizations, only to find it stops short of actually finishing the job. Employees still navigate between applications, chase down approvals, and route their own requests. This is because most AI tools are built inside a single application, unable to cross the boundaries of departments and systems where work lives.
ServiceNow has made significant investments to address this problem. It acquired Moveworks for $2.85 billion to bring a conversational experience to employees in IT, HR, and finance. Then, it introduced its concept of the autonomous workforce and launched its Context Engine to provide AI agents with a unified view of enterprise data. Until now, that infrastructure has lived in the back end, invisible to the employee sitting at their desk.
On Tuesday at its Knowledge 2026 conference, ServiceNow unveils the front door: ServiceNow Otto. As Nenshad Bardoliwalla, the company’s group vice president of product management for AI products, describes it, “Otto is ServiceNow’s new AI experience that turns intent into enterprise work for every person and across every workflow.”
You Start It. Otto Finishes It.
With so many platform capabilities, it can be challenging to grasp the scale of what is possible on ServiceNow. Otto appears to be an effort to streamline the user experience by blending Now Assist, the AI Experience announced last September, and Moveworks. “Otto unites all of it on a new AI-native architecture,” Bardoliwalla says during a press briefing last week. “Truly agentic AI, multimodal interactions across every channel and autonomous orchestration for complex work.”
Similar to Microsoft’s Copilot, SAP’s Joule, and Salesforce’s Agentforce, ServiceNow’s Otto serves as a chat layer across the enterprise platform. Anyone can use it—employees, customers, and support teams—across any channel. They detail what they want done, and Otto handles the rest—routing requests, crossing systems, and completing work without employees needing to know which system is involved.
Beyond natural language requests, Otto can also search across an organization’s knowledge base—documents, wikis, databases, and SharePoint—and return answers personalized ot an employee’s role and location. It also handles voice requests in multiple languages and lets users query enterprise data in plain language to surface insights and analysis.
Any steps taken by Otto will be governed by ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower. Responses are also grounded in a customer’s data, policies, approval chains, and organizational structure.
What makes work completion possible is that ServiceNow already runs the workflows underneath—the approval chains, permissions, and cross-system processes that other AI tools have to reach across to access. Otto doesn’t finish the work itself; it hands off to a platform that already knows how to execute it.
Otto is already in use—first through ServiceNow EmployeeWorks and the AI-driven experiences governed by AI Control Tower. ServiceNow says EmployeeWorks closed six deals, each exceeding $1 million in net new annual contract value, within its first month, a result it attributes to Otto’s ability to complete work rather than just field requests.
“Employees no longer need to know where to go or who to ask,” Bhavin Shah, ServiceNow’s senior vice president and general manager of employee experience and AI, says in a statement. “They just ask ServiceNow Otto, and it can handle the rest within the guardrails the enterprise requires.”
Joining the Conversational Layer Trend
So, why Otto? ServiceNow didn’t say, but the name is likely an aptonym for “autonomous” (get it?)—apt for a company pushing agentic enterprise use cases where AI handles the work without employees having to orchestrate it themselves. With its declaration that the so-called “sidecar AI era” is over, ServiceNow is done with piecemeal AI. Otto is what that conviction looks like in practice.
That said, enterprise platforms are converging on the same idea: to replace the button-and-click interface with conversation. Salesforce embedded its platform into Slack. Adobe is rolling out AI assistants across Creative Cloud, such as Express. Workday has its Workday Assistant. Oracle has Fusion Cloud.
ServiceNow, with Otto, is making the same bet—that the chatbot is the new UI. It’s not an entirely new direction for the company; its AI Experience already laid that groundwork. Otto moves it forward, with Moveworks’ conversational intelligence now fully integrated into the platform.
For now, Otto is available through ServiceNow EmployeeWorks and AI Control Tower. The company plans to extend it across its full product portfolio through the rest of the year.
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: Credit: ServiceNow
