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.
Walking through the Venetian Convention and Expo Center in Las Vegas on a Wednesday afternoon in May, I navigate through the crowds and vendor booths before arriving at a section called the “Playground.” It’s here where I find Jayney Howson, ServiceNow’s chief learning officer.
This wasn’t our first meeting: In 2025, we spoke on the sidelines of the company’s Knowledge conference ahead of the launch of ServiceNow University. We were back to talk about year two. But every so often, our conversation would naturally pause, and in those moments, conference attendees would wander over just to say hello to her. Around here, Howson is something of a celebrity—and she took it in stride, welcoming each person warmly before turning back to me. It’s not hard to understand why: she and her team have built something that now counts two million learners, two-thirds of the way to the three million ServiceNow initially set out to reach.
At this rate, the company will likely exceed its goal by next year’s conference. Howson acknowledged the possibility and wondered if she should start thinking about a stretch goal. However, that wasn’t really her main focus. “We’re going to keep getting bigger. We want to go deeper with that learning, though,” she said. “It’s good enough to get people [at the] top of the funnel. I want to pull them down and get more of them credentialed, more of them certified.”
The platform isn’t an original concept. It competes alongside similar offerings from Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, SAP, AWS, and IBM, not to mention LinkedIn Learning and Coursera. But ServiceNow is taking a different approach, one deliberately centered on play—the idea that failure is part of learning, not a detour from it. At this year’s Knowledge, the company doubled down on that philosophy, transforming an entire section of the expo hall into what could be colorfully described as Nintendo World for enterprise tech.
“We call ServiceNow University a playground for learning very purposely because it uses the science of play to trigger our prefrontal cortex,” Howson explained. “We wanted to create a space that feels almost child-like in its awe and wonder. This is the first time that we’ve combined ServiceNow University with community and brought it all together. What we realize is that all these people have so much knowledge, we want them to learn all together, from each other, all in one place.”
ServiceNow’s Playground consisted of a dozen activations, described as being “faithful versions of what’s happening online,” and was structured as a gamified system. Each activity earned participants 50 points—the more activities completed, the higher the level reached and the better the prizes. “It creates the idea that you want to keep coming back and learning more,” Howson said. And the points aren’t lost now that Knowledge is over—they became part of each participant’s learner profile.
An AI Guide to Help With Learning
This interactive area also gave ServiceNow a chance to showcase two new features added to ServiceNow University: AI Learning Guide and SimStudio. Both are designed to give learners a clearer path through the platform, so they feel they’re getting real value rather than blindly choosing courses they think best suit their role.
The AI Learning Guide functions as a personal coach embedded directly into ServiceNow University. Rather than leaving learners to scroll through a catalog of 1,500 courses and guess what’s relevant to their role, it asks questions, surfaces a personalized path, and provides real-time feedback along the way. A system administrator in financial services, for example, gets different guidance than one working in manufacturing. Powered by Otto, ServiceNow’s conversational AI experience, the tool can also help learners think through career transitions—mapping out what skills they need to move from an admin role into a developer or platform owner position. It’s less a course catalog and more a conversation with someone who already knows the curriculum.
SimStudio is described as a hands-on simulation environment where learners can practice real ServiceNow tasks rather than simply watching videos or completing quizzes. It observes not only whether a learner finished a course but also how they worked through the exercises. It flags whether best practices were followed and offers feedback and alternative methods accordingly.
To start, however, SimStudio is being piloted for two courses—ITSM fundamentals and administration fundamentals—, but ServiceNow said it plans to roll the tool out to more courses in the future.
AI has always been a part of ServiceNow University, but it functioned more like a recommendation engine. It understood what a learner knew or didn’t know and what was important to them. Then, it surfaced relevant courses for them. Now, AI is embedded directly into the platform where the learning actually happens. It’s not part of a separate course or lab—it’s watching the learner work through the skill in real-time. “Previously, we were AI-powered,” Howson said. “This is a completely AI-native way of looking at learning.”
She suggested that with this approach, technical training that once may have taken five weeks could now be completed in roughly five hours, “with an improved observability. We have improved confidence in someone’s ability versus them doing the course.” It’s an ambitious claim, and one that ServiceNow will ultimately need real-world data to back up.
A Crowded Playground
ServiceNow isn’t the first software company to turn its learning platform into a conference spectacle. Salesforce, for example, has made Trailhead a centerpiece of its flagship Dreamforce conference for years, even creating a visible symbol of achievement in the form of gold jackets awarded to standout Trailblazer and Agentblazer community members. The idea is the same: use the energy of a live event to make learning feel like something worth showing up for.
Other enterprise tech firms, such as Okta and Adobe, also promote learning at their conferences, though the emphasis tends to be on certification pathways rather than the kind of immersive experience ServiceNow has built. Howson keeps an eye on the competition, but she doesn’t lose sleep over it.
“I am not here to make money from training,” she said. “I am here to make sure that our customers can unlock the platform, and that means they need individuals who are as informed as possible. My North Star is [that] I need to keep redesigning learning so it’s as easy as possible to get there.”
Howson noted that she put most of her focus closer to home, making sure ServiceNow University keeps pace with a platform that ships new releases each month, with “thousands of products, innovations” that need support. In addition, Howson wanted to ensure that her learning platform remains like a playground, encouraging people to “feel safe to be outside their comfort zone.”
“We all can remember being a kid and feeling like we were safe,” she said. “This needs to feel like you’re safe to push yourself and not get it right the first time.”
The stakes for getting this right extend beyond the playground. Despite the rapid proliferation of AI tools across the enterprise, adoption remains uneven—is it because of the disconnected systems? Data problems? Slow-to-respond management? Employee skepticism? Howson believed organizations aren’t doing enough to bring their workers along. “Humans want to be as proficient as possible,” she said. “But they’re scared.” The solution, in her view, was straightforward: leaders need to understand the moment, provide the right tools, and then get out of their employees’ way.
It’s an argument that conveniently doubles as a pitch for her own platform. ServiceNow University, with AI Learning Guide surfacing personalized learning paths and SimStudio observing competency in real time, is designed to do precisely that, guiding workers through the process without requiring hand-holding.
More Than a Participation Trophy
But getting people into ServiceNow University is only half the battle. The harder question is what a certification from the platform is actually worth, and whether accelerating the path to one diminishes the credential itself.
“A skill without a signal has no economic value,” Howson said. She noted that there are hundreds of ServiceNow’s most elite certifications in existence today, each commanding significant premiums in the market precisely because earning one is genuinely difficult. Speed up the process too much, and it risks undermining the value entirely. At ServiceNow, that concern has a name: Minimum Viable Duration. “We need to make sure that learning doesn’t become so short that it’s got no value,” Howson added. “We need to make sure it’s got proof of validation. It’s an art and a science.”
Testing and validation remain “critically important” for assessing capabilities, she insisted, but the time spent should not define readiness. She pointed to the legal profession as an example: Could AI compress the path to becoming a lawyer from five years to five months? You might get there faster, Howson reasoned, but you wouldn’t necessarily be a great one. “It’s experience and wisdom that takes time to build,” she said.
The playground, it turns out, is the easy part. What happens after–the certification, the credential, the signal that tells the market you actually know what you’re doing—that’s where the real work begins.
Updated on 5/26/2026: Corrected Jayney Howson’s title from senior vice president and head of global learning and development to chief learning officer.
Disclosure: I attended 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.
