ServiceNow is giving its AI Control Tower new features to make AI agents more governable — and a new name, Super Intelligence Control Tower (SICT), to please the US President. It is also updating EmployeeWorks to make building AI agents easier.

AI Passport, a new component of SICT, gives every agent, whether from ServiceNow or a third party, a verifiable identity, and provides runtime control over its activities.

As enterprises scale autonomous agents from pilots to production, they are facing new challenges, said Nenshad Bardoliwalla, SVP of AI product management at ServiceNow: “If companies can’t identify which agents are running, what they are doing, and what systems they can access, then scaling quickly becomes a risk.”

An AI Passport is a cryptographically signed credential for AI agents that is checked at runtime to verify the scope authorized by the enterprise. When an AI agent stays within its passport scope, it can operate freely, but if it tries to deviate, defined actions are enforced. These can include redirecting, restricting, or reconnecting the agent with proper context, or even triggering a kill switch. All actions are audited so agent activity can be tracked.

It is built on open specifications, so any governance product, identity provider, or enforcement point can issue and verify credentials for their own and third-party AI agents, and those credentials are verifiable at every step in multi-agent workflows.

A bouncer at every door

This is a real step forward, said Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research. “Most agent governance today is a security camera. It records what happened so someone can review the tape later. AI Passport is a bouncer at every door.”

The controls extend beyond ServiceNow’s own agents, he said: “For third-party agents, the passport replaces the agent’s own ‘claims’ about its permissions,” he said. “Taking an agent’s word for what it is allowed to do is an Achilles’ heel of agentic AI.”

And, he said, “A passport is only as trustworthy as the office that issues it. Here, the issuing office is ServiceNow’s CMDB, its GRC policies, and its workflow approvals. If that data is stale, the passport is stale. Credit ServiceNow for building on open specifications, but an open spec matters only when others adopt it. Nvidia is the launch partner, and ServiceNow says that enforcement implementation is still being built.”

In addition to AI Passport, ServiceNow has further beefed up its governance tools with a number of other features, including shadow-AI detection to locate unapproved agents on the network; more than 400 connectors to enable AI discovery across platforms and vendors; access mapping; and continuous enterprise AI observability.

It also announced cost governance; “value intelligence” that connects consumption, cost, quality, and “realized user value” to help teams optimize their AI use; AI cost management as part of ServiceNow IT Asset Management, which integrates with the Control Tower; and policy enforcement.

AI Passport, Shadow AI detection, and AI Cost Management are expected to be available by year end.

EmployeeWorks enhancements

The third generation of ServiceNow EmployeeWorks now lets employees add automations to the autonomous AI personal assistants they build. ToolSmith is a new agentic developer environment that takes tool building “from days to minutes,” the company said.

What companies have been trying to do, said Bhavin Shah, SVP of ServiceNow’s employee experience group, “is to give developers a way to build, but in a way that’s governed, that allows them to stay within the guardrails and the controls that that are required in order to do the kinds of safe but deep and capable work that they want for their constituents inside the company.”

ToolSmith helps address that problem. It’s a vibe-coding environment with which developers can build automations for ServiceNow EmployeeWorks AI assistants by describing what they need in natural language. ServiceNow said ToolSmith was trained on over 75,000 APIs and optimized for reliability and token efficiency. Developers can test and refine its output using the same conversational interface.

ServiceNow said that ToolSmith also identifies what to build next, scanning logs “to identify opportunities to fix, improve, or invent the next best workflow.”

Non-coding employees, on the other hand, can build new Productivity Assistants to perform contextual or persona-based work including long-running tasks, the company said. There are also pre-built assistants available, beginning with several for HR service delivery.

EmployeeWorks itself includes two assistants out of the box: a research assistant that can scan internal and external sources for answers, based on the user’s role, and a calendaring assistant that, ServiceNow said, “goes beyond typical calendar booking solutions by orchestrating nuanced requests like scheduling quarterly one-on-ones with an entire team on days that minimize disruption to project work or finding the least hectic day to bring together a team for a full day workshop. “

To automate repetitive tasks, Productivity Routines run proactively in the background, repeating routine steps and providing deliverables without human intervention. Employees just have to describe what they want to automate, select the necessary tools, and deploy the routine.

“The principle is right,” Dickson said. “The people closest to the work understand the problem best.”

But, he added, “the guardrails are only as good as the decisions behind them. Productivity Routines, by ServiceNow’s description, run in the background without human intervention. That is unsupervised work, and someone should own it.”

All of these EmployeeWorks enhancements are in controlled availability now.

Bottom line

Melody Brue, analyst in residence at Moor Insights & Strategy, said the announcements are a sign that ServiceNow is extending its existing security and workflow controls into a broader role in governing agent actions across systems.

“AI Passport makes identity and authorized scope verifiable, Control Tower provides oversight and enforcement, and ToolSmith expands the tools and connectors through which agents can act within enterprise guardrails,” she said, adding that with CEO Bill McDermott’s recent positioning of ServiceNow as a security company, “This suggests an ambition to become a control point for enterprise autonomy.”

But, she said, “What matters now is how consistently ServiceNow can enforce boundaries and verify outcomes across the systems agents actually touch.”

Dickson, too, has concerns.

“ServiceNow says Control Tower tracks spending by user, department, and runtime, and ties that spend to quality and value. The brake is another matter,” he noted. “The graduated alert, throttle, and block enforcement is described in future tense, as is the AI Cost Management integration, which is expected by year end.”

However, “a meter you can watch is not a brake,” he said. “A Productivity Routine that runs every morning is a standing purchase order. Someone should sign it.”

Give every agent and every routine a named owner and a budget before it goes live, he advised, and ask ServiceNow how assists are counted for background routines and whether hard caps exist today. Turn on throttling the day it ships, and reconcile its dashboards against your own invoices.

But despite these concerns, he said, ServiceNow has the right idea. “An agent should carry its permissions, its manager, and its budget wherever it goes. But until the brakes ship, that budget is a decision a person still has to make.”

ServiceNow has a new take on the service desk: Flow by ServiceNow, a standalone AI product that allows users to get help via chats in Microsoft Teams, Slack, or a Flow web app, or by email, rather than having to leave what they’re doing to open a helpdesk ticket.

Flow can be up and running within a day, no implementation project or infrastructure required, the company said. The product can stand alone or plug into the ServiceNow platform for customers who need enterprise scale, governance, and cross-functional workflows, it said.

It’s a smart move, said Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research. “The pitch is what Flow does not require. ServiceNow claims Flow can be running in a day with no implementation project, no CMDB migration, and no infrastructure. Every item on that list is something its flagship ITSM platform does require. ServiceNow is selling the absence of its own complexity,” he said.

Flow will connect to more than 100 systems through pre-built connectors. If the AI can’t surface the information it needs to fulfill a request from available data sources, Flow will escalate the issue to a human. Frequent requests, such as those for password resets, can easily be automated by IT, ServiceNow said.

Cost of consumption

Customers don’t need an existing ServiceNow implementation to use Flow; as soon as it goes live, it can handle user requests. Pricing will be consumption-based.

ServiceNow customers who subscribe to its AI services will also be able to deploy Flow with no additional licensing costs; they will just pay for consumption via assists from their existing pool.

The product is currently available at no charge during what ServiceNow refers to as Controlled Availability. Organizations seeking early access can sign up on the Flow website.

Flow is now available to current ServiceNow customers in North America, and the company plans to make it generally available in North America and EMEA by year-end. Wider availability will follow in the first quarter of 2027, a company representative said.

Melody Brue, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said that Flow is a logical next step for ServiceNow. “The company built its business around digitizing work that historically moved through tickets, forms, portals, and manual handoffs,” she noted. “The AI opportunity is to make that same operational depth easier to access through conversation and, increasingly, voice.”

Headless trade-off

Dickson said Flow rides a larger trend toward headless software, in which the engine runs in the background and uses someone else’s user interface, in this case Slack or Teams. But it’s a trade-off: “ServiceNow describes its platform as a single pane of glass. With Flow, it hands the glass to someone else. Whoever owns the interface owns the daily habit, and in headless software, the habit may become the relationship.”

That said, Brue saw Flow as a good fit for today’s market. “Customers want AI with a clear use case, quick time to value, and proof that it can do more than generate answers,” she said. “They want it to resolve real work. A standalone product also gives ServiceNow a lower-friction place to land (with the goal of expanding), reaching customers that may not be ready or have time for a full platform rollout.”

But, she said, while many vendors offer AI assistants, “the real test is whether this can reliably complete work across systems, with the right permissions, approvals, and human handoffs. ServiceNow has a credible foundation in workflow and service operations. The question is whether it can make that enterprise depth simple and fast enough to deploy for the product-led AI market it is targeting.”

With the current fierce competition to capture “the front door of work,” she said, “ServiceNow’s opportunity is to differentiate not just on the conversational experience, but on its ability to carry a request through governed workflow, approval, and fulfillment across systems.”

The once stable era of IT service management (ITSM) has entered a period of disruption and uncertainty. At least if you’re an investor or enterprise customer with an interest in ITSM giant ServiceNow, the signals over recent months have been hard to ignore.

Last year, the category leader delivered market-pleasing AI announcements, a record share price, and good quarterly revenue growth, as well as an interesting pivot toward cybersecurity with the December acquisition of partner Armis for $7.75 billion in cash.

But as the calendar turned to 2026, the phrase “Saas apocalypse” started to gain traction, and market sentiment about SaaS incumbents suddenly melted away, causing ServiceNow’s share price to drop 30% by mid-2026, albeit from historic highs.

What’s driving anxiety is the perception that AI agents and vibe-coding tools will soon took over many of the previously complex workflow, automation, and software tasks carried out traditionally by subscription platforms, including ServiceNow’s. Customers will stop buying SaaS subscriptions because they won’t need employees or “seats” to do this work. Instead, cheaper internal AI tools, or larger cloud platforms doing the same job, will simply automate the market away.

While some enterprise IT leaders are in fact empowering business users to vibe code their own solutions, the model for replacing vendors with vibe-coded apps remains edgy business. As a result, SaaS isn’t likely dying any more than on-premises software, though CIOs are still reimagining software’s future as AI agents advance.

So too is ServiceNow, including how it expects IT leaders to finance that future. The company’s June Financial Analyst Day 2026 presentation confirmed a shift away from subscriptions based on seats is already under way, with only 50% of the company’s Net New Annual Contract Value (SaaS jargon for new revenue) in 2025 coming from this source. Instead, growth is increasingly generated by “consumed” services such as infrastructure, integrations and connectors, AI token consumption, and cybersecurity.

AI convergence

AI is causing previously distinct sectors such as ITSM and cybersecurity to converge, with AI itself turning into a unifying AIOps front end to diverse, specialized technologies sitting below it. In this, ServiceNow looks well-placed, having added the Virtual Agent chatbot system to its Now platform as long ago as 2018, later reinforced by acquisitions, including search outfit Element AI, chatbot company Passage AI, and AIOps pioneer Loom Systems. In 2025, this evolution crystalized as the ServiceNow AI Platform, a rebranded Now platform augmented by unifying features such as the AI Control Tower.

In traditional ITSM, the platform helps teams build workflows without the need for coding in a way that simplifies complex processes. AI takes this a step further; now it becomes possible not only to generate a workflow but reason and act on it. In this, AI and ITSM look like a natural combination as each enhances the usefulness of the other.

But building a better AI front end or adding automation to workflows gets you only so far, which makes the company’s Armis acquisition, its largest ever, intriguing. Unlike previous ServiceNow acquisitions with a cybersecurity theme — Veza in 2025, Mission Secure in 2024 — Armis’s agentless platform is more than an information gathering system. It can also orchestrate actions such as isolation and blocking across a wide range of devices, including workstations, routers, switches, firewalls, and the long tail of often forgotten medical scanners and IoT devices.

Nevertheless, it is the ability to build an accurate inventory that explains why the acquisition happened at an eye-watering 23 times annual revenue, says Brad LaPorte, a former Gartner analyst who now works with Lionfish Tech Advisors. ServiceNow didn’t buy Armis to sell it as a cybersecurity sideline because its $340 million annual revenue and annual growth rate are too small to justify that.

“Nobody pays 23 times revenue for a product. They pay for a position. That single financial fact explains most of what customers are about to experience, good and bad,” says LaPorte. The limitation of today’s ITSM and configuration management database (CMDB) systems is that workflows assume the CMDB is accurate when it’s often a work of fiction.

“Everyone reconciles to it. Nobody believes it. Every attack surface tool on the market can tell you what it found. Not one of them can tell you who is going to fix it by Friday,” LaPorte says.

So, buying Armis is less about adding cybersecurity than supercharging the company’s traditional ITSM workflows, which have recently been given an AI makeover. At the same time, by making its platform appealing to hospitals, utilities, and manufacturing, ServiceNow can attract customers in completely new sectors.

According to LaPorte, ServiceNow customers should be alert to the ways this changes their relationship. Customers are likely to experience Armis being heavily marketed to them at contract renewal. In theory, this is good, assuming they can refuse. But they might find that the financial engineering and incentives behind this could be complex to untangle and don’t always work in their favor over the contract period.

Armis will also bring ServiceNow into competition with a new set of rivals, LaPorte notes, and bring into the fold a new buyer, the CISO, it has never previously had to win over. CISOs are skeptical by nature as well as sensitive to the occasional security weaknesses that have affected ServiceNow itself.

“Armis was Switzerland. It integrated with everybody, including every ITSM platform that competes with ServiceNow. That neutrality was part of the product,” LaPorte says. “That is gone now. This just moved everybody’s negotiating position.”

Consumption pricing

Several experts spoken to for this article agreed that the SaaS apocalypse idea is overblown in relation to ServiceNow. Its incumbency protects it from AI because reproducing ServiceNow’s capabilities using vibe-coded AI could prove more challenging than people assume. However, there is consensus that the convergence of AIOps and cybersecurity will be highly disruptive in the ITSM sector.

“ServiceNow is competing with Microsoft, which can bundle, and with the model vendors, who are climbing up into the application layer,” argues Lionfish Tech Advisors CEO Rob Smith, another ex-Gartner analyst. “ServiceNow’s defense is not that it has a better model, which it doesn’t. Its defense is that it knows the steps in your process, and that is expensive to re-create.”

Chris Selland, founder of research company Differential Factor, who lectures at Northeastern University on entrepreneurship and disruption (and has written on SaaS for CIO.com), agrees that ServiceNow’s Armis acquisition looks like an important piece of a puzzle.

“The Armis deal extends that map into everything that was never in the CMDB, such as IoT and medical devices. It’s a defense of their asset graph,” he says. And the company probably sees itself as having something to defend. “ServiceNow is in around 90% of the Fortune 500, so yes this is fundamentally a ‘sell more to the base’ strategy,” argues Selland.

“The threat was never that AI writes competing enterprise software; it’s seat compression and the collapse of per-seat pricing. That threatens the SaaS industry’s core revenue model,” Selland contends.

ServiceNow understands this, which is why it is moving toward a consumption-based model. The question is how this will change the balance of power with customers at a time when open-source and open-weight models are driving down AI pricing and competition is fierce, including from large cloud platforms.

With more players competing for business against specialists such as ServiceNow, this could give buyers a lot more leverage if they understand how to manage hidden cost traps.

“Consumption-based pricing is much better for both buyers and sellers than seat-based pricing, although it can lead to nasty surprises for buyers if they’re not careful about monitoring what their employees are doing,” Selland says.