The energy at ServiceNow’s Knowledge25 matched the company’s ambitious direction! ServiceNow is repositioning itself as more than just an IT service platform – aiming to be the orchestration layer for the modern enterprise. Over the past two days, I’ve seen a clear focus on platform extensibility, AI-driven automation, and a push into new functional territories like CRM and ERP.
Here are my key takeaways from Knowledge25.
Click here to download “ServiceNow Knowledge25: Big Moves, Bold Bets, and What’s Next” as a PDF.
AI Everywhere: Agents and Control Towers
ServiceNow goes all in on AI Agents – and makes it easy to adopt.
Like Google, Salesforce, and AWS, ServiceNow is betting big on agents. But with a key advantage: it’s already the enterprise layer where workflows live. Its AI Agents don’t just automate tasks; they amplify what’s already working, layer in intelligence, and collaborate with other agents across systems. ServiceNow becomes the orchestration hub, just as it already is for processes and change.
ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower is a critical accelerator for AI at scale. It enforces policies, ensures compliance with internal and regulatory standards, and provides the guardrails needed to deploy AI responsibly and confidently.
The bigger move? Removing friction. Most employees don’t know what agents can do – so they don’t ask. ServiceNow solves this with hundreds of prebuilt agents across finance, risk, IT, service, CRM, and more. No guesswork. Just plug and go.
Sitting Above Silos: ServiceNow’s Architectural Advantage
ServiceNow is finally highlighting its architectural edge.
It’s one of the few platforms that can sit above all systems of record – pulling in data as needed, delivering workflows to employees and customers, and pushing updates back into core systems. While most Asia Pacific customers use ServiceNow mainly for IT help desk and service requests, its potential extends much further. Virtually anything done in ERP, CRM, SCM, or HRM systems can be delivered through ServiceNow, often with far greater agility. Workflow changes that once took weeks or months can now happen instantly.
ServiceNow is leaning into this capability more forcefully than ever, positioning itself as the platform that can finally keep pace with constant business change.
Stepping into the Ring: ServiceNow’s CRM & ERP Ambitions
ServiceNow is expanding into CRM and ERP workflows – putting itself in competition with some of the industry’s biggest players.
ServiceNow is boldly targeting CRM as a growth area, despite Salesforce’s dominance, by addressing gaps traditional CRMs miss. Customer workflows extend far beyond sales and service, spanning fulfillment, delivery, supply chain, and compliance. A simple quoting process, for instance, often pulls data from multiple systems. ServiceNow covers the full scope, positioning itself as the platform that orchestrates end-to-end customer workflows from a fundamentally different angle.
Its Core Business Suite – an AI-powered solution that transforms core processes like HR, procurement, finance, and legal – also challenges traditional ERP providers, With AI-driven automation for tasks like case management, it simplifies workflows and streamlines operations across departments.
Closing the Skills Gap: ServiceNow University
To support its vision, ServiceNow is investing heavily in education.
The refreshed ServiceNow University aims to certify 3 million professionals by 2030. This is critical to build both demand (business leaders who ask for ServiceNow) and supply (professionals who can implement and extend the platform).
But the skills shortage is a now problem, not a 2030 problem. ServiceNow must go beyond online learning and push harder on in-person classes, tutorials, and train-the-trainer programs across Asia Pacific. Major cloud providers like AWS broke through when large enterprises started training their entire workforces – not just on usage, but on development. ServiceNow needs similar scale and commitment to hit the mainstream.
Asia Pacific: ServiceNow’s Next Growth Frontier
ServiceNow’s potential is massive – and its opportunities even bigger.
In Asia Pacific, many implementations are partner-led, but most partners are currently focused on the platform’s legacy IT capabilities. To unlock growth, ServiceNow needs to empower its partners to engage beyond IT and connect with business leaders.
Despite broader challenges like shrinking tech budgets, fragmented decision-making, and decentralised tech ownership, ServiceNow has a clear path forward. By upskilling partners, simplifying its narrative, and adapting quickly, it’s well-positioned to continue its growth and surpass the hurdles many other software vendors face.
Many years ago – back in 2003 – I spent some quality time with BMC at their global analyst event in Phoenix, Arizona and they introduced the concept of “Business Service Management” (BSM). I was immediately a convert – that businesses can focus their IT Service Management initiatives on the business and customer services that the technology supports. Businesses that use BSM can have an understanding of the impact and importance of technology systems and assets because there is a direct link between these assets and the systems they support. A router that supports a customer payment platform suddenly becomes a much higher priority than one that supports an employee expense platform.
But for most businesses, this promise was never delivered. Creating a BSM solution became a highly manual process – mapping processes, assets, and applications. Many businesses that undertook this challenge reported that by the time they had mapped their processes, the map was out of date – as processes had changed; assets had been retired, replaced, or upgraded; software had been moved to the cloud or new modules had been implemented; and architectures had changed. Effectively their BSM mapping was often a pointless task – sometimes only delivering value in the slow to change systems – back-end applications and infrastructure that delivers limited value and has a defined retirement date.
The Growth of Digital Business Strategies
Our technology systems are becoming more important than ever as digital business strategies are realised and digital interactions with customers, employees, and partners significantly increase. Many businesses expect their digital investments to remain strong well into 2022 (Figure 1). More than ever, we need to understand the link between our tech systems and the business and customer services they support.
I recently had the opportunity to attend a briefing by ServiceNow regarding their new “AI-Powered Service Operations” that highlighted their service-aware CMDB – adding machine learning to their service mapping capabilities. The upgraded offering has the ability to map entire environments in hours or minutes – not months or weeks. And as a machine learning capability, it is only likely to get smarter – to learn from their customers’ use of the service and begin to recognise what applications, systems, and infrastructure are likely to be supporting each business service.
This heralds a new era in service management – one where the actual business and customer impact of outages is known immediately; where the decision to delay an upgrade or fix to a known problem can be made with a full understanding of the impacts. At one of my previous employers, email went down for about a week. It was finally attributed to an upgrade to network equipment that sat between the email system and the corporate network and the internet. The tech teams were scratching their heads for days as there was no documented link between this piece of hardware and the email system. The impact of the outage was certainly felt by the business – but had it happened at the end of the financial year, it could have impacted perhaps 10-20% of the business bookings as many deals came in at that time.
Being able to understand the link between infrastructure, cloud services, applications, databases, middleware and business processes and services is of huge value to every business – particularly as the percentage of business through digital channels and touchpoints continues to accelerate.