ServiceNow re-emerges as an AI “security company”

Following two recent acquisitions, ServiceNow aims to bring enterprise CISOs onto its platform by expanding its AI security monitoring and alerting capabilities.

Veza’s access graph and Armis’ asset intelligence are among a series of new features in the ServiceNow AI platform launched in Australia this week. The IPs of both companies, with which ServiceNow completed acquisition deals in March and April, respectively, were revealed in updates to its AI Control Tower agent governance tool and ServiceNow’s Autonomous Risk and Security portfolio.

ServiceNow officials demonstrated the new integration at a press conference on April 28, showing an AI Control Tower workflow where Veza’s access graph alerts administrators to immediate injections and displays the blast radius of affected systems. New workflows could run autonomously or with human approval to disable agents and their tools to generate security incidents and audit documentation through the new ServiceNow AI gateway. These features will go into preview this month and ship in August.

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Another press demo previewed how Armis IP is integrated with AI Control Tower to automatically discover AI assets using agentless network monitoring and add them to the ServiceNow Context Engine through the cyber asset graph. Context Engine also uses AI observability tools that ServiceNow acquired with Traceloop to correlate Veza asset permissions with activity on the corporate network. This enhanced context engine includes security data from third-party tools such as Microsoft’s Agent 365 and Palo Alto Networks.

These updates will allow ServiceNow to target new users, according to John Aisien, ServiceNow’s senior vice president and general manager of central product management, security and risk, during a press demonstration.

“This is a prime example of how ServiceNow is a security company uniquely built for the agent era on three axes: cyber assets, access, and decision context,” Isien said. “We can manage every agent, every identity and permission, every asset, every running or historical process and policy. We can correlate business risk. We can stop exposure in real time and drive remediation before damage occurs.”

ServiceNow extends from the root of the CMDB

ServiceNow loses the AI ​​control tower battle.

Forrester Research analyst Charles Betz said adding security data to the knowledge graph that provides context to AI agents is a natural extension of ServiceNow’s existing configuration management database (CMDB).

This is an area with many competitors, including cloud hyperscalers and other large vendors such as SAP and Salesforce. But “the AI ​​control tower battle is one that ServiceNow will lose,” Betts said. “I can’t think of anyone in a better position than them.

“There’s a lot of posturing and posturing. But I don’t see SAP or Salesforce being relevant there. They haven’t done their homework to understand the digital infrastructure. They’re going to be the control tower for AI. Maybe an AI walled garden to build an agent or two. But if you’re talking about true agent workloads running across large digital estates, ServiceNow is 20 We’ve been struggling with security for over a year now.”

Another analyst said ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower’s proactive alerting capabilities make it stand out among enterprise agent orchestration platforms.

“We’ve never seen alerts like what we saw in the demo anywhere else,” said Rebecca Wetteman, CEO of independent research firm Valoir. “ServiceNow already has Impact, which allows us to use telemetry to understand how our customers are actually using the platform, making it a great foundation for AI Control Tower and the monitoring capabilities built around it.”

Understand trends in enterprise agent deployment

ServiceNow touted customer success with its AI control tower and risk and security management products, including HDFC Bank, Rothman, National Hockey League, and Fortinet. On April 22, ServiceNow reported strong first quarter 2026 results, with revenue up 22% year-over-year to $3.77 billion. It also raised its 2026 subscription revenue forecast to $15.74 billion to $15.78 billion. ServiceNow isn’t alone in riding the recent wave of AI adoption. AWS, Microsoft, and Google have also reported gaudy revenue increases from AI services in recent earnings calls.

But while companies are buying in, Betz says autonomy in production AI remains an aspiration for most companies so far.

Charles Betts

“People want deterministic and auditable workflows, but they’re hard enough to manage,” he said. “We see well-designed, well-specified multi-agent architectures that are not very complex. They just say, ‘There’s an agent that actually creates the thing, and there’s another separate agent that does the QA of the thing.’ And there you have a multi-agent architecture.”

One corporate consultant said he has seen similarly limited adoption of AI agents among clients so far.

“It’s usually scenario-based, and some of it is successful,” says Thomas Weaver-Knight, co-founder, CEO, and principal at AheadCRM, a consulting firm specializing in customer resource management, customer experience, and AI. “Most of them start in a service scenario and want to go beyond that. [AI assistants] This ensures that your customers have actually useful information instead of a ton of links to sift through. ”

Rolls-Royce looks to expand agency

Rolls-Royce is running ServiceNow’s Now Assist agent internally as part of its help desk, said Phil Priest, head of global business services at Rolls-Royce, who attended the April 28 press conference. Priest said the company has seen a return on its investment in the form of a 54% deflection rate on help desk requests, which has saved human help desk agents 5,000 hours since August 2025.

Rolls-Royce plans to expand the Now Assist agent to the rest of the 45,000-employee company, starting with its human resources department, using ServiceNow, the EmployeeWorks portal introduced in February.

But the company faces additional challenges when it comes to scaling AI. For example, as other enterprise Now Assist adopters demonstrated at last year’s ServiceNow Knowledge conference, making AI work autonomously in that context requires close attention to the underlying knowledge base data, Priest said.

“As we expanded our AI assistant beyond the IT department and into other functions, we realized that we needed to almost rewrite our knowledge articles to be AI-enabled,” Priest said.

The company is working on an agent automation system for the accounts payable (AP) space, but needs to ensure that the system maintains strict governance, including the separation of duties required by regulations.

“We have to think very carefully about, for example, structuring these agents in a way that fraud can never occur,” Priest said. “And there are a number of laws in the AP space that impact payments, anti-money laundering, bribery and corruption. Using AI to perform all these tasks requires proper oversight by a third party with appropriate checks.”

Beth Pariseau, senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning IT journalism veteran. Any tips? send an email to her or connect linkedin.