ServiceNow announced on April 9 that every product in its portfolio now includes built-in AI capabilities, data connectivity, workflow execution, security, and governance. The company is framing this as a shift from “sidecar AI,” where intelligence is bolted onto disconnected systems, to an AI-native architecture where agentic capabilities are embedded by default.
Two new capabilities headline the announcement. Context Engine, available in preview to select customers, links together fragmented enterprise applications using ServiceNow’s Service Graph, Knowledge Graph, and data inventory. The goal, according to SiliconANGLE, is to give AI agents awareness of identity relationships, asset dependencies, and policy controls across every connected application, so that when an agent needs to make a decision, it checks regulated processes and approval chains before acting.
Build Agent Skills launches later this month as a developer toolkit. Starting next week, developers will be able to use Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Cursor to build applications and deploy them directly on ServiceNow, inheriting the platform’s security and governance by default.
The Control Plane Pitch
ServiceNow’s strategic positioning is explicit. CEO Bill McDermott told investors at the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference on March 4: “There’s going to be many millions more of agents than there are human beings. And we’re the control plane, the AI control tower for business reinvention.”
No Jitter’s analysis described ServiceNow as pursuing a “platform of platforms” strategy, positioning itself as the orchestration layer through which enterprises deploy and govern all of their agents, not just ServiceNow-native ones. IDC Group VP Stephen Elliot told No Jitter that ServiceNow recognizes not all agents will be theirs. “But when it comes to deployment, governance and security guardrails, these will always be required,” Elliot said. “If they can be a central control point and help customers get these foundational requirements, that will drive a lot of use cases on their platform.”
Security Acquisitions Fill the Gaps
ServiceNow backed the “control plane” claim with two recent acquisitions. The company acquired Veza in December 2025 for identity security, giving the platform real-time mapping of access relationships and privileges across humans, machines, and AI agents. It also acquired Armis for cyber risk management, adding agentless discovery and classification of every asset across IT, OT, IoT, and medical devices.
These fill two specific gaps in the agent governance stack: knowing what identities (human and machine) have access to what, and knowing what assets exist across the network before agents interact with them.
Enterprise Service Management for SMBs
The company also launched Enterprise Service Management Foundation, targeting small and medium businesses. The product provides AI agents that automate IT, HR, and legal services for organizations that lack the platform team resources of larger enterprises. President and CPO Amit Zavery told SiliconANGLE that organizations “typically spend months trying to assemble the pieces needed to get enterprise AI up and running, and very often they fail in those endeavors.”
The announcement arrives on the same day AWS launched its Agent Registry, underscoring a broader competitive race to own the enterprise agent governance layer. ServiceNow approaches it from workflow orchestration, AWS from cloud infrastructure, and Microsoft from identity and productivity. The enterprises buying these products will likely need all three.