With many early adopters of AI increasingly bogged down by practical roadblocks, business automation software provider ServiceNow is pitching software tools that could deploy AI agents more easily and build the necessary foundation for the groundbreaking technology.
It is providing a platform that not only creates semi-automated AI agents to help humans with complex, repetitive tasks, but also to manage and orchestrate them with guardrails built in for accuracy, security and privacy.
At a regional customer and partner conference in Sydney today, the company showed off its AI Control Tower, which can connect up with AI agents created on other vendors’ software and allow business users across an organisation to manage and control them easily.
It has also released thousands of “ready-to-run” AI agents that cuts across industries, from mining to IT, and works throughout an organisation, from customer service to human resource. This, it believes, will overcome the biggest issue for AI takeup so far – fragmentation.
“While the ambition is big, the foundation is not there,” said Colin Fleming, ServiceNow’s chief marketing officer, who pointed to fragmented systems, siloed operations and added complexity as common problems as organisations all rushed out to deploy AI of late.
Describing many of today’s experimental efforts as a “hornet’s nest of complexity” and “PoC (proof of concept) purgatory”, he said efforts are often disjointed and uncoordinated.
“Everyone wants their own AI chatbot or copilot,” he pointed out, arguing that AI built in isolation would create the same complexity as before and hardwire it into the infrastructure.
AI is the intelligence that does the hard work but it also needs clean data as a foundation and workflow as a way to get things done, instead of simply providing insights, he said at the opening of ServiceNow World Forum Sydney.
Indeed, in the past year, AI maturity among organisations globally has dropped by 9 points, according to a study by the company. Organisations in Singapore (-4 per cent), Japan (-3.3 per cent), Australia (-3 per cent), and India (-2.1 per cent) all reported year-over-year declines in AI spending as a percentage of their overall technology budgets.
These cutbacks come even as C-suites express growing optimism about AI’s potential, likely a sign of AI innovating at a much faster pace than organisations’ ability to harness it.
ServiceNow’s pitch is to start small but get multiple departments in an organisation involved. For example, an AI-powered IT customer service agent can not just pull up customer data but run quick tests on connectivity and performance on a device and recommend the rollback to a previous software version or network configuration.
This rollback could be approved by a human, who handles multiple cases with AI agents helping him to carry out various tasks automatically before approaching him for unique cases. Solutions can also be turned into “playbooks” to resolve similar cases in future.
With an end-to-end agentic AI strategy that seeks a more seamless deployment, some ServiceNow customers have been successful at automating more tasks and freeing up human operators.
Australia-based mining firm Orica has a 94 per cent “deflection rate” with AI agents, which means they help resolve most of its IT support requests without a human involved. Also in Australia, Griffith University resolves 90 per cent of its support tickets at first contact.
Another customer, PC maker Lenovo, which also offers professional IT services, says AI agents help improve technical support responses by 35 minutes and boost productivity by at least 15 per cent.
Sujo Joseph, director for global IT engineering and product development at Lenovo, said it was important to get small wins at the start when deploying AI, instead of asking for a big transformation when the foundation is not there.
“You need to pick up something that you can show to company executives,” he told an audience gathered for a panel discussion at the ServiceNow event.
ServiceNow’s approach seems to be working, at a time every technology company is pushing AI as an all-important feature, even as many businesses are struggling to find real improvements.
Just yesterday, ServiceNow’s financial results beat earlier estimates. Its revenues of US$3.22 billion in the second quarter of 2025 represented a 22.5 per cent year‑over‑year growth.
Going forward, however, some customers might question if it is prudent to bet so much of a crucial transformative technology on one technology vendor.
Even though ServiceNow promises to run on different cloud providers and even on-premise, and that it would connect to different types databases to improve data quality, it wants organisations to place more eggs into its basket, as other technology vendors are also suggesting. Some customers might just be a little wary of lock-in.
