Why Bill McDermott Says ServiceNow Is Leading the AI Race

Bill McDermott, Chairman and CEO  says “We’re leading the AI race”.

While much of the tech industry is still defining what AI agents can be, ServiceNow has begun deploying them at scale. With the March 2025 Yokohama release, the enterprise software company introduced a suite of autonomous agents embedded across IT, HR, security, and CRM workflows. These aren’t experimental tools or isolated pilots. They’re fully integrated systems designed to act, adapt, and coordinate with minimal human input, backed by years of internal development and platform unification.

Over the past four months, ServiceNow has acquired three AI-focused companies, Moveworks, Cuein, and Logik.ai, while simultaneously deepening its partnership with Cisco to address one of enterprise AI’s most urgent blind spots: security.

With the Yokohama release, ServiceNow launched preconfigured teams of AI agents ready to deliver productivity from day one. These agents span across CRM, IT, HR, and security operations. Unlike traditional AI that supports through suggestions, these agents carry out tasks with autonomy. In security operations, ServiceNow’s AI agents streamline the incident lifecycle by handling detection, triage, and response. In IT, they resolve service requests, categorize incidents, and generate post-incident reviews. In HR, agents are used for tuition reimbursement processing. Each of these agents is designed to operate with minimal oversight, performing tasks in real-time based on context and data.

The new agentic AI framework is anchored by tools like AI Agent Studio and AI Agent Orchestrator, enabling enterprises to build, monitor, and govern agents throughout their lifecycle. Instructions can be defined in natural language, and each agent has a clearly defined role to prevent overlapping functions or confusion in execution. The framework also provides dashboards that link agent activity to key performance indicators, giving visibility into performance and ROI.

The agents are context-aware and leverage the company’s Workflow Data Fabric to connect across departments and systems. In one internal demo, five AI agents collaborated to fulfill a software request, checking license availability, provisioning access, and notifying users. These AI agents were not assisting a user in a traditional sense but executing tasks end-to-end.

Underlying all of this is ServiceNow’s push to unify data. The Yokohama release expands its Knowledge Graph and enhances its Common Service Data Model (CSDM), enabling connected AI agents to operate with shared context. By standardizing how data is structured and accessed, CSDM lets agents hand off work between themselves and human operators seamlessly. This allows organizations to maintain transparency, audit readiness, and regulatory compliance.

ServiceNow and Cisco announced a deepened partnership to tackle AI governance and security. The collaboration integrates Cisco’s AI Defense with ServiceNow’s Security Operations (SecOps) platform, creating a layered response to the growing complexity of AI adoption. Jeetu Patel, EVP and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, explained the stakes: “The risk of a breach used to be data loss. Now it’s altering decisions at scale.” 

In a detailed post, Patel laid out the key problems security teams face in the AI era—skills shortages, alert fatigue, and mounting complexity across toolsets. He noted that traditional infrastructure and security frameworks are not equipped to handle the risks posed by unsanctioned and evolving AI applications. “Security teams aren’t struggling with lack of data. They are struggling with lack of clarity,” Patel wrote. He emphasized the shift from manual decision-making to orchestrated, multi-agent AI workflows in Cisco’s XDR platform, coupled with the integration into ServiceNow’s SecOps. “We live in an interconnected ecosystem where the innovations from each company should deliver a compounded effect towards keeping us safe from the adversaries and I’m super excited to partner closely with ServiceNow.”

Cisco AI Defense will feed telemetry from AI applications into ServiceNow’s Security Incident Response (SIR), Vulnerability Response (VR), and Integrated Risk Management (IRM) platforms. The joint solution promises visibility into AI workloads, automated vulnerability detection, runtime protection, and mapped compliance frameworks. Incident telemetry from Cisco will surface in ServiceNow to aid real-time investigations, and ServiceNow’s posture control will flag protection gaps.

Initial field trials are set to begin in mid-2025, with broader availability planned for the second half of the year. Beyond partnerships, ServiceNow has accelerated its acquisition strategy to expand its AI and CRM capabilities. In January 2025, it acquired Cuein, a company specializing in conversational data analysis. This was followed by the March acquisition of Moveworks for $2.85 billion, a move that brings advanced enterprise search and AI assistant capabilities into the fold. In April, ServiceNow acquired Logik.ai, a CRM-focused company with strengths in AI-powered Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) solutions.

CRM is a major focus of ServiceNow for 2025, Bill McDermott said. “We’re running the table in CRM because now you can configure, price and quote CRM with ServiceNow, and that has been a horror show,” he said. “You check your sources in any well-known CRM company, and there’s a couple out there. They have the worst configure-price-quote solutions ever. And now with ServiceNow you can do the whole order management, fulfilling and servicing on one AI-driven platform instead of some bespoke AI agent talking with a disconnected silo somewhere in the world.”

These acquisitions align with ServiceNow’s goal to provide an integrated, AI-driven enterprise platform rather than fragmented solutions. The AI agents introduced in Yokohama are not standalone products, they operate within a unified architecture, orchestrated via ServiceNow’s React (Reasoning and Acting) framework. Agents are capable of using tools such as Now Assist skills, integration hub actions, custom scripts, and internal APIs. They are configured for either supervised or autonomous execution, depending on the sensitivity of the task.

The agents share context through short-term memory during a use case session and can escalate tasks when necessary. The orchestrator decomposes tasks, assigns agents, and ensures smooth transitions, whether between agents or to a human. ServiceNow also includes a communicator agent responsible for managing interactions through the Now Assist panel or Virtual Agent.

The internal deployment of over 200 AI use cases has already delivered more than $325 million in annual value, according to the company. Metrics and dashboards help teams assess performance across use cases, slice data by execution mode, and maintain governance throughout.

As Amit Zavery, president, chief product officer, and COO, stated: “Agentic AI is the new frontier. Enterprise leaders are no longer just experimenting with AI agents; they’re demanding AI solutions that can help them achieve productivity at scale.”