The IT Nerd

Today, at ServiceNow’s annual customer and partner event, Knowledge 2026, ServiceNow introduced AI Learning Guide and SimStudio within ServiceNow University, an AI learning platform transforming workforce development for the AI era. The new capabilities give customers, partners, and individual learners, including ServiceNow’s own global workforce, a faster, more personalized path to building real-world skills on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

The World Economic Forum projects a net gain of 78 million jobs by 2030, driven by technology, demographics, and economic shifts, with AI and big data topping the list of fastest-growing skills. This underscores an urgent need for reskilling.

The industry’s answer until now has been static instruction sheets, pre-recorded videos, and time-based certifications that measure course completion instead of competency. People need a safe space to experiment with AI in the flow of work, build confidence through practice, and chart a clear path to the careers emerging inside agentic businesses built on the ServiceNow AI Platform. ServiceNow University is that space: an open playground for learning where everyone is welcome, built on the science of play to counteract the fear of failure and make skill-building sustainable.

AI Learning Guide and SimStudio drive AI career readiness with a coach + practice model

Most enterprise learning platforms deliver a catalog of content. Learners scroll through courses across multiple learning tools, with no guidance on what matters for their role.

AI Learning Guide changes that. It is a conversational AI coaching companion embedded directly into ServiceNow University that guides learners through personalized learning paths, surfaces relevant courses and certifications, and provides real-time coaching and feedback. AI Learning Guide delivers contextual recommendations and next steps, and acts as the coaching layer that transitions learners into simulation-based practice.

SimStudio is a hands-on simulation environment that lets learners prove competencies by practicing and performing ServiceNow tasks. Unlike videos or quizzes, SimStudio captures how a learner works, not just whether they finished a course, enabling richer competency insight. It flags whether they used ServiceNow best practices and offers feedback and alternative methods accordingly.

Together, AI Learning Guide and SimStudio accelerate time-to-competence and give learners confidence that they can do the work, not just pass a test. AI Learning Guide tailors the journey; SimStudio delivers the prove-it moment.

Underpinning both tools is a personalized learning profile that matches recommendations to each learner’s role, usage patterns, skills, and behaviors, surfacing what to learn next without requiring learners to navigate the full catalog. The profile applies “people like you” logic so a system administrator in financial services with heavy ITSM usage receives different guidance than one in manufacturing.

ServiceNow University reaches almost 2 million learners with 80% growth year-over-year

Without certified talent, enterprise AI investments stall, depleting leadership pipelines and slowing the innovation those investments were meant to accelerate. ServiceNow University is helping close that gap at scale.

One year after its launch at Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow University has grown to nearly 2 million learners and 307,000 certified professionals, with momentum across the entire ecosystem: customer learners grew 28%, partner participation increased 17%, and employee participation jumped 24% year over year.

According to an IDC study, sponsored by ServiceNow, organizations that complete ServiceNow training and certifications see a 536% ROI on training investments in the first three years through staff efficiencies, cost savings, improved productivity, and +16% productivity gains through upskilled employees.

Training and certifications also drive measurable partner and customer growth. According to a ServiceNow study, when partner teams have a certified implementation lead, their customers go live one month faster and report higher satisfaction scores. Customers with certified implementors show 7-point higher gross retention and 14-point higher net retention. The pattern is consistent: more certified professionals correlate with higher license usage, greater app deployment, and stronger retention.

Availability

• ServiceNow University is free and available to all employees, customers, partners, and individual learners at learning.servicenow.com.

• AI Learning Guide and SimStudio are available to learners today.

• ServiceNow University is expanding its reach to new markets: New Arabic language support launched in March 2026; localized content in Brazilian Portuguese is underway.

• ServiceNow University’s new capabilities are part of a broader wave of AI platform innovation ServiceNow will unveil at Knowledge 2026, taking place May 5–7 at The Venetian Expo Center in Las Vegas. For more information on Knowledge 2026, visit servicenow.com/events/knowledge

Today, at ServiceNow’s annual customer and partner event announced a major expansion of its Autonomous Workforce, launching new AI specialists for IT, customer relationship management (CRM), employee service teams, and security and risk. Together with the previously announced L1 IT Service Desk AI Specialist, which is now available, these AI specialists complete end-to-end processes alongside humans to autonomously resolve cases, contain threats, manage incidents, and handle high-volume employee requests.

Enterprises today run on a patchwork of systems where talented people spend time answering routine questions, triaging backlogs, updating records, and racing between fire drills. The work that moves the business, such as strategic decisions, relationship building, and risk assessment, gets pushed to the margins as a result. Autonomous Workforce deploys role-scoped AI specialists embedded in proven workflows to deliver outcomes from start to finish, without human intervention.

Because AI specialists run on the same platform, they share the same operational intelligence (Configuration Management Database and Context Engine), data connectivity (Workflow Data Fabric), conversational front door (ServiceNow EmployeeWorks), and governance infrastructure (AI Control Tower). ServiceNow announced in April that all of these capabilities are now included across every product and package; not as add-ons but built-in by default. This allows enterprises to build on years of platform investment and achieve speed, scale, and oversight, without adding complexity or extending time to value. ServiceNow has also expanded the reach of its Autonomous Workforce to more customers in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft, and NVIDIA, enabling AI specialists to deploy and run across the infrastructure enterprises already use.

Autonomous IT: from reactive firefighting to autonomous resilience

IT teams today face a backlog of unresolved incidents, security findings, and operational recommendations that grow faster than any team can act on, consuming bandwidth that should be going toward AI governance, strategic investment, and platform scale. The L1 IT Service Desk AI Specialist is already resolving assigned IT cases 99% faster than human agents within ServiceNow’s own help desk. Building on that foundation, ServiceNow is introducing a wave of new IT AI specialists spanning infrastructure monitoring, site reliability (SRE), asset lifecycle, portfolio planning, and more.

For example, a new specialist for AIOps autonomously detects anomalies, correlates events, and triggers remediation, while a specialist for SRE handles incident triage and postmortem documentation end to end, so IT teams can shift attention from reactive firefighting to strategic infrastructure investment. Other new AI specialists for common IT workflows give full visibility into hardware, software, and cloud assets across their lifecycle, and connect demand to capacity, budget, and resource availability in real time.

Autonomous CRM: AI that acts on customer interactions

Legacy CRM systems track sales activities and service interactions but don’t fulfill customer requests. Whether a customer is requesting a quote, asking to expedite an order, or disputing a charge, the goal should be to give them what they want, not open new opportunities or tickets. The gap between front-office interaction and back-office fulfillment is where customer experience breaks down. According to Ipsos research, sales representatives spend just 10 hours a week talking to customers. At the same time, ServiceNow’s CX Shift research shows that service agents still need to work in three to five systems to resolve a single customer issue, with the rest of their time lost to CRM updates, manual handoffs, and administrative overhead.

ServiceNow Autonomous CRM is built to finish the work, from speed of thought sales to customer service automation. Today, ServiceNow is introducing new AI specialists across the entire customer lifecycle, including sales qualification and quoting, order fulfillment, invoice disputes, service, and renewals. Starting with case management, an AI specialist can triage, solve, and escalate cases across channels, as well as generate custom quotes from meeting transcripts. Each month, ServiceNow Autonomous CRM resolves over 100 million customer cases, orchestrates over 16 million orders, and configures more than seven million quotes. These AI specialists go further, delivering quotes, orders, and issue resolution faster for customers.

Employee services: an AI workforce for every team, across every function

HR, finance, legal, procurement, and workplace services teams face structural challenges at scale, including rising case volumes and service desks dependent on manual triage. Based on ServiceNow estimates, 23 million employees use ServiceNow’s employee portal every month, generating an estimated 40 million-plus cases annually.

This is routine, repeatable work that’s ideal for autonomous resolution.

ServiceNow is introducing new AI specialists across HR, workplace services, legal, finance, procurement, supplier management, and health and safety. Each acts as a digital employee that is equipped with role-specific skills. Across ServiceNow’s customer base, they’ve been shown to resolve 91% of the cases without reassignment. Requests are deflected before they become cases, and when cases are created, they route directly to the right AI specialist.

This allows business operations teams to focus on tasks like workforce planning, supplier strategy decisions, financial planning, contract negotiations, and more.

Security and risk: containing threats in minutes

Security and risk teams are overwhelmed: vulnerabilities accumulate faster than teams can triage them, supercharged by AI-powered attack surface expansion; phishing incidents demand immediate investigation across disconnected tools; and manual response processes stretch resolution from minutes to hours. Legacy point solutions simply weren’t built to keep pace with the AI platform shift.

ServiceNow’s new Autonomous Security & Risk solution introduces AI specialists purpose-built to help eliminate growing backlogs across the full threat landscape, autonomously triaging and remediating vulnerabilities (including hardware-level), investigating and containing SOC incidents with humans-in-the-loop, and screening third-party vendor risk with instant summaries so teams focus only on what needs scrutiny. Together, they compress tasks that typically take days or hours into minutes, bringing identity visibility and governance, cyber asset intelligence, enterprise decision context, and autonomous security operations together on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

Availability

L1 IT Service Desk AI Specialist, CRM AI specialists, and AI specialists for employee service teams are available now. IT AI specialists are expected to be available in June 2026. The security and risk AI specialists are expected to be available for preview in June 2026 and generally available in September 2026.

Today, at ServiceNow’s annual customer and partner event, Knowledge 2026, ServiceNow launched Autonomous Security & Risk to govern every AI agent, identity, and connected asset. Armis delivers continuous asset intelligence across code, IT, OT, IoT, and connected assets. Veza provides fine-grained visibility, intelligence, and governance for human and non-human identities. The result of this combination is one of the most complete security, risk, and compliance platforms in enterprise AI.

Security and risk crossed $1 billion in annual contract value (ACV) for ServiceNow last year, making it one of the fastest-growing sources of demand on the ServiceNow AI Platform. The pressure is compounding as AI exponentially multiplies identities, permissions, connected assets, and decisions that require governance. AI agents acquire access, execute decisions, and operate at machine speed – and the non-human identities behind them already vastly outnumber human ones. Who approved that access, why it exists, and whether it remains valid are questions most enterprises cannot answer. Disconnected security tools cannot close this gap; a platform approach can.

Every AI agent is an identity, with most ungoverned

Every AI agent that acts inside an enterprise does so through an identity. It accesses systems, reads data, and executes workflows under a set of permissions that were almost certainly designed for human actors, rather than the speed, scale, or autonomy of AI agents. Closing the identity visibility, intelligence, and governance gap is critical.

Veza’s Access Graph provides a continuous, real-time map of every access relationship across an enterprise environment, including what has access, what it can do with that access, and how these change as context shifts, systems evolve, and agents multiply. With Veza now integrated into the ServiceNow AI Platform, this capability governs both human and non-human identities within a single operational framework: surfacing risk, enforcing least privilege at the point of action, triggering downstream remediation, and building the traceable institutional memory that auditors and regulators require. ServiceNow Veza works in concert with ServiceNow’s existing vulnerability, exposure, and incident management capabilities to close pre-breach & post-breach exposure: governing who and what has access and continuously identifying and remediating permission-related vulnerabilities.

You cannot secure what you cannot see

Asset visibility has always been a foundational requirement of enterprise security, along with a persistent failure point. The environments enterprises operate in today span pre-compiled code, IT infrastructure, operational technology, connected devices, cloud workloads, medical equipment, and now AI agents, interacting across boundaries that no single tool was ever meant to fully see.

Once integrated into ServiceNow, Armis will deliver real-time, contextual awareness of every connected cyber asset, including the devices and systems conventional tools had no visibility into. Armis will monitor network traffic without agents, without disrupting operations, and enrich every asset record with device type, classification, firmware version, behavioral data, and real-time risk posture. This intelligence flows directly into the ServiceNow CMDB, turning a hitherto static inventory into a live picture of the actual attack surface. When an asset is found to be vulnerable, misconfigured, or behaving anomalously, ServiceNow responds at machine speed, in accordance with prevalent environmental context.

Together, Veza and Armis boost ServiceNow’s standing as a platform that knows what exists in the environment and who or what is permitted to interact with it. This real-time asset intelligence feeds directly into ServiceNow’s security incident response workflows, so the same context used to assess risk before a breach is immediately available to contain it after.

The blueprint for trusted AI

When AI acts inside an enterprise, it must do so with the full business reality behind every decision, including governed permissions, continuous oversight, and an audit trail that holds under scrutiny. That is what Autonomous Security & Risk delivers. Asset intelligence, identity governance, risk management, and workflow automation operating as a single system, with AI running across all of it. Two new AI specialists, announced today as part of ServiceNow’s autonomous workforce expansion, handle vulnerability resolution and security operations end to end, autonomously addressing unresolved vulnerability backlogs and investigating phishing incidents alongside human teams.

The ServiceNow AI Control Tower governs agents, ensuring they are inventoried from the moment they appear, risk-scored continuously, and least privilege enforced in real time. Evaluations score agents as they run. If something drifts, the AI Control Tower is able to catch it before it compounds. A2A and MCP interoperability means any agent, on any platform, operates within a governed framework that connects decisions to context and accountability to action. That same governed framework extends across ServiceNow’s partner ecosystem, so the third-party security tools enterprises already rely on feed into a continuously updated picture of enterprise posture. ServiceNow’s own security operations team runs Autonomous Risk & Security, handling incidents seven times faster than prior workflows using AI agents, with every action documented and every decision traceable.

Organizations are already seeing results on the ServiceNow AI Platform. A global energy company operating across 70+ countries saved 1.2 million hours by automating security operations and cut the time it takes to contain threats by 97%. A major U.S. financial services institution eliminated 96% of dormant non-human identities, turning least privilege from a policy goal into an enforced reality. A Fortune 100 aerospace manufacturer reduced the time to complete control attestations by 75% and close compliance gaps by 85%, replacing manual audit prep with evidence that captures itself.

Enterprises that establish this foundation of complete visibility, governed identities, integrated risk, and autonomous response will be decisively ahead as AI accelerates further. ServiceNow gives security and risk leaders a single view of how exposure, incidents, and identity decisions translate to enterprise risk posture in real time, with the audit trail regulators require.

Today, at ServiceNow’s annual customer and partner event, Knowledge 2026, ServiceNow expanded its AI Control Tower offering with new capabilities that give enterprises control over every AI system, agent, and workflow.

AI Control Tower, first introduced at Knowledge 2025, has evolved from visibility and management into a comprehensive, end-to-end solution that lets customers act with confidence across five dimensions:

• Discover finds AI assets once deployed across the organization — including systems beyond ServiceNow — through 30 new enterprise integrations spanning Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, and enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, and Workday. Discovery also extends to non-human identities and connected devices, bringing OT and IoT assets into the same governance model as AI agents and cloud services.
• Observe provides continuous monitoring with live alerts, replacing periodic audits. Through the recently completed acquisition of Traceloop, AI Control Tower now delivers deep observability into AI agent behavior at runtime, giving teams visibility into how agents reason, where they make decisions, and when to course-correct.
• Govern delivers AI-driven risk assessment and automated remediation across all types of AI, not only agents but also models, data sets, prompts, and classic machine-learning. Five new risk frameworks aligned to NIST and EU AI Act standards provide compliance controls out of the box.
• Secure extends identity access governance to hyperscaler AI environments and every connected device through integration with Veza, bringing patented access graph technology, scoped permissions, and least-privilege enforcement to every AI system, agent, and identity. When an agent goes off script or operates beyond its permissions, AI Control Tower can detect it and shut it down in real time — giving organizations the kill switch they need as agents take on more critical work.
• Measure provides cost tracking and ROI dashboards that give customers financial control as they scale AI— addressing runaway model spend — one of the most pressing challenges enterprises face as AI deployments grow.

This approach is powered by two decades of enterprise operational data accumulated through 100 billion workflows and 7 trillion workflow transactions annually, and anchored by the ServiceNow CMDB and Context Engine, which is designed to map digital assets to the services, people, and processes it supports. Enterprises can sense signals across their full digital estate, decide with live business context, act through autonomous workflows, and secure every agent action. Standalone governance tools simply cannot replicate this. In addition to its existing integrations with Anthropic and OpenAI, ServiceNow has also announced deepened AI Control Tower integrations with AWS, Microsoft, and other LLM providers, extending governance and observability across the infrastructure enterprises rely on most.

Additionally, for all customer Model Context Protocol (MCP) transactions, a new AI Gateway provides real-time controls for agentic workloads, with governance, observability, and security for full visibility across any third-party AI system.

Availability

Features announced today and many more as part of the ServiceNow AI Platform Australia release are available on a rolling basis beginning April 2026. AI Control Tower enhancements enter Innovation Lab in May with general availability expected in August 2026. Full details can be found in the ServiceNow Store.

Additional information

Read more about the ServiceNow AI Platform Australia release.