The IT Nerd

ServiceNow today announced major advances to ServiceNow EmployeeWorks that give employees the ability to build the AI agents their jobs demand. These agents can complete daily tasks without human intervention and enable deep persona-based work across critical business functions. Additionally, ToolSmith, a new agentic developer environment for ServiceNow EmployeeWorks, takes complex tool-building from days to minutes, securely and at enterprise scale.

ServiceNow EmployeeWorks is powered by a third-generation employee-centric AI harness, which provides employees with intelligent context, trusted decision making, and robust enterprise actions to orchestrate AI safely.

While enterprise AI investment is rising, most employees still can’t build the AI their job needs. IT backlogs, developer constraints, vendor lock-in, and fragmented tools mean that the people closest to the work—the ones who understand the problems best—can’t build AI solutions that take secure actions. ServiceNow EmployeeWorks helps change that.

Productivity Assistants: AI assistants for contextual persona-based work

Productivity Assistants are specialized AI assistants for contextual, nuanced, or persona-based work. These assistants run on the third-generation employee-centric AI harness, which combines reasoning, memory, and tool interoperability, so assistants can own deep research, long-running tasks, and cross-system and agent work with durable memory.

Non-coding employees can easily build the Productivity Assistants they need with admin-defined guardrails. They can tailor behavior, content, tools, and access. Pre-built assistants are also available.

HR Service Delivery: Productivity Assistants will be available for different ServiceNow products, starting with HR Service Delivery, extending service directly to managers for HR, talent, growth, and hiring.

• Talent Insights Assistant surfaces candidate fit, hiring, and organizational talent insights directly to managers, powered by integrations with Findem and Phenom.
• HR Business Partner Assistant handles HR needs, including approvals, case management, and employee programs, conversationally. HRBP Assistant acts as a digital twin to help scale HR teams.
• Manager Assistant equips managers with timely coaching, insights, and team-performance visibility, unlocking information and capabilities that normally sit behind HR people and process.

ServiceNow EmployeeWorks: Two foundational productivity assistants are available out of the box, with the option to build more.

• Research Assistant investigates complex questions across internal and external sources in real time, delivering personalized answers based on role and access through a rich artifact, document, or deck.
• Calendaring Assistant integrates directly with calendar systems, serving as a smart scheduler that can decipher complex calendars, resolve conflicts, reserve rooms, add conferencing links, and more. It goes beyond typical calendar booking solutions by orchestrating nuanced requests like scheduling quarterly one-on-ones with an entire team on days that minimize disruption to project work or finding the least hectic day to bring together a team for a full day workshop.

Productivity Routines: Employees build their own agents for proactive work

For work that’s predictable and repeatable, employees can now build and deploy Productivity Routines that run proactively in the background, helping eliminate the need to manually repeat the same tasks continuously. They execute the same steps every time and deliver finished outcomes without human intervention.

For example, a sales leader can build a Prospecting Agent that can scan their calendar for upcoming account meetings, research the account via internal and external resources, and assemble a tailored asset or pitch that marries the company’s value props to the problems and pains experienced by the prospect – all before they sign on for the day.

Employees don’t need to understand backend systems, API integrations, or data models. They describe what they want to automate, select the tools they need, and deploy. This democratizes AI, shifting the power to automate from IT and into the hands of the people who understand the work best, with governance built in.

ToolSmith: Developers vibe code enterprise-grade AI tools in minutes

ToolSmith is a new agentic developer environment that builds any automation for ServiceNow EmployeeWorks AI assistants. Developers describe what they want to accomplish in natural language, and ToolSmith handles the end-to-end build of the tool. ToolSmith is trained on over 75,000 APIs. It aligns on a plan with developers, implements integrations following the best practices, and builds tools for AI agents that are optimized for token efficiency and reliability. If something breaks, it can pull the relevant logs and propose a fix. Developers can then test and refine all through the same conversational experience.

ToolSmith also identifies what to build next. It scans through logs to identify opportunities to fix, improve, or invent the next best workflow. What used to take weeks, now takes minutes.

Conversations API: ServiceNow EmployeeWorks everywhere employees work

With the new Conversations API, organizations can bring ServiceNow EmployeeWorks capabilities – including Productivity Assistants, Productivity Routines, and ToolSmith – directly into the tools employees already use, including custom internal applications, kiosks, and other AI applications.

One unified platform, available across every channel, with no rearchitecting required.

Availability:

Productivity Assistants, Productivity Routines, the employee-centric harness, ToolSmith and Conversations API are all in controlled availability today.

ServiceNow today announced a new AI Passport solution and significant advances in AI governance to help ensure AI agents are production-ready by combining runtime governance, platform integration, and comprehensive oversight, all inside ServiceNow’s operational AI harness. Specifically, AI Passport is a new authority layer that gives enterprises runtime control over what AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are authorized to do at every point in a multi-agent workflow. ServiceNow also enables enterprises to discover what AI is running, control what AI agents do, and measure spend against outcomes with a broadened set of governance capabilities.

AI agents need more than a reasoning model to execute enterprise workflows securely. They need structure: which data or tools they can access, clear rules for what actions they’re allowed to do, and an auditable record of who authorized it. ServiceNow provides the operational foundation that helps enterprises make AI agents safe for production. AI Passport is a cryptographically signed credential that AI agents refer to at runtime, including environments such as NVIDIA OpenShell, to verify their authorized scope, grounded in enterprise business context for governed decisions. When an AI agent stays within its passport scope, it can operate freely. When it drifts, graduated responses can be enforced — redirecting, restricting, or reconnecting the AI agent with proper context — including kill switch capabilities at machine speed if termination is needed. ServiceNow’s Super Intelligence Control Tower keeps the full audit record behind actions, transforming AI agent execution into governed, auditable, and accountable work.

AI Passport: attested authority, enforceable at the edge

AI Passport is built on open specifications so that any governance product, identity provider, or enforcement point can issue and verify credentials for their own and third-party AI agents. Credentials are verifiable at every step in multi-agent workflows.

This represents a fundamental shift from reaction to prevention. Unlike audit trails, which show what happened after the fact, AI Passport helps prevent AI agents from acting outside their scope by authorizing what they can do at runtime. It brings ServiceNow’s ‘Shift Zero’ approach to life: secure by design, at inception. Each AI agent receives its own AI Passport, issued by the Super Intelligence Control Tower and grounded in the enterprise’s live business context through ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) policies, and workflow approvals. For third-party AI agents especially, this creates a verifiable permissions record rather than relying on the AI agent’s own ‘claims’ about its permissions.

The approach to AI Passport enables precision revocation and scoped delegation that narrows at each step for third-party agent governance, along with audit trails that include full compliance signatures. ServiceNow is also announcing NVIDIA as a design and launch partner, building a production-ready enforcement implementation using the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, which features NVIDIA OpenShell open-source secure runtime software and the NVIDIA Sentry security framework.

AI Passport: attested authority, enforceable at the edge

AI Passport is built on open specifications so that any governance product, identity provider, or enforcement point can issue and verify credentials for their own and third-party AI agents. Credentials are verifiable at every step in multi-agent workflows.

This represents a fundamental shift from reaction to prevention. Unlike audit trails, which show what happened after the fact, AI Passport helps prevent AI agents from acting outside their scope by authorizing what they can do at runtime. It brings ServiceNow’s ‘Shift Zero’ approach to life: secure by design, at inception. Each AI agent receives its own AI Passport, issued by the Super Intelligence Control Tower and grounded in the enterprise’s live business context through ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) policies, and workflow approvals. For third-party AI agents especially, this creates a verifiable permissions record rather than relying on the AI agent’s own ‘claims’ about its permissions.

The approach to AI Passport enables precision revocation and scoped delegation that narrows at each step for third-party agent governance, along with audit trails that include full compliance signatures. ServiceNow is also announcing NVIDIA as a design and launch partner, building a production-ready enforcement implementation using the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, which features NVIDIA OpenShell open-source secure runtime software and the NVIDIA Sentry security framework.

Unified discovery, visibility, and measurement

In addition to AI Passport, ServiceNow delivers end-to-end AI governance on one unified platform across discovery, visibility, control, measurement, and compliance. The new capabilities announced today build on ServiceNow’s autonomous remediation and kill switch capabilities that empower enterprises to act with speed.

The ServiceNow AI Platform runs on a single unified data model, which enables governance decisions to happen automatically across asset intelligence, identity security, and AI observability, eliminating manual handoffs between teams:

• Shadow AI detection that finds unapproved AI agents running in the network
• 400+ out-of-box connectors that will enable AI discovery across platforms and vendors
• Access mapping that grounds authorization decisions in actual entitlements
• Continuous enterprise AI observability that keeps track of AI agent traces and behavior

Beyond discovering what AI is running, enterprises need visibility into whether that AI is delivering value and operating within budget. ServiceNow is announcing:

• Cost governance that tracks user, department, and runtime spending
• Value intelligence that connects consumption, cost, quality, and realized user value so teams can optimize AI use, maintain budget commitments, and help prove business value
• AI Cost Management as part of IT Asset Management (ITAM), which will integrate with the Super Intelligence Control Tower to bring frontier model, embedded SaaS AI, hyperscaler, and data center GPU costs into a single view, alert teams to potential budget overruns, and ground spend in business context
• Policy enforcement that will manage alert-to-throttle-to-block graduated responses

AI control in highly regulated industries

For financial institutions, ungoverned assets and shadow AI multiply risk across compliance clocks. Regulators are shrinking incident notification windows far faster than manual, spreadsheet-driven programs can respond. ServiceNow’s 2026 Banking AI Maturity Index reveals that gap: while 100 percent of banks report using AI, only 24 percent have the governance to match it. Unmanaged service accounts, shadow AI agents, and unregistered devices remain exposed.

ServiceNow’s new Operational Resilience solution brings AI governance, risk, and security together in one place, with centralized data that helps financial institutions respond quickly. It gives CROs and CISOs the same real-time visibility and control. The Super Intelligence Control Tower senses ungoverned assets, identities, and AI agents across IT, OT, cloud, and third-party systems on one data model and unified platform. It is designed to treat a rogue AI agent like any other exposed asset: it finds it, flags it, and shuts it down, if needed. When an incident hits, banks can triage, contain, and revoke access inside the regulatory window, with auditable proof already in hand.

Availability

AI Passport, shadow AI detection, and AI Cost Management are expected to be available in Q4 2026. ServiceNow’s Operational Resilience solution for financial services is available today.

Attendees of NVIDIA GTC Berlin can also learn more about AI Passport, powered by the ServiceNow AI Platform and NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, by joining session SB61172.

Four flaws hand just been disclosed in ServiceNow’s AI Platform, three of them scored a maximum CVSS 10.0: a code injection bug in the GraphQL Composite Data API (CVE-2026-18885), a privilege escalation flaw in the system configuration image upload processor (CVE-2026-18886), and a SQL injection through a dynamic schema ORDER BY clause (CVE-2026-74820), plus a lower-severity sandbox escape in the Now Platform (CVE-2026-6876, CVSS 8.7). ServiceNow patched its own hosted instances on August 27, but self-hosted customers must apply the fix themselves, leaving the responsibility for closing three maximum-severity holes with the customer rather than the vendor.

Jason Brown, Director of Counter Fraud Operations, iCOUNTER had this to say:

“Three maximum severity bugs in one disclosure is a lot, but the detail I’d focus on is the split between hosted and self hosted customers. ServiceNow’s hosted instances were already updated as part of the August 27 advisory. Everyone running ServiceNow on their own infrastructure now has to go find, schedule, and apply that patch themselves, and in a lot of organizations that process takes weeks, not days. During those weeks, an unauthenticated attacker with a working exploit for the GraphQL Composite Data API code injection bug or the SQL injection flaw has a real shot at systems that sit next to HR records, vendor onboarding, and finance approvals. I spent years chasing fraud operators who specifically target that lag between disclosure and patch adoption, because they know it’s where the easy access is. My advice to any security team running ServiceNow self hosted right now is simple: don’t wait for your normal patch cycle, treat this one as urgent and confirm it’s applied this week.”

Needless to say, if you use ServiceNow, it’s time to patch all the things. And maybe at the same time take a look at how ServiceNow is used in your organization.

ServiceNow today announced an acceleration of its Autonomous Security vision with six unified solutions that help deliver prevention-first, AI-native cyber defense across unified exposure management, continuous vulnerability detection, cyber-physical security, identity and access security, and agentic incident response, and cyber risk and compliance. With new AI Specialists that complete security workflows autonomously, including the Vulnerability Resolution AI Specialist, these capabilities enable enterprises to prevent, contain, and remediate risk at machine speed, before threats become breaches.

As enterprises adopt agentic AI, security teams face an emerging challenge: every new agent, identity, and line of code multiplies exposure faster than any human team, or any patchwork of disconnected tools, can respond to. Closing that gap requires governed autonomy at the same machine speed. The average enterprise runs more than 70 security tools, fragmenting insights across the extended attack surface, including endpoints, networks, cloud environments, and identities. Today, ServiceNow becomes one of the most complete and fastest-growing security companies built for the AI era by consolidating this complexity into one unified system where assets, identities, and agents are visible, contextualized, secured, governed and auditable in a single motion.

This is achievable through Shift Zero: the move from fragmented, reactive security to prevention embedded at every layer, where every system, identity, and agent is governed and secured in real-time as threats move at AI speed. In Shift Zero, the goal is zero exposure at all times with an enterprise able to answer, with proof, what every system is doing, why, and who is accountable, while AI moves as fast as the business needs it to.

Shift Zero: Prevention embedded at every layer

Autonomous Security moves companies from reactive, fragmented security to prevention-first, autonomously governed security that operates faster than AI creates risk. The Autonomous Security offerings stand on six solutions that integrate into ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower.

Unified Exposure Management: Exposures pile up in silos, with security teams seeing vulnerabilities but not the assets that matter or which ones could be easily exploited. ServiceNow consolidates findings from any source and enriches data with business context and exploitation intelligence, enabling autonomous remediation at scale.

• Agentic Exposure Management consolidates vulnerability findings from every source into a single stream enriched by Early Warning threat intelligence and Fix Intelligence prioritized remediation.
• Vulnerability Resolution AI Specialist orchestrates triage and remediation at enterprise scale, executes low-risk patches, and turns exposure backlogs into closure pipelines.

Continuous Vulnerability Detection: The attack surface spans code, cloud, and infrastructure, but traditional tools only see one layer at a time. ServiceNow closes these gaps, enabling security teams to govern code, cloud, and infrastructure risks from a unified platform.

• Application Security extends threat modeling to AI-generated code and model dependencies with a new version that surfaces supply chain vulnerabilities before deployment.
• Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) validates runtime vulnerabilities in live applications and APIs.
• External Attack Surface Management (EASM) surfaces infrastructure exposure that attackers can exploit, showing a footprint the way threat actors see it.

Cyber-Physical Security: OT, medical devices, and IoT systems can be blind spots because legacy tools disrupt production and lack the behavioral understanding needed to catch risky activity. ServiceNow brings continuous visibility and compliance monitoring to operational environments without disruption.

• Agentic AI for Cyber Physical Security delivers agentless discovery across OT and medical networks, establishes behavioral baselines, validates compliance continuously in real time, and models attack paths, so security teams understand adversary movement. Automated remediation workflows execute across brownfield environments without custom engineering.

Identity & Access Security: Non-human identities, service accounts, cloud identities, and AI agents are everywhere and almost entirely ungoverned. ServiceNow enables security teams to see, control, and govern every identity across the enterprise under consistent least-privilege principles.

• AI Agent Access Security unifies access control for AI agents across any platform or model provider, closing the threat vector of ungoverned agents with escalated permissions.
• Non-Human Identity Remediation moves beyond risk scoring into active action: automated key rotation, deprovisioning, and permission revocation at scale across IT, OT, IoT, and medical networks; enables AI agents and service accounts to operate under identical identity governance as human users.

Agentic Incident Response: Incident response teams can lose hours stitching together threat intelligence, asset ownership, and identity data when they should be stopping threats. ServiceNow automates triage and investigation, freeing analysts to focus on sophisticated threats.

• Agentic Incident Response enables ServiceNow’s Tier 2 SOC AI Specialist to autonomously build and execute multi-phase response plans for complex incidents, performing actions like enrichment, correlation, containment and blocking while escalating only high-risk decisions to human analysts.

Cyber Risk and Compliance: Compliance remains a pre-audit scramble. Evidence collection is manual, controls are monitored quarterly, and organizations are stuck playing catch-up. ServiceNow transforms compliance from a seasonal event into a continuous operational signal.

• Agentic AI for Continuous Control Monitoring transforms control evidence into a continuous operational signal. Automated agents evaluate segregation of duties, access rights, and configuration state across ServiceNow and external systems in real time, surfacing violations the moment they occur. Compliance-ready reports exist on demand across regulatory frameworks including SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA.
• Cryptographic Asset Compliance enables rapid migration from legacy cryptographic algorithms to quantum-resistant standards before the quantum threat window closes. ServiceNow delivers comprehensive discovery, AI-powered risk profiling, and guided migration workflows across on-premises and cloud environments, with full integration to ServiceNow Integrated Risk Management and Governance, Risk, and Compliance (IRM/GRC) products for regulatory compliance evidence at enterprise scale.

Availability

Agentic Exposure Management, Autonomous Remediation Agents, Application Security, Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), External Attack Surface Management (EASM), Agentic AI for Cyber Physical Security, AI Agent Access Security, Non-Human Identity Remediation are available now. Tier 2 SOC AI Specialist, Vulnerability Resolution AI Specialist, Agentic AI for Continuous Control Monitoring, and Cryptography Asset Compliance are expected to be available in December 2026.

New data in ServiceNow’s AI Maturity Index shows that Canadian companies are going big on AI, but the next test is turning that spend into real results. Canadian organizations expect AI to account for 22% of IT budgets by 2027 – doubling year over year – yet companies are lagging in execution.

The question now is: how can companies move from AI investment to measurable business impact?

You can read the report here: https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/resource-center/white-paper/wp-enterprise-ai-maturity-index-2026.pdf

ServiceNow is warning customers through a support bulletin about a security incident after hackers exploited an unauthenticated access flaw through a vulnerable API endpoint, allowing them to query data from customer instances.

Bleeping Compiter has the details here:  https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/servicenow-discloses-security-incident-exposing-customer-data/

Dan Moore, Sr. Director CIAM Strategy at cybersecurity company FusionAuth, provided the following comments:

“Everyone’s calling this an unauthenticated API vulnerability. The attacker bypassed the authentication because there wasn’t any. The endpoint, which lets you create related lists to show up on ServiceNow forms, apparently had its authentication check default to off. It’s unclear how long this has been exposed.

A one-line smoke test “hit the endpoint with no credentials, expect a rejection” catches this. Nobody wrote the test, because the platform treated ‘no auth’ as valid configuration for a sensitive endpoint. When authentication is something you toggle per endpoint instead of a default the platform enforces, an exposed endpoint isn’t a bug the system rejects. It’s a setting someone forgot to change.

If you manage an application with an API, does an endpoint with no auth fail your build, or does it just ship?”

It should not ship. But that is now how the universe sees things. Maybe the universe should change.

ServiceNow and Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced a platform expansion as companies rapidly deploy and scale agentic AI across the enterprise, which follows a significant milestone of ServiceNow’s AWS Marketplace transactions surpassing $1 billion. The expansion introduces a governance architecture for mutual customers built on ServiceNow AI Control Tower and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore; new AI agent integrations for enterprise security, IT operations, and telecommunications that detect, act, and resolve issues; and a native developer integration that lets teams build and deploy ServiceNow applications directly from Kiro, the AWS agentic integrated development environment (IDE), so that developers can move from idea to impact faster.

ServiceNow’s $1 billion milestone reflects something larger than a commercial threshold. Enterprises are consolidating their AI infrastructure around platforms they trust, and increasingly, that means combining cloud and foundation model services with orchestration, governance, and workflow execution. ServiceNow’s platform expansion with AWS is a direct response to that demand: customers who have already committed to both platforms now have a single, connected architecture to deploy and scale AI. The AI workloads they’ve already built and deployed on AWS can now be governed, audited, and wired into the ServiceNow workflows that run their business, without rebuilding anything from scratch.

AI Control Tower and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: where enterprise AI gets built and governed

Enterprises scaling agentic AI face a common problem: agents built on different models, governed by different teams, with no unified view of what they are doing or whether they are working. ServiceNow AI Control Tower and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore address this together. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore provides the flexible foundation to build agents on the models and infrastructure customers trust, while ServiceNow AI Control Tower delivers the unified control plane to help govern how those agents operate across the business. Leading enterprises are building toward this architecture now.

ServiceNow AI specialists and AWS AI agents tackle critical enterprise workflows

Across security, IT operations, and telecommunications, manual triage and system handoffs compound risk and delay outcomes. ServiceNow AI specialists working alongside AWS AI agents handle these workflows end-to-end, with humans in the loop to guide important decisions.

• Security use case: The moment a configuration change is detected in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), ServiceNow’s Vulnerability Resolution AI Specialist calls the AWS Security Agent via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to run an on-demand penetration test against the affected application. ServiceNow then layers on identity blast radius from Veza and device exposure from Armis, producing a complete risk picture. It then determines the fix and presents it for a single human approval. Remediation executes on two parallel tracks: patch deployed, privileges reduced. A final call to the AWS Security Agent will confirm that the fix is clean.
• IT operations use case: An anomaly detected by Amazon CloudWatch is routed to ServiceNow, where ServiceNow’s AIOps AI Specialist and SRE AI Specialist collaborate with the AWS DevOps Agent to correlate events, enrich signals with business context, and validate and execute remediation with human approval. Post-remediation, alerts are confirmed cleared, often proactively without a formal incident ever being raised.
• Telecommunications use case: A ServiceNow and AWS AI-orchestrated telecommunications customer care solution leverages the combined strengths of Amazon Connect for interactions, AWS for infrastructure intelligence, and ServiceNow Telecommunications Service Management for orchestration. When a customer contacts support, a transcript streams into the ServiceNow Telco Customer 360-powered agent workspace in real time via Amazon Connect. ServiceNow’s AI specialist queries RADCOM, a cloud-native network intelligence provider running on AWS, for a scored assessment of voice, video, and streaming quality via Agent-to-Agent (A2A), and simultaneously queries ARIA for billing history and lifetime value. Based on findings and knowledge base rules, the AI specialist recommends a resolution, routes important decisions for human approval, triggers field dispatch if required, and closes the case with a full audit trail.

Build and deploy ServiceNow AI Agents directly from Kiro

ServiceNow is bringing the ServiceNow SDK with Build Agent skills natively into Kiro, giving developers the ability to build and deploy ServiceNow applications, including AI agents, directly from the AWS IDE. With a single-click install from the Kiro Power Marketplace, developers can scaffold applications, configure workflows, and create AI agents through prompt engineering without ever leaving their IDE. Because everything runs natively on the ServiceNow AI Platform, developers get enterprise governance and security without any additional configuration.

Availability

• ServiceNow AI Control Tower with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is available now in AWS Marketplace.
• The ServiceNow Vulnerability Resolution AI Specialist, AIOps AI Specialist, and SRE AI Specialist integrations with AWS AI agents is expected to be available later this year, with launch details to follow.
• The AI specialist workflow for telecommunications is available now. ServiceNow Telecommunications Service Management is a generally available product and now includes ServiceNow Telco Customer 360 as part of the Australia Platform release.
• The ServiceNow SDK for Kiro is available now through the Kiro Power Marketplace.
• Learn more about how ServiceNow is expanding its Autonomous Workforce of AI Specialists to major business functions at Knowledge 2026 here, and how it’s introducing new AI Control Tower capabilities to further discover, observe, govern, secure, and measure AI deployed across the enterprise here.

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