The IT Nerd

We’ve all been there: you’re locked out of your bank account, and the chatbot keeps looping: “Please verify your identity.” We know we’re talking to machines… we just don’t want it to feel that way.

That moment isn’t rare and it’s reshaping consumer expectations. A 2025 report from ServiceNow reveals that 64% of Canadians expect AI chatbots to recognize emotion by the end of the year. 

Why? Because while 62% of Canadians see value in chatbots, a striking 94% still find them frustrating and impersonal. When we say, “this is urgent,” we want tech that can read the room, not just recite a script.  

But the real issue isn’t just that bots lack empathy, it’s that we’re relying on them too much in the wrong moments. 

What Canadians really want is a smarter handoff: 
🧠 AI that handles the boring stuff 
👩‍💻 Humans who can step in with real empathy 
📱 Tech that helps both work better — together 

We’re not anti-tech. We’re just pro-sanity. Canadians are happy to let AI handle the basics, but when something goes sideways, they want a real person, already up to speed, thanks to embedded, context-aware AI working behind the scenes. 

Today, at ServiceNow’s annual customer and partner event, Knowledge 2025 the company introduced its new Core Business Suite—an AI-powered solution that quickly transforms core business functions like HR, procurement, finance, and more. Available on the single, intelligent ServiceNow AI Platform, Core Business Suite connects employees, suppliers, systems, and data in one place, enabling efficiency and faster time to value for organizations of all sizes. Within Core Business Suite, ServiceNow also launched a new Finance Case Management solution to orchestrate finance department requests with AI-driven processes, eliminating manual tasks and reducing errors.

ServiceNow brings together AI, data, and workflows on a single, powerful platform, allowing ServiceNow Core Business Suite to accelerate transformation across business operations, drive better outcomes, reduce costs, and improve service experiences.

Simplifying the work experience for every team

ServiceNow Core Business Suite brings together proven capabilities across business functions into one unified experience, representing a new way to scale enterprise-grade intelligence, efficiency, and productivity to mid-sized and commercial customers. It provides a single-entry point where employees can resolve everyday workplace needs—whether it’s requesting workplace accommodation, seeking help with a procurement request, or submitting a compliance concern without navigating multiple systems. By seamlessly connecting employees, suppliers, systems, and data from both inside and outside the ServiceNow AI Platform, the suite eliminates silos and unifies requests and processes across finance, IT, HR, procurement, legal, facilities, and more.

Built for speed and simplicity, Core Business Suite is optimized for fast deployment—often in just weeks—with AI agents that assist with setup and automation from day one. This means faster time to value, lower cost to serve, and consistent experiences, even for smaller teams or companies without large IT departments. Employees gain quick, hassle-free access to critical information, powered by AI that’s as smart as the data behind it. By tapping into rich contextual data across the enterprise, business experts can swiftly resolve cases with complete context, while team leads gain visibility into performance metrics, enabling continuous improvement. The suite rapidly automates tasks, streamlines complex interactions, and accelerates productivity—delivering greater transparency and operational efficiency throughout the enterprise.

Transforming finance with ServiceNow Finance Case Management

As part of the launch of Core Business Suite, ServiceNow introduced Finance Case Management, a new solution built specifically for finance departments to manage their day-to day work and requests. While traditional finance tools focus on recording transactions, ServiceNow Finance Case Management addresses the unstructured work that leads to inefficiency—such as creating a new cost center, checking the status of a vendor invoice, or escalating a payroll issue—bringing visibility, structure, and automation. Instead of navigating a maze of disconnected systems, employees now have a single, intuitive interface to initiate, act on, and track finance-related requests with AI agent assistance.

Core Business Suite marks the next step in ServiceNow’s mission to simplify work across the enterprise—streamlining IT, HR, finance, procurement, legal and workplace operations, eliminating silos, and transforming how employees get things done. By automating requests and connecting workflows across departments, it delivers faster outcomes and better experiences for teams at every level.

Additional information: 

Learn more about ServiceNow Knowledge 2025 here.

Today, at ServiceNow’s annual customer and partner event, Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow unveiled the next milestone in its groundbreaking CRM designed to disrupt an industry long dominated by outdated, overbuilt systems. In a bold move to challenge the status quo, ServiceNow is bringing together data, AI, and workflows into a single system of action.

Customers can sell, fulfill, and service on a unified platform, built to deliver consistent, end-to end customer experiences. In addition, ServiceNow announced new AI agents for CRM that make true self-service a reality by completing tasks autonomously, reducing time spent swiveling between applications and customer requests. Using ServiceNow CRM, The Whole Group is delivering 40% faster time to value and unlocking dynamic, AI-powered business models for its customers. ServiceNow CRM is setting a new standard for advanced, seamless customer
experiences.

Traditional CRM serves as a system of record ending at the front office, putting customer acquisition and retention at risk, but ServiceNow CRM is built for an AI-first world, providing personalized and proactive experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. The ServiceNow AI Platform connects workflows across systems and departments, eliminating inefficient processes tied together by spreadsheets, shared inboxes, and human middleware.

ServiceNow CRM is growing at an impressive rate as customers demand a better way to connect sellers, agents, and field technicians all on the same unified platform. CRM is the company’s fastest-growing workflow business with cumulative annual contract value (CACV) of $1.4 billion, growing 30% year-over-year as of year-end 2024. The entire customer experience resides on a single platform supercharged with agentic AI capabilities, so businesses can deliver what customers want quickly, drive increased productivity, sell more and foster a whole new level of customer loyalty.

ServiceNow CRM partner The Whole Group has experienced the power of seamlessly connected data and AI-powered workflows that maximize revenue, profit and operational efficiency. The company has both accelerated time to value and decreased the cost of business model transformation by 40% when its customers leverage ServiceNow for CRM and build AI-powered customer journeys on the ServiceNow platform.

AI Agents power seamless, intelligent customer experiences

Today’s customers expect more than fast service—they expect personalized, proactive experiences that anticipate their needs and resolve issues without friction. New capabilities in ServiceNow CRM deliver intelligent solutions to help businesses shift from reactive customer service to proactive engagement and ensure consistent end-to-end service experiences across departments.

ServiceNow today unveiled CRM AI Agents, a suite of specialized AI agents that autonomously orchestrate and complete tasks across the entire customer lifecycle—from selling and fulfilling to servicing. Unlike traditional automation requiring predefined rules, these AI agents dynamically determine the best course of action by resolving inquiries instantly, routing complex cases with full context, and managing workflows across departments. These agents start with conversational interactions to capture customer requests, then seamlessly manage the entire fulfillment process, coordinating with live agents when human intervention is needed.

At ServiceNow, AI agents are already automating 37% of the company’s customer support case
workflows. By scaling live call center agents, they boost efficiency, accelerate resolutions, and
enhance customer engagement, enabling businesses to shift from reactive support to proactive,
autonomous AI-driven experiences.

The news follows a drum beat of innovation from the ServiceNow CRM and Industry Workflows business, an innovator in the customer service and support market since 2016. In March, ServiceNow signed a definitive agreement to acquire Logik.ai, an industry leader with a modern, AI-powered, and composable CPQ solution to expand ServiceNow’s growing CRM footprint and empower sales organizations to close deals faster, boost productivity levels, and achieve greater efficiency. ServiceNow’s recent Yokohama platform release also strengthened CRM capabilities like self-service commerce portals, turnkey CCaaS integrations, and AI agents designed specifically for CRM use cases.

By connecting AI, data, and workflows organization-wide on a single platform, ServiceNow is advancing in its CRM leadership to service, sell, and deliver, from first contact to resolution.

All features announced today are generally available and can be found in the ServiceNow Store.

ServiceNow today unveiled the Yokohama platform release, advancing automation, governance, and workflow intelligence to help businesses navigate operational complexity.

With this release, organizations can accelerate application development, improve workflow performance, and enhance customer experiences—all while maintaining the highest standards of governance and security. From ServiceNow Studio, which provides a unified workspace for rapid application development and governance, to enhanced self service portals which enable customers to conveniently configure and place orders, these innovations simplify complexity and drive efficiency. Service Observability also ensures business resilience through AI-driven insights so organizations can meet the growing demand for enterprise-wide visibility—all within a single, secure platform.

The 2024 Gartner® Digital Worker Survey found that over 60% of digital workers are streamlining work with basic automation and using analytics to build customized dashboards to support business decisions. With the Yokohama release, ServiceNow is reducing complexity and inefficiencies so businesses can strengthen decision making, improve experiences, and accelerate productivity.

From no-code to AI agents, ServiceNow Studio simplifies enterprise automation

Speed and scale define modern business—but fragmented tools slow innovation, and siloed solutions lead to governance issues and workflow inconsistencies. The opportunity comes from building AI-powered, enterprise-grade solutions that connect teams, automate workflows, and
ensure security by design.

ServiceNow Studio is a unified, AI-powered environment that revolutionizes development on the ServiceNow Platform for no-code, low-code, and pro-code developers. With built-in support from Now Assist, ServiceNow Studio accelerates application development with intuitive, easy-to use tools that enhance collaboration and streamline automation. Developers can work seamlessly across projects by managing all metadata in one place with cross-scope editing and confidently deploy changes with developer-friendly update set management.

Expanding on ServiceNow’s AI Agent innovations, it integrates with AI Agent Studio, enabling developers to design both apps and AI agents in one experience. Together, these capabilities automate reviews, approvals, and application changes all enabled by the seamless data integration of ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric for fully governed, enterprise-wide data connectivity. By centralizing tools, best practices, and AI-driven workflows, ServiceNow Studio empowers businesses to scale automation, collaborate more effectively, and turn innovation into real
impact.

Additionally, new GenAI-powered skills further help developers automate work to accelerate testing, optimization, and deployment. RPA bot generation allows companies to use natural language to create bots, democratizing development; app summarization adds AI-generated summaries to app descriptions to check for duplicate apps and evaluate for deployment; and Automated Test Framework (ATF) generation simplifies application testing with automated testing scenarios that improve quality, reliability, and performance. By continuing to release new skills that deeply embed AI directly into the development process, ServiceNow enables teams to build, test, and optimize applications with speed and intelligence.

Make sales cycles seamless with smarter ordering solutions

Traditional CRM systems have failed to deliver the flexibility and efficiency businesses need to drive real-time, seamless end-to-end experiences that meet modern customer expectations. Sales and support teams spend excessive time manually processing orders, responding to repetitive inquiries, and tracking customer issues—often leading to delays and dissatisfied customers.

ServiceNow Sales and Order Management (SOM) is addressing this challenge. Built on ServiceNow’s AI Platform, SOM unifies the ability to configure, price, and quote with order management and fulfillment to accelerate sales cycles, streamline operations, and deliver seamless, proactive service.

Self service commerce portals make it even easier for companies to drive revenue by allowing customers to configure products, place orders, and track status instantly and at any time— without the need to engage sales or support teams at every step. By reducing friction in the purchasing process, businesses can decrease order abandonment, increase transaction volume, and capture revenue faster. With sales, fulfillment, and support functionality on a single platform, businesses can deliver exceptional, connected experiences while freeing up teams to focus on customer relationships.

Enhancing service operations with intelligent observability

Service Observability, part of ServiceNow IT Operation Management (ITOM), gives organizations a single solution to manage and act on insights across their entire observability ecosystem. Many enterprises rely on dozens of monitoring and observability tools, creating complexity and blind spots. Service Observability brings together information from any source, using AI-driven insights to pinpoint root causes faster, quantify business impact, and resolve issues before they escalate.

With Service Observability, IT teams get a unified, AI-powered hub that integrates seamlessly with their existing solutions. AI-driven automated workflows allow organizations to reduce downtime, eliminate guesswork, and align service operations with business outcomes. Service Observability delivers real-time intelligence that helps organizations move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive problem-solving.

A platform that redefines work

With the Yokohama release, ServiceNow reinforces its leadership as the AI platform for business transformation—delivering scalable and intelligent automation and workflows that drive real business impact. By equipping businesses with tools to accelerate development, enhance observability, and streamline sales and order management, ServiceNow continues to lead in helping enterprises boost productivity and drive operational efficiency.

These innovations—along with ServiceNow’s additional advancements in agentic AI announced today as part of the Yokohama release—help organizations achieve greater resilience in an increasingly dynamic world.

All features announced today are generally available and can be found in the
ServiceNow Store.

ServiceNow today announced the Yokohama platform release, unleashing new AI agents across CRM, HR, IT, and more, for faster, smarter workflows and maximum, end-to-end business impact. These latest innovations include teams of preconfigured AI agents that deliver productivity and predictable outcomes from day one, on a single platform, as well as capabilities to build, onboard, and manage the entire AI agent lifecycle. Because data fuels AI, the company also announced expansion of its Knowledge Graph with advancements to its Common Service Data Model (CSDM) to break down barriers among data sources for more connected AI agents.

According to Gartner®, “By 2028, 40% of CIOs will demand “Guardian Agents” be available to autonomously track, oversee, or contain the results of AI agent actions,” underscoring the growing need for a coordinated, enterprise-wide approach to AI deployment and management. As businesses race to unlock the full potential of agentic AI, ServiceNow serves as the AI agent control tower for enterprises, with solutions that eliminate common roadblocks like data fragmentation, governance gaps, and real-time performance challenges. Unlike other AI providers that operate in silos or require complex integrations, ServiceNow AI Agents are built on a single, enterprise-wide platform, helping ensure seamless data connectivity with Workflow Data Fabric. By providing a single view of all workflows, AI, and automation needs, ServiceNow enables companies to seamlessly coordinate thousands of AI agents across CRM, IT, HR, finance, and more, enabling total enterprise-wide visibility and control.

ServiceNow AI Agents are now available to radically accelerate productivity at scale

Enterprise leaders are moving beyond experimentation, demanding AI solutions that drive real outcomes. ServiceNow’s AI capabilities generate insights that power AI agent reasoning, planning, learning, and orchestration, equipping businesses to more rapidly achieve impactful goals.

New ServiceNow AI Agents are available today and ready to help businesses accelerate productivity, streamline operations, and drive real outcomes for enterprise-wide use cases. For example:

• Security Operations (SecOps) expert AI agents transform security operations by streamlining the entire incident lifecycle, eliminating repetitive tasks and empowering SecOps teams to focus on quickly stopping real threats.
• Autonomous change management AI agents act like a seasoned change manager, instantly generating custom implementation, test, and backout plans by analyzing impact, historical data, and similar changes—ensuring seamless execution with minimal risk.
• Proactive network test & repair AI agents operate as AI-powered troubleshooters that automatically detect, diagnose, and resolve network issues before they impact performance.

Simplify AI agent management for a more streamlined lifecycle

ServiceNow AI Agent Orchestrator and AI Agent Studio are also now generally available with expanded capabilities to govern the complete AI agent lifecycle—from building AI agents, to onboarding and monitoring their performance, to ensuring enterprises realize the value they need. This includes:

• Enhanced onboarding capabilities through AI Agent Studio to streamline the setup process with guided instructions, making it easier than ever to design and configure new AI agents using natural language descriptions.
• Expanded performance management capabilities within ServiceNow’s overall agentic AI framework include an analytics dashboard for visualizing AI agent usage, quality, and value. Agentic AI workflows are seamlessly tied to business KPIs so administrators can more easily track AI agent performance and ROI.

Connect, understand, and take action with data solution advancements

At the foundation of the ServiceNow Platform is Workflow Data Fabric, enabling AI-powered workflows that integrate seamlessly with an organization’s data, regardless of the system or source. Workflow Data Fabric enables businesses to gain deeper insights through AI-driven contextualization and decision intelligence while automating manual work and creating process efficiencies.

New in the Yokohama release, ServiceNow continues to expand its Knowledge Graph data capabilities with enhancements to its Common Service Data Model (CSDM). CSDM provides a standardized framework for managing IT and business services that accelerates quick, safe, and compliant technology deployments. By unifying hundreds of technology categories, systems, and processes under one clear model, CSDM empowers organizations to implement and scale technology with confidence. With this latest update, customers gain a unique advantage: the ability to orchestrate seamless hand-offs between both AI and live agents, ensuring work flows effortlessly across teams. Built-in governance and audit-ready data provide transparency and trust, so businesses can continue at the pace of innovation while maintaining compliance.

All features announced today are generally available and can be found in the ServiceNow Store.

ServiceNow and Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced the expansion of their strategic partnership, unveiling cutting-edge AI-driven capabilities to help businesses streamline operations and compete on a global stage.

Highlights for Canada: 

• Expansion to Canada in 2025: This partnership’s growth into Canada will deliver enhanced value to industries such as telecom, technology, finance, education, and retail. 
• Canadian Enterprise Success: Companies like Bell Canada are already leveraging this collaboration to achieve significant cost savings and outstanding results. John Watson, President, Bell Business Markets, AI and FX Innovation notes, “By harnessing the Now Platform’s advanced automation and AI capabilities powered by AWS, we are driving operational excellence and delivering even greater value to our customers.” 
• Critical Moment for Canada: With AI adoption in Canada still at just 35%, this announcement is poised to break barriers to productivity and drive comprehensive digital transformation across the country. 

What’s New: 

• Enhanced GenAI Workflows: A new connector enables seamless use of multimodal models developed and trained on Amazon Bedrock, powering advanced Generative AI workflows on the Now Platform. 
• Automation & Integration Upgrades: New solutions for managing security incidents and procurement are available on AWS Marketplace, simplifying complex enterprise needs. 

This partnership represents a milestone in the collaboration between ServiceNow and AWS, combining AWS’s advanced cloud capabilities with ServiceNow’s innovative solutions to empower businesses to maximize cloud value, enhance digital experiences, and redefine GenAI-powered workflows. 

For more details, you can read the full press release, here.

For leaders, the pressure is on to demonstrate the ROI of their generative AI investments. As one of the few enterprise software companies with real GenAI products already delivering tangible value for customers, ServiceNow is winning. 

Today, ServiceNow launched its Now Platform Xanadu release, representing the company’s most comprehensive AI release to-date, to further help move AI from potential to reality. 

The new innovations included in the Xanadu release are designed to help businesses harness the full potential of GenAI and streamline work, top-to-bottom. At a high level, today’s announcements include:  

• New plans to integrate Agentic AI into the Now platform to power 24/7 productivity at massive scale. 
• Expanded Now Assist capabilities, hundreds of additional AI updates, and the general availability of our Copilot for Microsoft 365 integration, boosting employee collaboration and productivity.  
• Innovations for developers, IT teams, and employees create a connected, agile work environment, helping organizations scale and drive operational efficiency. 
• Purpose-built industry solutions powered by GenAI help organizations solve distinct business challenges, redefining services and experiences. 

Alongside Xanadu, ServiceNow also announced new Data Enhancements on the Now Platform, including a next generation data layer to unlock value with ultra-scale and performance.  

You can find out more via the links below:

• Generative AI Innovations Press Release 
• Agentic AI Innovations Press Release 
• Industry Innovations Press Release 
• Data Enhancements Press Release 
• Xanadu Innovations Press Release 

New research is out from ServiceNow measuring AI maturity of organizations across industries shows that 56% of Canadian AI pacesetters—those who are seeing success (and ROI) deploying GenAI—are using AI in collaboration with human workers to boost efficiency.  

Prioritizing human needs in AI development is crucial to ensuring deployment is trusted and useful. AI needs to become a collaborative partner rather than just a transactional tool—a necessary step to drive the transformational change the technology promises.   

But the new research has also found that less than half of Canadian respondents (46%) say that their organization has the right mix of talent/skills to execute their AI strategy, and only 39% feel that they have good visibility into the deployment and use of AI in their organization – pointing to a need for reskilling / upskilling and AI education and governance initiatives for the organizations falling behind pacesetters.  

You can read the research here.

A company named Assetnote has published research on a series of vulnerabilities in ServiceNow which when chained together can create huge problems for those who rely on ServiceNow:

Through the course of three to four weeks, we were able to find a chain of vulnerabilities that allows full database access and full access to any MID servers configured.

The following CVEs were assigned for these issues:
‍
CVE-2024-4879
CVE-2024-5178
CVE-2024-5217

Tom Siu, CISO, Inversion6 had this comment on this research:

The input validation flaw means that regular data entry fields, such as a user login window where a user would type a userid, does not check whether the data inputs are as expected. This means an attack, such as the well known “SQL Injection” attack could be used to gain access to the system’s backend data. The OWASP Top 10 Web vulnerabilities list this as A03:2021 – Injection, where 03 means it is the third most prevalent risk.

Since many customers of ServiceNow include IT Help Desk functionality, a successful attack could reveal critical internal information about users (email, phone numbers), IT issues, and operational challenges the organization manages, permitting well-crafted social engineering attacks.  I could see an attack spoofing a Help Desk support call.

Of major importance for cybersecurity teams – some organizations use ServiceNow to track and manage security events and incidents. The disclosure of this highly sensitive operational security information would be disastrous to IT and cybersecurity teams. Cybersecurity teams should use this risk impact to amplify priority for patch implementation of ServiceNow utilities.

ServiceNow has released mitigations to this chain of vulnerabilities. Thus if you haven’t applied them, now would be a good time to do so. I’d also read the research on this as this clearly is a non trivial chain of vulnerabilities