ServiceNow advocates for ‘invisible’ AI agents to ease worker adoption

Credit: Michael Trestman via DALL-E

Enterprises are beginning to deploy AI agents. However, if organizations plan to deploy agentic ecosystems at scale and improve employee acceptance, they might consider treating AI agents as tools working in the background to avoid intimidating employees who think they have to know how to use these tools. 

Dorit Zilbershot, vice president of AI and Innovation at ServiceNow, told VentureBeat that employees don’t have to know if teams of AI agents are working in the background.  

“There’s so much AI around us that we’re not even aware, and that’s how we are thinking about AI agents in ServiceNow,” Zilbershot said. “It should just work. As an employee, I shouldn’t care if AI agents are in the background.”

Zilbershot said employees become “managers” of AI agents in that they just need to do their regular work. The agents are automatically triggered to finish tasks. 

Enterprises have begun embracing AI agents and exploring how to deploy them at scale, even as generative AI deployment in enterprises has fallen slightly. Zilbershot said ServiceNow’s agent platform, Now Assist, is the company’s “fastest-growing product to date.” Now Assist launched a library of AI agents for customers in September. 

AI agents could ideally automate many workflows. This could include sales or product roadmaps, where one agent can encode customer information, another categorizes it and yet another informs an employee of a change in status. Zilbershot said agents don’t replace human employees, they take some busy work away, so the only time humans have to pay attention to an agent is if there’s an agent who’s supposed to interact with them.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told VentureBeat in a separate interview that generative AI, particularly applications around agents, “has grown beyond our expectations.”

“We’ve mastered the flow of work and governance, and we’re building agents solving unique problems,” McDermott said. “AI will be in every product we have.”

As AI agents grow in popularity, Zilbershot said enterprises need to understand what makes agents work for their organization and employees. 

Agents and not assistants

Beyond AI agents quietly working in the background, Zilbershot said it’s essential for organizations to understand that agents are not assistants. If not, they risk setting an expectation to users that they will need to learn how to prompt agents instead of letting them work for them autonomously. 

“I think we’re doing a little bit of a disservice to our customers when agents function more as assistants, but we don’t change the name,” Zilbershot said. “It just creates a wrong perception in the market and how people approach working with agents.” 

Zilbershot added AI agents work best when there are other agents they can interact with, so to handle the expected sprawl of agents, orchestrator agents must be deployed to manage all the agents. ServiceNow ships an orchestrator agent with its Now Assist platform. 

Other companies have begun offering enterprises access to use orchestrator agents and build custom AI agents. Crew AI launched an agentic platform this month, while Asana released an agent creator specifically for workflows. 

Partnership with Nvidia

To expand on its agentic ecosystem, ServiceNow announced it will begin building off-the-shelf AI agents using Nvidia’s NIM Agent Blueprint. 

Zilbershot said using the NIM Agent Blueprint helps ServiceNow build more agents at the volume they feel is needed to make agents more efficient.

“We’re expanding our ecosystem since there can be a limit to how much we can build on our own; we want to have a strong partnership with companies like NVIDIA to build native AI agents within the ServiceNow platform,” she said. 

The first agent ServiceNow will build with Nvidia is a Vulnerability Analysis for Container Security AI Agent. The agent will automate vulnerability analysis and will be available on ServiceNow’s agent platform in 2025. 

Zilbershot said the work with Nvidia will be just the first of many possible partnerships ServiceNow will enter into to expand AI agents.