While the industry was abuzz in 2024 with the term 'Generative AI', 2025 will be the year for AI Agents. A recent LangChain survey revealed over half of companies already use AI agents, with over 75% planning to do so in 2024. Are you considering yourselves part of this demographic? If not, I highly recommend reading and watching the content in this blog.

Why? Because AI Agents represent a transformative leap beyond traditional ML, Virtual Agents & GenAI.

Here's why:

1. Reasoning + Acting Autonomously
   Unlike Virtual Agents that rely on predefined decision trees, AI Agents have the ability to reason and act autonomously, accessing tools and data without explicit human intervention. This makes them far more scalable and adaptable to complex workflows. AI Agents can operate autonomously, completing tasks without supervised invocation. This capability includes the ability to interface with multiple systems/tools to gather data and take action. While there's still a gap between this AI reasoning and human reasoning, and while there is debate on the nature of the reasoning vs reciting, it has proven to improve performance and achieve autonomous goal achievement.
2. Reduced Implementation Complexity
   The biggest friction with Virtual Agents has been the costly and time-consuming implementation process to define decision trees, intents, entities. AI Agents eliminate the need for rigid decision trees, significantly reducing deployment barriers and improving time-to-value. As a LLM based solution, it also means the system can do tasks like classification without requiring a large golden data set for training (e.g. determine category of an issue based on available categories). Given a goal, it will dynamically create a plan and consume available tools.

The Shift Toward AI Agents

The fundamental role of SaaS has been to provide UIs & databases to simplify workflows and tasks for knowledge workers to enhance employee productivity/ customer revenue. As AI evolves, up to 15-20% of future knowledge worker roles tasks are becoming handled by AI Agents & GenAI, allowing for additional capacity to be freed for greater productivity.

With this context set, I'd like to share a brief overview of our AI Agent plans for ITSM:

SaaS providers like ServiceNow grew in popularity because it offered operational cost savings & value differentiation over on-prem solutions or tool sprawled alternatives. The next frontier of cost efficiency lies in autonomous AI agents augmenting your workforce, built and consolidated on ServiceNow.

Why to Consider ServiceNow ITSM AI Agents

Our ownership of workflows, system of record, and domain context positions us uniquely to build domain-specific agents out of the box. Unlike competitors, we can deliver integrated, purpose-built AI Agents optimized for ITSM. These agents can access data directly from the instance, also invoking integrations, flows, scripts, and tools. In addition, we can define the access scope of the user we want the agent to run as- meaning you can maintain your existing security and data definitions established on the platform.

I’m not the only one excited on AI Agent technology.

Just checkout what the industry’s top tech executives have been saying:

In the words of Paul Revere – ‘the AI agents are coming! The AI agents are coming!’.

If you want to learn more about AI Agents for your organization, I recommend this shortlist of resources:

• (AI Agent Overview)
• (Research into worker productivity with GenAI AI)
• (Industry state of art demo on computer use AI agents)
• (Industry Research on AI Agents)

Do you want to partner on identifying & prioritizing use cases for AI Agents in the ITSM domain?

The demo and technology is currently in a controlled go to market (limited access release). I am actively recruiting a small set of design partners to help prioritize use cases and test pre-production AI Agents. Please drop a comment if interested and I will do my best to connect, if your organization is eligible.

All the best to 2025,

Darius

ITSM Product Management

Safe harbor statement: The article above is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for ServiceNow’s products remains at the sole discretion of ServiceNow.