ServiceNow recently held its annual Partner Summit -- this time in sunny Mexico. CoreX CEO Rick Wright returned from Cabo with more than a few insights about AI and the upcoming Knowledge25 event in Las Vegas (where you can find CoreX at Booth #5647), market uncertainty, the supply chain, and more.
Rather than try to interpret Rick’s words, we felt it better to simply let our CEO speak freely on just a few of the event’s myriad takeaways. As we continue to dive deeper into last week’s landmark Yokohama release -- something we’ll be discussing on this page in the next few days -- these insights couldn’t have come at a better time.
Note: All content below reflects Rick’s direct quotes unless otherwise marked.
The ServiceNow Partner team really did a great event that allowed all of us to be open, sharing where the challenges and opportunities are, and how we can all collaborate. The event was a mix of GSIs, resellers, and regional – or smaller – boutiques. It was a mix of people focused on the federal government and public sector as well as commercial.
There was conversation about the current political and economic uncertainty along with strategies on where to focus and opportunities with a big takeaway from ServiceNow that it’s well positioned to drive these opportunities globally. Another takeaway was how important partners are to ServiceNow’s future and its partner-driven ecosystem.
The ability for ServiceNow to be the AI orchestration, approval, and governance engine -- that single point where you control this collection of enterprise agents from a whole bunch of different vendors to effectively execute an end-to-end enterprise workflow, that’s where the magic is going to happen. It’s going to be the game-changer moving forward.
ServiceNow is a single data model, but it will also be the central orchestration workflow engine. You’re not going to have multiple enterprise-wide orchestration engines, right? ServiceNow is well positioned to be the workflow engine because it’s already across the enterprise.
If you look at the use cases where that type of level of experience and knowledge works it's in a call center. Most of what takes time at a call center is the [human] agents doing research. So, if you can do 99% or even 90% of the research in a ticket automatically; if someone has an email issue where there are 20 things to go do -- build agents for those 20 activities. They'll go off and figure out all that and come back with a proposed solution.
ServiceNow’s value proposition is centered on driving operational efficiency. That will only be enhanced and accelerated through the use of AI technologies. But, even without the AI technologies the solutions ServiceNow is building that are industry-specific are driving operational efficiencies with "Little T" transformation projects -- a programmatic approach to digital transformation that breaks "Big T" projects into agile, "Little T" waypoints that allow companies to realize incremental ROI throughout the project, drive measured organizational change management and learn and evolve throughout the project.
AI only accelerates this operational efficiency strategy. ServiceNow hopes to have thousands of agents in its ecosystem by this fall. Ninety percent of those agents are going to come from partners. The reason is, in ServiceNow’s view, their partners have deep industry and functional knowledge based on real-world experiences from real clients.
I think as companies continue to reevaluate the structure of supply chains, the structure, and processes around how you manage suppliers in this ever-changing world … are going to be key. If you can digitize and drive operational efficiencies and agility into how you manage your supply chains and how you manage your suppliers, you can easily adapt to supply chain changes. And I think that's where the real value of ServiceNow comes in.
You’re going to see ServiceNow continue to be more industry-focused, and while they continue to pivot their sales organization, you're going to see more products that are going to be released that are industry-specific problems or resolutions of solutions for industry-specific problems.
From an engineering perspective, they're spending a ton of time not only on AI but also just the foundation -- the framework -- of new industry solutions.
I think you'll start to see that not just in manufacturing. You'll start to see it in financial services. You'll start to see more in telco and retail and utilities and a lot of other industries.
The other one is AI. ServiceNow is laser-focused on winning the AI battle. And what I mean by that is they fully know that it's not going to be just the ServiceNow agents. There are agents out there from a million different companies at this point. They want to own the enterprise AI governance and orchestration market, because that's their specialty. That's the real value they provide as a single data model, a single workflow engine, and an orchestration layer across the enterprise.
[ServiceNow is] releasing a couple of products in Yokohama, a collection of tools that allow either you or your partners to build these agents on the ServiceNow platform. Along with that, there'll be different pricing models to allow people to get into this in a very inexpensive way.
They’re trying to drive through their pricing models, through their product strategy, rapid adoption of Agentic AI, and allowing people to evaluate it.
That's going to open minds and will open the door to people saying, "Alright, one worked great. One thousand [AI agents] will work amazingly with the right governance and the right orchestration."
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These insights are just the beginning. Be sure to come speak with us at Knowledge 25 (Booth #5647), so we can dive even deeper into the discussion of ServiceNow in 2025 and beyond.