Enterprises today rarely lack data. Their challenge lies in accessing it quickly and consistently. Too often, critical information is scattered across departments, locked in legacy systems, or slowed by brittle integrations. The result is a patchwork of disconnected processes that cannot keep pace with modern demands for agility and insight.
ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric (WDF) was created to address this challenge. By unifying data across systems and making it available in real time to workflows and AI agents, WDF allows organizations to shift from reacting to outdated reports to acting on live operational events. It gives leaders a way to turn disconnected data into a single, trusted foundation for decision-making and automation.
Many organizations discover that their automation struggles stem less from limitations in AI and more from the inconsistency and fragmentation of their data. WDF resolves this by establishing a reliable, connected data layer that powers intelligent workflows and unlocks AI’s full potential.
At its core, WDF is a secure, unified data layer within ServiceNow. It connects structured, semi-structured, unstructured, and even streaming data without requiring migration or duplication.
Traditional integrations rely on extract-transform-load (ETL) pipelines that copy data from source to target systems. This approach adds latency, increases storage and compliance burdens, and often leaves workflows operating on stale or duplicated data. WDF’s zero-copy connectors remove that friction by allowing workflows to access data in real time, directly where it resides. This shift improves governance, lowers costs, and ensures decisions are based on current, authoritative information.
Operational and transactional data, such as machine telemetry, IoT sensor readings, asset-utilization metrics, threat-intelligence feeds, and customer-interaction histories, often benefit most. These high-velocity data sets are essential for time-critical processes and become far more effective when accessible on demand.
WDF also includes Integration Hub, which offers hundreds of prebuilt connectors to major enterprise systems. This replaces brittle, custom-coded integrations with a more sustainable framework. Combined with ServiceNow’s RaptorDB Pro for high-speed transactions and analytics, WDF transforms ServiceNow from a traditional system of record into a true system of action.
One of the clearest demonstrations of this value is predictive maintenance in industrial operations. WDF unifies live sensor readings, ERP work orders, field-service histories, and compliance records into a single data layer that can trigger automated workflows and support AI-driven decisions.
For technology leaders, the critical insight is that WDF is the data backbone of an AI-ready enterprise. Every modern workflow, every agentic AI scenario, and every data-driven business decision depends on having fast, consistent, and connected access to reliable data.
Organizations turn to WDF to overcome three persistent challenges:
Breaking down data silos. Consider a global manufacturer with plants running separate maintenance systems. When assets move between facilities, service teams lose visibility into their full history, prolonging downtime. By linking these systems through WDF, the manufacturer gains a unified, real-time view of asset health and cuts downtime significantly.
Reducing the cost and fragility of legacy integrations. A large financial institution may need to unify risk and compliance data from multiple aging tools. Previous point-to-point integrations are slow to build and prone to failure. WDF’s connector framework and zero-copy architecture enable faster unification, reduce custom code, and allow automated controls testing with live data.
Eliminating reliance on stale data. Manual lookups and out-of-date records slow workflows and increase errors, frustrating employees and customers. With WDF, organizations gain a real-time single source of truth, so that both workflows and AI agents operate on the most accurate and current data.
These improvements are especially valuable in industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and financial services, where compliance, safety, and business continuity all rely on timely and trustworthy data.
Intelligent automation depends on a consistent, reliable data foundation. Without it, predictions lose accuracy, recommendations become obsolete, and automation fails to deliver.
WDF addresses this by giving AI agents immediate access to authoritative information at the source. It enriches that information with context via ServiceNow’s knowledge graph and extends it to unstructured documents through tools like Document Intelligence.
The results are tangible. A healthcare provider that once required days to coordinate medical-device maintenance can now do so in under an hour. By combining live IoT sensor data and ERP inventory records, WDF enables AI agents to schedule field engineers, order replacement parts, and update compliance logs automatically.
Similarly, in customer service operations, virtual agents that previously struggled with fragmented data can now respond accurately, cutting average resolution times by half.
The strength of WDF lies in its ability to connect, understand, and act on enterprise data.
Connectivity begins with zero-copy connectors and Integration Hub, which link ServiceNow directly to internal and external systems without complex processes. Context is added through ServiceNow’s knowledge graph, transforming raw data into actionable insights. Acting on this enriched data becomes seamless, as workflows, analytics, and automations operate on live information for timely decision-making.
Governance serves as a fourth pillar. WDF embeds granular access controls, audit trails, and privacy safeguards to ensure unified access remains compliant and secure.
The business impact is measurable. Operations leaders managing equipment lifecycles, for instance, can view procurement, maintenance, and utilization data in one dashboard. Instead of waiting days for reconciled reports, they can decide in minutes whether to repair or replace equipment. Many organizations report improved time-to-decision and lower integration costs within their first WDF-enabled project.
By adopting Workflow Data Fabric, enterprises move beyond fragmented records to connected, real-time operations, accelerating innovation, strengthening compliance, and creating the data foundation needed for the next generation of AI-driven workflows.