ServiceNow thinks you're doing AI fast and wrong

And of course thinks it can help you do it right, once it gets around to delivering

Three weeks after releasing one of its biannual platform upgrades, ServiceNow has started delivering an "AI Experience."

The Register asked why the company chose to vary its usual release cycle, given its "Zurich" upgrade debuted on September 10 and included the "Builder Agent" vibe coding tool, meaning those users who choose to adopt the new platform – each ServiceNow customer runs a private instance and can change to new versions at a time of their choosing – already have more AI to play with.

Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright told us ServiceNow did so simply because it wanted to get more AI into users' hands ASAP, as it believes they want it.

So there's another thing AI can do: change established product release cadences.

ServiceNow calls its new agentic stuff "AI Experience" and the big ticket item is "voice agents" that allow users to drive workflows by speaking.

The company showed a demo of an HR person receiving a notification that a job offer will soon lapse if they do not authorize it and responding by chatting with a bot to explain they are unable to sign off on the offer due to some unknown glitch. The bot authorizes the offer, diagnoses the glitch as crocked firewall config, and sends IT a ticket to fix that up. That ticket ends up in the queue of an IT support person, who sees a recommended fix – rolling back the firewall to remove a recent upgrade that caused problems – and clicks to let an agent make that happen.

That sounds great. Shame it's on a to-do list ServiceNow promises to complete before the end of 2025, along with the underlying plumbing to make it possible.

The part of the AI Experience the company has ready now is called "AI Lens" and means AI can read things like screenshots or forms and initiate workflows based on their content instead of requiring a sentient meatbag to interpret a document.

The Register keeps hearing about organizations abandoning AI projects because they don't pay, and slow take-up rates of the tech. So we asked Wright if that's typical of ServiceNow users.

He responded by saying people are not thinking about agentic AI the right way. "People don't get in the AI mindset. They use it for things they did before," he said, before urging: "Don't use it as robotic process automation 2.0."

Wright instead wants you to use agentic AI to achieve outcomes. "People will use AI to say, 'When I resolve this incident, write me a summary,'" he said. "Why not amend the query slightly to ask, 'Summarize the incident and advise on how to improve.'" ®