Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI. learn more
Businesses are starting to deploy AI agents. However, if your organization plans to deploy an agent ecosystem at scale and improve employee acceptance, treat AI agents as tools that work in the background and control how these tools are used. You might consider avoiding the intimidation of employees who think they have to know.
Dorit Zilberschott, Vice President of AI and Innovation ServiceNowtold VentureBeat that employees don’t need to know whether a team of AI agents is working in the background.
“There’s so much AI around us that we don’t even realize, and that’s how we think about AI agents at ServiceNow,” Zilbershot says. “It should work. As an employee, I don’t have to worry about an AI agent working in the background.”
Zilbershot said employees will become “managers” of the AI agents in that they only need to do their regular jobs. Agents are automatically triggered to complete tasks.
Despite a slight decline in the adoption of generative AI within enterprises, enterprises are beginning to embrace AI agents and explore ways to deploy them at scale. 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 can ideally automate many workflows. This could include a sales or product roadmap, with one agent encoding customer information, another categorizing it, and yet another notifying employees of status changes. . Zilbershot says that agents don’t replace human employees, but take some of their busy work away, so humans need to pay attention to agents who interact with them. He said that only if there is someone.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told VentureBeat in a separate interview that generative AI, particularly applications around agents, are “growing beyond our expectations.”
“We are mastering work flow and governance and building agents to solve unique problems,” McDermott said. “AI will be built into all of our products.”
As AI agents grow in popularity, Zilbershot said companies need to understand why they work for their organizations and employees.
Agent, not assistant
More than an AI agent working quietly in the background, it’s essential for organizations to understand that agents are not assistants, Zilbershot said. Otherwise, you risk giving your users the expectation that they need to learn how to prompt the agent instead of letting it work autonomously.
“I think it’s a little bit of a disadvantage for the customer to have agents acting as assistants, but we’re not changing the name,” Zilbershot said. “It just creates a false perception of how people approach the market and working with agents.”
AI agents added to Zilbershot work best when there are other agents with which they can interact, so to handle anticipated agent sprawl, you can deploy Orchestrator agents to connect all agents. need to be managed. ServiceNow ships with the Orchestrator agent along with the Now Assist platform.
Other companies are also starting to use Orchestrator agents to provide businesses with access to build custom AI agents. Crew AI released its agent platform this month, and Asana released an agent creator specifically for workflows.
Partnership with Nvidia
To expand its agent ecosystem, ServiceNow announced that it will begin building off-the-shelf AI agents with the following capabilities: NvidiaNIM Agent Blueprint.
Zilbershot said NIM agent blueprints allow ServiceNow to build more agents in the amount it deems necessary to increase agent efficiency.
“We are expanding our ecosystem because there is a limit to how much we can build on our own. We are working with companies like NVIDIA to build native AI agents within the ServiceNow platform. “We want to build strong partnerships,” she said.
The first agent ServiceNow will build with Nvidia is the Vulnerability Analysis for Container Security AI agent. The agent automates vulnerability analysis and is expected to be available on ServiceNow’s agent platform in 2025.
Zilbershot said the partnership with Nvidia is just the first of many partnerships ServiceNow may enter into to expand its AI agents.
