ServiceNow Launches AI Governance Platform at Knowledge 2026 Conference

ServiceNow held its Knowledge 2026 conference this week, drawing a record 25,000 customers to what Paul Fipps, the company's president of global customer operations, called the biggest crowd in the event's history. Three weeks before the conference, a CTO of a large financial services company in India told Fipps he had built 30 production-grade AI agents but could not put any into production because he could not answer basic questions about access or performance.

A CIO of a large healthcare and life sciences company told Fipps he had 900 AI pilots running and canceled all of them because he could not govern them.

Amit Zavery, ServiceNow's president, COO and chief product officer, said the era of sidecar AI is over. "Customers don’t want to cobble pieces together — they want outcomes," Zavery stated. ServiceNow's market capitalization hovers around $96 billion.

The company runs 100 billion workflows annually across its platform and processes 7 trillion transactions per year. " ServiceNow partners with Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, and NVIDIA’s NIM for LLMs. The company launched AI Control Tower, a governance layer built on its CMDB that discovers, monitors, and manages every AI agent.

Zavery compared the need for such oversight to air traffic control. "Imagine if you didn’t have air traffic control and people were just flying around," Zavery said. "AI agents are not like humans. " He added that if AI technologies give random outputs, "it doesn’t help.

Fipps reported that customer uptake of AI Control Tower was one of the biggest surprises of the week. He said he was "pleasantly surprised" by how fast customers are engaging and wanting to contract for it. Melinda McKinley, COO of Strategy and Talent at Standard Chartered Bank, said the bank scaled an AI assistant from a 50,000-person pilot in Hong Kong to 85,000 colleagues globally.

The bank's AI assistant case deflection rate increased from 77% to 90%, which McKinley said is triple the industry baseline. Hitachi Energy has 70,000 employees. Oliver de Wilde, head of ServiceNow’s Centre of Excellence at Hitachi Energy, said that after AI went live, employee self-service usage spiked 10-fold in one week and calls to the IT service desk decreased 25%.

Fortune reported that its journalists used generative AI as a research tool for this story and an editor verified the accuracy before publishing.