ServiceNow Launches Significant AI Agent Expansion, Reports Annual Growth

‘What we are focused on is AI agents that are running across the ServiceNow platform, that are running all the way across your enterprise: north, south, east, west. This is because the kind of tasks and business processes our customers need to perform don't live in silos. You need agents,’ says Paul Smith, president of customer and field operations.

Business transformation technology developer ServiceNow Wednesday introduced several innovations aimed at making AI agents available across customers’ environments and improving the orchestration of those agents.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company also reported its fourth fiscal quarter 2024 and fiscal year 2024 financials, highlighted by a 21-percent year-over-year growth in both subscription revenue and overall for the quarter, as well as a 21-percent growth in customers with over $5 million in ACV (annual contract value) and a 35-percent growth in customers with over $20 million in ACV.

ServiceNow is making a big push to make AI agents ubiquitous across the ServiceNow platform and across its customers, including pre-built, ready-to-deploy AI agents for every workflow, said Paul Smith, president of customer and field operations.

[Related: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott: ‘We’re Putting AI To Work For People’]

“We are announcing a very large number of pre-built AI agents, 1000s of pre-built AI agents that our customers can put to work in hyper automating IT, solving employee issues, solving customer service issues, and many others,” Smith told CRN.

Also new from ServiceNow is AI Agent Studio, a new low-code/no-code tool for businesses looking to build their own AI agents, Smith said.

When ServiceNow demonstrated AI Agent Studio at this month’s sales kickoff event, which was focused on the company’s AI agentic advances particularly for channel partners, partners in the audience gave an audible gasp, he said.

“We have a number of our well-known partners who are already getting their hands on this and are out building their AI agents,” he said. “And if you follow that to its logical conclusion, you are going to have the thousands of pre-built agents from ServiceNow. You’re going to have customers building their own agents. You’re going to have partners like Nvidia with their own agents and building new agents on the ServiceNow platform, and all of our other partners out there like Cognizant working on this. There are going to be fleets of agents out there deployed our customers environments.”

ServiceNow also unveiled AI Agent Orchestrator to connect teams of AI agents working across tasks, systems, and departments as a way to basically harness, automate, control, and manage these fleets of AI agents, Smith said.

“The combination of those three things is going to be incredibly powerful,” he said. “Pre-built agents, AI Agent Studio, AI Agent Orchestrator—this is what our customers need to really take advantage of agentic AI and get to value fast.”

ServiceNow has also expanded its Workflow Data Fabric, an enhanced integrated data layer unifying business and technology data across the enterprise to power workflows and AI agents with real‑time, secure access to data from any source. It previously was available with technology partners such as DataBricks and Snowflake on Microsoft Azure, and later became available on AWS, and is now available natively on Google Cloud as well as Oracle, Smith said.

So basically, our customers can now really start to harness data from any source to fuel their workflows and fuel agentic AI,” he said.

Smith (pictured) also said that ServiceNow is committed to working with all AI platforms including China’s newly introduced DeepSeek as well as Twitter’s Grok.

“I can't believe it's only Wednesday, considering the amount of news copy that's been written on all of this,” he said.

When ServiceNow first launched its AI strategy, it initially focused on its own domain-specific large language models that were focused on serving very specific ServiceNow use cases, and they were very efficient and very effective from a GPU and cost perspective, Smith said.

“We are absolutely now embracing whatever other language models our customers are choosing, whether that be OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic, etc., because this is going to be a world where language models are constantly trumping each other in terms of efficacy, in terms of what they offer, in terms of cost benefit,” he said. “And we want to be the platform that embraces them all depending on the particular choice of our customers, while at the same time focusing on our own R&D with our own domain-specific language models, and also going deeper with some of these third-party models as well, where it makes sense for our customers and where it makes sense for our particular use case. We're a platform that embraces all of them.”

ServiceNow will integrate with every AI model customers use, Smith said.

“Our plan is that we are going to basically be a platform that, depending on customer choice, you can bring in the large language model of your choosing,” he said. “The conversation this week could be Grok, and next week it could be something different. But our stated intent is that we're a platform that allows you to safely bring whatever language model you are using, supplemented by our own R&D.”

Beyond the financial numbers and the widening breadth of customers is real change in how those customers use AI, Smith said.

“Only 12 months ago, I was talking with you and with customers and partners around AI assistants and Copilot, and around the massive productivity gains you can get there,” he said. “But already we've moved from that. That is all still great. It's still amazing in terms of ‘summarize this case for me’ or ‘deliver the information I need as an employee’ or ‘help automate my IT operations.’ But now there’s a real shift to agentic AI and agents.”

Smith said he met with analyst firm IDC last week, which predicted that nearly 50 percent of organizations in 2025 will be using AI agents.

“But the key thing is, if you're just deploying agents inside a particular cloud or inside a particular workflow or inside a particular business silo, that is going to be of limited value in terms of enterprise transformation,” he said. “What we are focused on is AI agents that are running across the ServiceNow platform, that are running all the way across your enterprise: north, south, east, west. This is because the kind of tasks and business processes our customers need to perform don't live in silos. You need agents.”

ServiceNow’s own use of AI has resulted in significant quantifiable impacts to the company, Smith said.

“We have obviously deployed agentic AI across the ServiceNow landscape, in my business from a customer perspective, in HR, in IT support,” he said. “We know we have freed up about 3 million employee hours inside ServiceNow. That’s about $325 million of annualized value to us. I'll give you one really specific example. In [ServiceNow President and CFO] Gina Mastantuono’s organization, she has a finance support team for dealing with employee financial queries. I'll be honest, a lot of those financial queries come from my 11,000-person go-to-market organization. These are people who are basically checking, ‘Hey, I thought I was going to get XYZ commission. I didn't get XYZ commission. Can someone tell me what I should have gotten?’ On any other kind of payroll query, the response time was typically four days. The response time now is eight seconds.”

Agentic AI is going to come into its own at some point this year, and ServiceNow is leading the charge, said Rick Wright, CEO of CoreX, a Radnor, Pa.-based solution provider and ServiceNow partner.

“Not only is their agent technology good, but their secret sauce, I think, is the orchestration,” Wright told CRN. “We have all of these workflows, especially as we get into the space that we're in—financial close, order to cash, supply chain exception handling—there’s just a myriad of use cases that just jump off the page.”

Wright cited as an example a company which has repeating issues with their supply chain, and has maybe 12 things that need to happen in response.

“Building agents to go drive those and driving those through a workflow, to me, is a game changer,” he said. “So we are incredibly excited about where ServiceNow is taking this technology. I think there's lots of companies building AI agents to do a whole lot of things. And the ServiceNow differentiator is the ability to connect all of those in an construct, in a workflow, with approvals and checkpoints that already spans an enterprise. This is technology that exists within most organizations. So adding agents to that, to me, is just the next step in the evolution of enterprise software.”

ServiceNow By The Numbers

For its fourth fiscal quarter 2024, which ended December 31, ServiceNow reported total revenue of $2.96 billion, up 21 percent over the $2.44 billion the company reported for its fourth fiscal quarter 2023.

That included subscription revenue of $2.87 billion, up 21 percent, and professional services and other revenue of $91 million, up 26 percent.

GAAP net income for the quarter was $384 million or $1.83 per share, up from last year’s $295 million or $1.43 cents per share. On a non-GAAP basis, ServiceNow reported net income of $769 million or $3.67 per share, up from last year’s $643 million or $3.11 per share.

For all of fiscal 2024, ServiceNow reported revenue of $10.98 billion, up 22 percent from last year’s $8.97 billion.

That included subscription revenue of $10.65 billion, up 23 percent, and professional services and other revenue of $338 million, down 16 percent.

GAAP net income for the year was $1.43 billion or $6.84 per share, down from last year’s $1.73 billion or $8.42 per share. On a non-GAAP basis, ServiceNow reported $2.90 billion or $13.92 per share, down from last year’s $2.22 billion or $10.78 per share.

Looking ahead, ServiceNow expects fiscal first quarter 2025 subscription revenue of $2.995 billion to $3.000 billion, up by about 18.5 percent to 19 percent over last year. The company also expects full fiscal year 2025 subscription revenue of $12.635 billion to $12.675 billion, up by about 18.5 percent to 19 percent over fiscal 2024.

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