ServiceNow Deepens OpenAI Ties Around AI Agents

ServiceNow and OpenAI are doubling down on their partnership with a new three-year agreement aimed at putting AI where people already work. By integrating OpenAI’s models into ServiceNow, they’re trying to make tasks and approvals feel easier and less hands-on.

“Enterprises want OpenAI intelligence applied directly into ServiceNow workflows,” said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer. “Looking ahead, customers are especially interested in agentic and multimodal experiences, so they can work with AI like a true teammate inside ServiceNow.”

There’s a revenue piece to the deal, but the bigger story is how OpenAI is choosing to grow, by embedding its tech inside platforms companies already rely on. For ServiceNow, that means faster access to advanced AI without having to build everything from scratch.

Time for AI to actually pull its weight, it seems.

From the lab to real work: where agentic AI is impacting customer support and other workflows

The partnership centers on agentic AI, or systems that can take action on behalf of users rather than simply respond to prompts. ServiceNow plans to use OpenAI’s models to power AI agents for tasks such as customer support, IT troubleshooting, and workflow automation.

Voice is a big part of the plan. ServiceNow is building agents that can listen to a request and take action, whether that’s opening a case or kicking off an approval. The company is also tapping OpenAI’s computer-use tools, which enable AI to navigate software the way a human would, rather than relying on rigid scripts.

According to ServiceNow president and COO Amit Zavery, that opens the door to automating tasks that still rely on older systems. “The computer-use models are basically now doing this through learning, and feeding it back into the ServiceNow workflow platform,” he said.

Zavery added that the goal is to make AI useful inside real enterprise environments, including those still running on legacy infrastructure. ServiceNow’s engineers will work alongside OpenAI’s technical teams, while its forward-deployed engineers will help customers put the technology into practice.

Why this matters for enterprise AI

The deal is another sign that companies’ thinking about AI is changing.

“Business has to improve margins, grow revenues, and get results from AI,” said ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. “That’s what we do — and we bring in those special secret sauces on the experience side.”

McDermott also pointed to the growing complexity of managing AI at scale, especially as digital agents become more common. 

“In the next two years, you’re going to have 1.2 million agents,” he said. “ServiceNow has put together the fabric to manage not only our agents, but the agents of other companies.”

A lot of companies are past the “let’s try AI and see what happens” phase and are now asking what actually works in the real world. That’s where ServiceNow sees an opening, and where OpenAI gets a clearer path into day-to-day enterprise use.

For OpenAI, the partnership helps cement its role inside large organizations as competition heats up from Microsoft, Google, and others. For ServiceNow, the goal is to put AI where people already work, instead of asking teams to learn yet another tool or workflow.

The OpenAI partnership also fits in with what ServiceNow announced early last year, when it rolled out new agentic AI offerings and expanded partnerships with Google Cloud, Oracle, and Visa. Together, the moves point to the same goal: giving enterprises a more practical way to manage and scale AI across real workflows, not just experiment with it.