u/psychofreud

Hi, I am Anders.

I spent most of my time at Knowledge listening to promises of a great future, getting invested in them, and then simply trying to find out what was true. I spoke with several ServiceNow product people - and for some questions I got great answers, while some replies were vague, and some times I had to give up and make an educated guess based on what I know.

Here are some of my thoughts.

(Disclaimer: I am not writing this on behalf of my employer or any company. My words, ideas and conclusions are my own, I am not claiming to know anything, I am most likely wrong or didn't get the memo, never listen to me or do anything I do, and if you get upset or angry based on whatever I say here I apologize. Just sharing my thoughts, because I think it's good to share ideas.)

Moveworks
Bill McDermott keynote quote: "This is now fully integrated into the platform". At worst this a false statement, at best it is a misleading thing to say.

My investigations show that Moveworks is still an external service, not at all in ServiceNow (at least yet), and is fully running, and is configured and maintained at moveworks.com only. It has a connector to ServiceNow, so the "fully integrated" part is at best an inbound integration from Moveworks servers. All demos you see will either be directly at a Moveworks instance, or an embedded chat (like Virtual Agent), like an iframe type, but you are actually typing in Moveworks and not ServiceNow. Any question I had around how to set it up, adjust prompts, set up custom integrations and so on were for the most part ignored or I was told a roadmap would have great ServiceNow functionality. Educated guess: Besides the connector to ServiceNow (no different than other connectors from there) you are just working in another system, which is in a different datacenter, meaning your CISO might want to have a word in any decision now that company data goes to more places.

I got my hands on a lab instance and made two Youtube videos (part 1 and part 2) where I "unbox" Moveworks, which is where I got my initial questions from.
(Disclaimer: I am not actually talking down Moveworks here. I actually think the service itself seems pretty awesome, it's super fast, and compared to Virtual Agent it's a way better user experience - my critisism is the misleading communication around this being anything but an external service, and how my questions around it are still unanswered or are mostly ignored.)

Autonomous Workforce
I was trying to figure out how this is more than a collection of preconfigured AI Agents, and why the current Agentic Workflows won't already cover this. The idea, as I understand it, is to provide agentic functionality on task level without having to work with complex prompting. This led me to question how much these agents are able to do, but on one level was hoping someone would surprise me with a great idea on how they would learn from historical resolutions.
I filmed asking a representative demoing this in the Expo area, a video which is also on Youtube. Direct quote: "We've tried to make this as plug and play as possible, so you don't have to configure anything". I asked "How does the agent understand HOW to resolve a ticket?" and the response was more or less that it would only do simple things like triaging, looking up knowledge articles, writing comments and resolving. Don't take my word for it - check out the video and make your own conclusion.

He does also say that if an agent would need to perform an integration to solve the task, that's probably something they need to add at a later point. My educated guess, this is pre-prompted agents with a generic problem-solving capability on a very basic level - assigning, replying with self-help text based on articles, and probably not much else. Can you set up tools like you can with AI Agents today? No. Can you direct these "AI specialists" to be more process specific? No.
At least not now.

AI Control Tower
I think the AI Control Tower is a great concept, and much needed now that companies buy AI services en-masse and with that need some level of control. I loved the demos showing a kill switch for rogue AI agents in the enterprise, and that a new role (AI steward) is introduced to be the "firewall persona" for people who wants to place AI everywhere with no risk assessment performed. We need it, and it's a great idea. I am not a fan of the user interface still, but assume it will improve at one point - so not spending more time on that part - it's new, I understand.

What I wished they did spend more time on is talking about just HOW the AICT can govern and control all AI in the company, and with what requirements and prerequisites. I had hoped they would explain early on how you need to perform discovery to find AI components, that you most likely need to use Service Graph Connectors for this, and how this is basically a CMDB monitor on AI classes.

Sure, this is a technical thing, not suited for a keynote, of course, sure thing, blabla.
But as soon as I spoke with people on the customer side right after, and they wanted to get going ASAP, I had to spend quite some time explaining that without spending time and money on that messy CMDB, and having a good quality Discovery process first, this probably will require to start that process before even considering it - and by experience that will take lots of time. What I was hoping for was for ServiceNow to at least mention the CMDB connection at all, so customers can be aware of what they have to do. Yes, they should have fixed their CMDB a long time ago - don't even mention it.

In any case, for this part I think it might be one of the more important features moving forward, it's a great idea, and I think having proper governance of AI in the enterprise is extremely valuable. It will be prosperous times for CMDB-experts the next few years.

Employeeworks / Employee Slate
This could have been under Moveworks, but I am here talking about the new portal they are introducing to support a Moveworks-chat / input field, and it will populate widgets under it. It is most likely a mix between the Moveworks embedded chat window (which integrates back into ServiceNow) and local widgets with the results. I don't have much to say here (my Moveworks point above points at my thoughts around that), other than I am really wishing for this to work out. I don't like the fact that we are stuck with Service Portal, I think it's outdated, and I am hoping for something more scalable and future looking. On it's own I think it's great that new portal tech is introduced, and I hope it will be something we can customize as much as we want (I doubt that though).

They are limiting all of this to employee-side (so IT and HR more or less, to start with) - my educated guess is because of what exists in Moveworks already when it comes to their connectors. Let's hope they make this to work in a broader context, or at least allows us to set things up how we want - and also support end-users / external users. At the moment, that's not happening though. I haven't tried this, only seen it on a screen - as soon as I get a hands-on experience I will make a video about it. Crossing my fingers this will be awesome.

Other things
There was just so much going on. Agent Fabric, Context Engine, Otto (just a brand by the way), Warpspeed, Build Agent, and new company aquisitions. I could write about these things too, but for me personally I need more time to get more information.

And there are things I wished was introduced which wasn't, so I guess I'll just make that myself.

Thank you for attending my TED talk, this was brought to you by not AI.