ServiceNow automates 90% of its own IT requests, aims to extend autonomy to enterprises

ServiceNow’s internal automation milestone—resolving 90 % of its own IT tickets without human intervention and cutting resolution time by 99 %—is the first concrete proof point of the “AI‑as‑worker” model the company has been courting for two decades, VentureBeat reported. The breakthrough stems from the now‑matured Now Assist layer, which has been grafted onto ServiceNow’s original ticketing engine and its later workflow‑automation capabilities. By treating AI not as a peripheral feature but as a full‑fledged participant in the workflow, the platform can move a request from identification to remediation within the same permission set that governs human agents, eliminating the hand‑off bottlenecks that have plagued most enterprise pilots.

The rollout hinges on three interlocking components announced Thursday: EmployeeWorks, Autonomous Workforce, and the architectural “role automation” layer. EmployeeWorks lets end‑users describe a problem in natural language and receive an instant fix, bypassing the traditional ticket submission process. Autonomous Workforce then executes the work end‑to‑end, while role automation enforces the same access‑control, CMDB context, SLA logic and entitlement rules that apply to human staff. As Bhavin Shah, the former Moveworks founder now serving as ServiceNow’s SVP, explained to press, “organizations have raced to adopt AI, but the rush has created fragmented tools and disconnected experiences” (VentureBeat). By inheriting existing governance frameworks rather than negotiating permissions at runtime, ServiceNow’s AI specialists avoid the audit‑trail and privilege‑escalation concerns that have stalled other vendors’ deployments.

The strategic significance of the role‑automation model lies in its departure from the task‑oriented agents that dominate today’s market. Conventional AI agents receive a goal, reason about the steps needed, and then attempt to acquire the necessary permissions on the fly—a process that often collides with enterprise policy engines. ServiceNow’s approach, by contrast, embeds the AI specialist within the same role‑based access control (RBAC) hierarchy that defines human job functions. The AI cannot exceed its predefined scope, cannot self‑escalate privileges, and operates under the same change‑management and compliance oversight as any other ServiceNow user. This architectural bet, VentureBeat notes, is intended to close the governance gap that “most teams are hitting,” allowing enterprises to move from AI assistance to AI execution without sacrificing auditability.

The acquisition of Moveworks in December provides the user‑experience foundation for EmployeeWorks. Moveworks previously served 5.5 million enterprise users through a single entry point that automatically routed requests across disparate systems, a capability that ServiceNow plans to integrate into its broader platform. By leveraging Moveworks’ natural‑language parsing and intent‑matching engine, ServiceNow can translate a plain‑English request into a concrete workflow action, then hand it off to the role‑automated AI specialist for fulfillment. This end‑to‑end pipeline is designed to eliminate the “ticket‑bounce” phenomenon that analysts have observed when employees must navigate multiple tools to resolve simple issues.

Analysts see ServiceNow’s move as a response to the broader industry trend toward unified AI platforms. VentureBeat’s coverage of the company’s expanded generative‑AI features—such as case summarization and text‑to‑code—underscores ServiceNow’s ambition to become the single source of truth for enterprise automation, rather than a collection of point solutions. If the internal results scale externally, the company could capture a sizable share of the $30 billion market for AI‑driven IT service management, where competitors like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini still rely on users to select the appropriate tool for each problem. ServiceNow’s promise is that a single, governance‑compliant AI worker will handle the full spectrum of routine IT requests, freeing human staff for higher‑value activities and delivering the speed gains it has already demonstrated internally.