ServiceNow has unveiled two additions to its AI platform: Autonomous Workforce and ServiceNow EmployeeWorks.
Coming just two months after the company closed its Moveworks acquisition, the announcements represent the clearest picture yet of how ServiceNow intends to put that deal to use.
ServiceNow’s claim that its tech has moved beyond mere suggestion and into action isn’t exactly unique. But what the vendor appears to be adding to that conversation is specificity.
Rather than individual task-completing agents, the company is launching what it calls AI specialists: role-based workers with defined scopes, governed by the same access controls as human employees, built to handle jobs from start to finish.
In discussing the news, Amit Zavery, President, Chief Product Officer, and Chief Operating Officer at ServiceNow, stated that “businesses don’t need more pilots or promises. They need AI that gets work done.
“The leaders realizing value from AI are investing in platforms where intelligence, execution, and trust work as one system.”
From Answering to Acting
During the launch briefing, John Aisien, SVP of Product Management at ServiceNow, put his finger on what he sees as the market’s core problem, explaining that most enterprise AI tools stop at providing answers and leave execution to humans.
The gap between a useful recommendation and a completed action is still being bridged manually in the majority of organizations.
Autonomous Workforce is ServiceNow’s attempt to close that gap.
AI specialists take on defined roles – a Level 1 Service Desk Specialist, a Security Operations Analyst – and are expected to carry out the full job: diagnosing issues, executing fixes, notifying employees, updating knowledge bases, and handing off to a human when something falls outside their authority.
The first specialist available out-of-the-box will be the L1 Service Desk AI Specialist, expected to reach general availability in Q2 2026.
ServiceNow says it is already running this internally, with its autonomous workforce handling over 90% of employee IT requests.
Early data puts the L1 specialist at resolving those cases 99% faster than human agents.
For contact center and service operations leaders, the numbers will get attention.
Nenshad Bardoliwalla, GVP of AI Platform at ServiceNow, was keen to draw a line between what’s being introduced and what came before:
“Bots follow scripts; specialists are designed to do the job. They understand context, reason across systems, handle exceptions, and improve over time.”
In short, the argument is not that these are smarter bots; it’s that they are a different category altogether.
EmployeeWorks: Moveworks Gets Plugged In
EmployeeWorks takes the Moveworks conversational AI and enterprise search capability and connects it to ServiceNow’s unified portal and autonomous workflows.
The result, in theory, is a single front door – available in Teams, Slack, or any browser – where employees can make a request in plain language and have it executed across systems without needing to know which system to use or which workflow to trigger.
Bhavin Shah, SVP and GM of Moveworks and AI at ServiceNow, used the briefing to set out what separates this from a conventional AI assistant:
“Moveworks proves that when AI solves real problems elegantly, people use it.
“Combined with ServiceNow’s 20+-year foundation in workflow automation, we deliver consumer simplicity with enterprise reliability, including the operational guarantees that mission-critical work demands.”
Shah also drew a distinction during the session between what he called “weak ROI” – productivity gains tied to individual employees that disappear when those employees move on – and “strong ROI,” where the business process itself is transformed through automation.
His argument is that EmployeeWorks falls into the second camp because it routes work through governed, automated workflows rather than simply making individuals faster.
The CX Case: Healthcare Leads the Way
For customer experience leaders, the CVS Health involvement is probably the most instructive piece of the announcement.
Alan Rosa, Chief Information Security Officer and SVP of Infrastructure and Operations at CVS Health, spoke during the briefing about what improved employee experience actually does to customer outcomes downstream.
He argued that when AI handles the administrative load, customer-facing staff get more time for the work that requires human judgment.
“AI isn’t replacing human connection; it’s creating space for it,” he said.
He pointed to reduced referral processing times and faster claim handling as areas where that space is already opening up, translating into more attentive, less friction-heavy customer interactions.
Rosa also offered a note of caution for any CX leader thinking about deployment at scale:
“Boring is beautiful. Start with definable problems, build governance into the foundation, measure outcomes that matter, and communicate transparently.”
Siemens Healthineers added further weight to the Moveworks story specifically.
Indeed, Nicole Hulst, Head of Digital Workflows Tooling at the company, noted that their AI assistant Ada, built on Moveworks, “saves them 5,000 hours monthly with 91% satisfaction.”
Unified Platform vs. Point Solutions
The argument threading through these announcements is one ServiceNow has been making for some time: that a unified platform with governance and workflows built in beats a collection of AI tools bolted onto disconnected SaaS applications.
The difference, the company argues, is that enterprises managing the latter carry all of the integration complexity themselves.
What’s new is the depth of the offering. The Moveworks acquisition has given ServiceNow a conversational front end that already has a credible track record of 5.5 million employees using it, per Shah’s figures during the briefing.
Pairing that with autonomous workflow execution on the back end gives the platform a more complete story than it had a year ago.
Whether that story gains traction in customer service operations will depend on how quickly the Autonomous Workforce model extends beyond IT service desk use cases.
ServiceNow has flagged customer service, HR, finance, and security operations as next in line.
For now, the L1 Service Desk Specialist is the only specialist available out-of-the-box, and the headline performance figures are still largely drawn from ServiceNow’s own internal deployment.
The roadmap is ambitious. The proof points, for the moment, are still catching up.
