Powering trusted AI, zero-copy data access & cloud architecture with AWS
Sunil Bemarkar, principal solution architect at Amazon Web Services, co-authored this blog post.
Faster decisions. Smarter workflows. Less busywork. Those are the promises of agentic AI, which is gaining traction across enterprises.
In fact, 43% of business leaders are considering adopting the technology in the next 12 months, according to the ServiceNow Enterprise AI Maturity Index. But turning that momentum into meaningful outcomes remains a major challenge.
Many enterprises are still grappling with fragmented systems, siloed platforms, and scattered data. Insights sit locked in cloud storage, disconnected from the workflows and AI agents built to act on them. Without strong governance in place, AI can make decisions faster than the oversight meant to keep those decisions trustworthy, safe, and aligned.
ServiceNow is announcing a new wave of co-innovations alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help enterprises move past these barriers. Combining unified architectural controls, zero-copy data access, and centralized AI governance can help turn complexity into capability across every cloud, function, and workflow.
Let’s look at three benefits of harnessing these innovations.
1. Real-time data without waiting or extra cost
For years, enterprises have accepted a trade-off: store data at scale in the cloud but access it at a cost. That cost often takes the form of complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to move and prepare data, data replication across systems, and delays that slow everything from incident response to customer service.
The data is there, but if you can’t act on it when it counts, what value does it have? Now that’s changing. ServiceNow and AWS are enabling a shift to real-time, actionable insights from massive datasets without moving or duplicating data.
With a native integration between ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric and Amazon S3 Tables, ServiceNow workflows and AI agents can query, analyze, and act on live data where it resides—without ETL, replication, or data movement. This is possible via the Iceberg REST Catalog, a standards-based API layer that lets query engines interact directly with data stored in S3.
“Enterprises like ours are sitting on massive datasets in Amazon S3 that are critical for driving business outcomes,” explains the chief data and analytics officer at a global healthcare provider.
“By connecting ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric directly with Amazon S3 Tables, we expect to eliminate silos, reduce costly duplication, and turn real-time data into actionable workflows. This will not only speed up decision-making, but also allow us to reimagine customer and employee experiences powered by live data.”
By eliminating traditional data movement, ServiceNow and AWS are enabling enterprises to:
- Query live data where it resides, at the right time and in the flow of work
- Trigger AI-driven workflows at the speed of insight
- Maintain governance through AWS Identity and Access Management and ServiceNow policy controls
2. Risk detection before development begins
Enterprises deploy hundreds of workloads across AWS to accelerate innovation and agility. However, this level of growth brings complexity, which can result in increased technical debt, cost overruns, slower time to market, and lackluster user experiences.
Architectural reviews could prevent these challenges, but they typically occur late in the development cycle, when fixing flaws is costly and disruptive.
That’s why the AWS Well-Architected Framework is embedded directly within the ServiceNow Enterprise Architecture workspace to bridge the need for accelerated innovation and closed-loop governance.
ServiceNow Enterprise Architecture uses AWS Well-Architected Tool APIs for seamless data exchange.
- The integration allows architects to initiate and review AWS assessments within ServiceNow Enterprise Architecture.
- The AWS Well-Architected Framework automates remediation workflows and progress tracking through ServiceNow’s workflow engine.
- Architects gain real-time visibility into the six AWS Well-Architected pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
“By integrating ServiceNow’s Enterprise Architecture framework with AWS’ design principles, we are giving our teams a unified view of system performance, risk, and business alignment,” says Zach Maybury, chief technology officer at DraftKings. “This helps us accelerate innovation while maintaining the governance and resilience that a live, high-volume platform like ours demands.”
The integration of ServiceNow Enterprise Architecture with the AWS Well-Architected Framework empowers customers to identify risks early, reduce technical debt, and accelerate time to market.
This unified governance model delivers continuous compliance, automated improvement workflows, and clear traceability of decisions. This enables closer alignment between business and IT while optimizing costs and driving innovation with confidence.
3. Oversight for AI at enterprise scale
As AI agents proliferate across systems and departments, managing them has become a growing operational challenge. Each AI agent might perform a useful task, but without centralized oversight, organizations lack a clear view into what’s running where, how decisions are made, and whether those decisions comply with policy. That kind of fragmentation introduces risk—especially at scale.
To help enterprises regain governance, ServiceNow AI Control Tower now integrates with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Amazon Bedrock. This integration offers a single interface to manage how AI agents operate across cloud platforms.
Organizations can discover deployed AI agents and related assets, monitor activity, enforce governance policies, and assess outcomes in real time.
With this level of stewardship, organizations can scale AI across the enterprise with the same discipline, transparency, and accountability as any other strategic system.
From disconnected to coordinated intelligence
What questions is your organization asking as AI agents begin taking on tasks across workflows, data, and systems? Are you ready to coordinate them, govern them, and scale them—without losing control? The answers will shape how automation delivers value in the years ahead.
ServiceNow and AWS are helping enterprises meet this moment. Together, we’re addressing some of the most pressing challenges in enterprise automation:
- Zero-copy access to operational data in Amazon S3, enabling real-time action without replication or risk
- Unified architecture workspace to model, assess, and remediate from one platform
- Centralized AI governance, providing oversight, accountability, and confidence at scale
These innovations don’t just solve technical problems. Together, they transform fragmented technologies into a connected ecosystem in which governed AI and coordinated intelligence drive business agility and trust at scale.
Find out more about how ServiceNow and AWS can help you realize business value.