The public sector technology market is crowded, and vendors have gotten good at speaking the language of government without necessarily really understanding it.
When an independent analyst firm like Forrester puts a vendor among the top in the market in a rigorous evaluation, one that includes direct interviews with government customers, it matters.
That’s why I’m excited to share that ServiceNow has been named a Leader and a Customer Favorite in The Forrester Wave™: Industry Cloud Solutions For Public Sector, Q1 2026 report.
Part of that recognition that stands out for ServiceNow isn’t its ranking in the evaluation. It's what government customers Forrester interviewed said unprompted: “Customers say that they would enthusiastically select ServiceNow again, citing very high trust and confidence. They praise transparent customer-zero practices, whether good or bad, shared through the Now on Now program.”
That's not just a marketing win from ServiceNow’s perspective. That's agencies telling an independent analyst firm they'd make the same purchase decision again. In government, where procurement decisions can carry weight for years, that kind of acknowledgement is rare.
Today, government agencies operate under a convergence of pressures without easy solutions. Federal mandates can reshape eligibility and compliance requirements for human services programs almost in real time.
Defense and intelligence organizations manage mission-critical workflows across classification levels with tools that often weren't designed for such complexity. Emergency management teams coordinate across jurisdictions during incidents that don't wait for IT to catch up. Field technicians who maintain critical infrastructure are still working off paper-based processes in some cases.
Underneath it all, IT leaders trying to hold this together are doing so with technology debt that grew by accumulation, not design.
The way we think about this at ServiceNow is straightforward: Government works best when AI and human judgment operate together. We call it Autonomous, Human Government, where AI functions as connective tissue between disparate systems, letting people do truly consequential work.
For a human services agency, that means AI that helps augment caseworker decisions by:
- Assisting in triaging cases
- Extracting the relevant details from submitted documents
- Flagging exceptions to policies, rules, and regulations
- Generating compliance reports a commissioner needs for the governor's office
This can all happen on one platform, without moving data between systems or waiting on IT to build a custom solution.
For an emergency management team, it means having interagency coordination built into the workflow. When conditions shift, the platform shifts with them. The platform can route decisions, alert field teams, and maintain a shared operational picture across participating agencies.
For IT leaders, it means having vulnerabilities, assets, and incidents in one place with AI configured to prioritize what matters to that team and help them respond more quickly to an incident or potential exposure.
Forrester's evaluation framework for public sector cloud solutions isn't a product checklist. It assesses solutions on criteria such as product strategy, capabilities, innovation, and adoption.
Forrester’s report stated, “ServiceNow suits jurisdictions seeking a mature platform with deep AI automation and intelligent workflows, while its dual low-code and no-code options designed separately for business and IT users make it viable for smaller agency adoption and deployment for whole-of-government use.”
The agencies that are pulling ahead in this environment are the ones that treat their platform as part of a larger operational strategy in which AI accesses contextual information, makes decisions, acts, and performs within the guardrails.
That shift—from bolted-on tools to connected, intelligent workflows—is what the Forrester recognition reflects for ServiceNow. And it's what the agencies in that evaluation already know.
Find out more about how ServiceNow helps turn government complexity into coordinated action.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity.
