Managing the agentic enterprise

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Business leaders are building the agentic enterprise organisational model, where teams of AI agents work across the enterprise to learn, reason, and execute tasks in collaboration with human employees.

Agentic AI is already delivering benefits to organisations furthest along in AI maturity, a group we call Pacesetters in the ServiceNow Enterprise AI Maturity Index 2025. Pacesetters are achieving better experiences (56%), increased efficiency (55%), and improved gross margins (55%) from agentic AI investments, our research found.

The agentic enterprise represents a huge opportunity for businesses, but it requires careful management. Unmanaged AI agents can fragment the business environment, create complexity, and cause cross-functional challenges. Let's explore how business leaders can manage the agentic enterprise.

The need for AI agent orchestration

According to our research, one in three (33%) global organisations—and 15% of businesses in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)—are piloting their first use cases for AI agents. Around 40% are considering implementation in the next 12 months.

Organisations are starting by deploying AI agents as individual contributors throughout the enterprise. They have specialised agents designed for HR, customer service, and IT. As implementation scales, AI agents can be implemented across multiple departments, but they require more formal management to work together cross-functionally.

AI orchestration, a structured approach to tracking and governing AI deployments, can help organisations coordinate teams of AI agents to work towards common goals. Well-orchestrated AI agents can efficiently share information and hand off tasks, seamlessly connecting complex tasks and processes across the organisation.

For example, ServiceNow® AI Agent Orchestrator enables AI agents to work together to triage network security incidents. It coordinates multiple AI agents to draw information from network, security, and event management systems, helping to identify and resolve network issues, once approved by a human operator.

People are essential for AI agent management

HR professionals typically own the entire employee lifecycle, from hiring to training to offboarding. As digital assets, AI agents require another form of specialised management—one involving senior leaders, team leaders, and individual employees.

Managing the agentic enterprise will become a strategic priority for senior leadership. In recent conversations I’ve had, boards are already showing a preference for technical CEOs who understand technology governance, compliance, and security enough to make adept decisions—particularly around risk and AI.

Team leaders can help manage AI agents by identifying their skills, training them for specific roles, and measuring return on investment. For example, IT leaders can use performance measures to assess the business impact of AI agents, such as productivity gains or reduced incident resolution time.

As more AI agents enter the workforce, employee roles across the organisation will evolve to focus on overseeing and validating the output of AI agents. Regularly assessing AI agent performance can help keep them on track towards operational and business goals.

Agility is your competitive advantage

As enterprises transition to hybrid workforces comprising human employees and AI agents, the ability to effectively manage agentic AI will become a critical differentiator. Leading organisations will be able to:

Businesses can set themselves up to reap the benefits of the agentic enterprise by establishing clear management protocols. A central platform to orchestrate AI agents, combined with human oversight, will enable them to responsibly deploy AI agents—at pace.

Find out how ServiceNow can help you put AI agents to work for people.