For 22 years, ServiceNow has been on a journey to reinvent the way we work. It began when Fred Luddy, the company’s founder, moved a woman named Phyllis to tears by automating an entirely manual order-entry system. Fred’s mindset has been integral to the way we work and build products.
That focus hasn’t changed, but how IT is managed has transformed rapidly. With AI agents entering the fold, there’s more chaos, fragmentation, and pressure on IT than ever before. And with every major technology shift, IT came out the other side more critical, not less. The difference now is the speed—and the stakes.
The agentic era accelerated the promise of business reinvention, but AI agents were never the end goal. Powerful AI agents that managed tasks brilliantly, such as summarizing incidents and suggesting knowledge base articles, could be packaged into workflows to handle processes, but they could never actually complete a job.
AI agents showed us the ceiling as much as the floor: what becomes possible when AI capabilities meet business workflows and what remains out of reach without deeper integration.
That’s why we built AI specialists: autonomous workers that can be onboarded in three clicks and take action with the appropriate governance in place and without human intervention. It’s just the start.
To successfully adopt an autonomous workforce enterprisewide, chief information officers (CIOs) must lead the charge—once again using their expertise during another, and arguably the fastest, technological shift. The path there runs through three essentials:
- The right context
- Clear guardrails
- People who are invested in making it work
The CIOs meeting this moment have three things in common: They own the outcomes, drive AI value and, most importantly, build trust every step of the way.
With business reinvention comes product reimagination. Gone are the days of developing a product as an answer to a specific problem. Today, we’re building toward an outcome. We’ve built the knowledge and skills of experienced human operators into AI agents and given them the capabilities that can help them achieve the holy grail:
- Zero outages
- Zero breaches
- Zero asset issues
- Zero-touch support
AI specialists are the future. They’re assigned a scope and bound by your knowledge base articles, playbooks, and structure. Once onboarded, they execute proactively. They have the situational awareness needed to orchestrate the correct agentic workflow and own a job end to end—so long as governance and guardrails are in place.
That’s the connection between process reimagination and process clarity: The better you understand your current processes and the outcomes you want, the more precisely you can deploy an AI specialist and the faster you can move from pilot to scaling onboarding and enabling autonomous operations.
Good data hygiene is a vital enabler of AI operations, and poor data hygiene is the biggest blocker. That’s because enterprises are more fragmented than ever, with point solutions solving isolated problems and data stuck in silos. Deterministic workflows can’t be completed without the proper infrastructure. Data is the foundation that makes transformative outcomes achievable.
The ServiceNow Enterprise AI Maturity Index 2026 found that 45% of enterprises lack the IT infrastructure to facilitate AI. Without high-quality data and an infrastructure layer, processes are broken, results are half-baked, and AI specialists are reduced to AI agents.
Clear outcomes and high-quality data and infrastructure open the door to an autonomous workforce, but creative judgment never goes away. Trust takes time to build. Would you let your new colleague wander unsupervised on day 1? The same goes for AI specialists.
I’m confident that AI specialists will prove they’re capable of solving problems the right way—and doing so 24/7. When that happens, everyone benefits. Belief in the potential of AI becomes contagious, behaviors change, and trust compounds. New opportunities open for your team and across departments.
In the Gartner® Guide to Redesigning the IT Service Desk Analyst Job in the Age of AI, the analyst firm suggests that humans will still be foundational in the agentic era and new skills will come into focus that could reshape organizations.
“CIOs should proactively blend service desk talent into jobs like ‘AI agent coordinator,’ ‘knowledge manager,’ or ‘prompt engineer,’ rather than clinging to legacy job titles,” according to Gartner.
I’ve spent my career watching IT absorb every major technology shift and come out on the other side more essential. This moment feels different—not because the technology is more powerful, but because for the first time, IT isn’t just enabling the business. IT is reinventing it.
As we help equip enterprises with an autonomous workforce, I reflect on Phyllis. Helping Phyllis became part of the ServiceNow ethos: putting people at the center of our work. And that doesn’t change with AI specialists.
With an autonomous workforce lightening the load of teams, new opportunities will present themselves: an upskilled organization, a new structure, or even a new line of business. That’s the winning outcome we’re building for people.
Find out how ServiceNow can help scale your team with an autonomous workforce.
1 Gartner, Guide to Redesigning the IT Service Desk Analyst Job in the Age of AI, March 4, 2026
GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
