ServiceNow has made no secret about its ambitions to become the execution layer for enterprise AI. To that end, its recent acquisitions of MoveWorks and Veza are not isolated bets, but part of a broader platform effort to make agentic AI governable, secure, and scalable.
Speaking about the pace of recent M&A activity, Matthew Higham, chief digital and technology officer, UK and Ireland at ServiceNow, is clear that the company is not just building a loose portfolio of products.
“We pride ourselves on a single data model on a single platform,” he said. “The bolt-on idea doesn’t really sit very well. Acquisitions have to be fully integrated over time, because they amplify the capability of the platform.”
This insistence on integration underpins ServiceNow’s approach to AI, governance, and customer experience, he said – and differentiates it from vendors still focused on point solutions or disconnected AI pilots.
Acquisitions Designed to Strengthen the Platform Core
Higham describes ServiceNow’s recent acquisitions as deliberate extensions of core capabilities rather than tactical feature grabs. Each addresses a specific enterprise requirement that has become critical as AI moves from insight generation to autonomous execution.
MoveWorks, he said, finalized this year, strengthens ServiceNow’s position at the point of engagement.
“MoveWorks really puts us at the front end of meeting the customer where they want to interface with technology. That’s where a lot of the value is now – how people actually interact with systems.”
The acquisition of Veza, meanwhile, speaks directly to the governance and security challenges introduced by agentic AI. As enterprises delegate more decision-making and execution to autonomous agents, visibility into identity, access, and authorization becomes table stakes.
“As we move more decision-making into agentic AI, we need to make sure that decision-making is done with the same level of governance as a human. That includes the handoffs between humans and agents throughout processes,” said Higham.
Veza strengthens ServiceNow’s ability to enforce least-privilege access across data, applications, and AI-driven actions, ensuring agents only interact with the right data, under the right conditions, with full accountability.
“We need to make sure those agents are doing exactly what we want them to do, interfacing with the right amount of data, the right type of data, with the right control set.”
Agentic AI Moves Beyond the Proof-of-Concept Phase
According to Higham, 2026 sees many organizations emerging from a period of heavy experimentation with agentic AI – often without the returns they expected.
“We’ve seen a proliferation of agentic systems across different use cases, but very few [are] actually getting into scale and releasing the value they hoped for,” he explained.
This has led to what he describes as a “curve of disillusionment,” where enthusiasm outpaced operational readiness. The missing ingredients, he argues, were governance and platform-level control.
“What organizations are realizing now is that they need a much better platform approach to control where the business logic is executed.”
For Higham, agentic AI is not just another interface layer. It is the monetization engine for enterprise AI investment.
“Agents are the execution and monetization layer. They’re the bit that actually releases value, eradicates waste, and drives operational efficiency.”
To that point, he believes 2026 will mark a turning point.
“2026 is when we’re going to see the real value. That’s when you’ll see the hockey stick in terms of outcomes, because organizations now understand what AI is, how it operates, and the governance they need around it.”
Cybersecurity and Governance Become Board-Level Imperatives
Since Higham spoke with NowBen, ServiceNow has also completed its acquisition of Armis, further strengthening its cybersecurity posture by extending visibility and control across unmanaged and non-traditional assets – an increasingly critical requirement as agentic AI expands the attack surface beyond conventional IT environments.
“Cybersecurity has now become a board-level conversation,” said Higham. “It’s not if you’re going to be attacked – it’s when. The question is how resilient your business is.”
In an agentic environment, that resilience must extend to autonomous systems acting on the organization’s behalf.
“If you’re asking agents to execute tasks that humans used to do, you need full accountability. Someone has to be responsible for what those agents are doing and how they’re doing it.”
Regulation is accelerating this shift. Higham points to a growing patchwork of AI and data regulations across Europe and the UK.
“With the EU AI Act, the EU Data Act, and emerging UK regulation, individuals can now go to prison for actions taken on behalf of AI in regulated environments,” he says. “That means organizations need full auditability and evidence at scale.”
ServiceNow’s platform, he argues, is designed to make that level of compliance operationally achievable rather than administratively overwhelming.
Bringing AI to Data – Not the Other Way Around
Higham contends that a key differentiator in ServiceNow’s strategy is its approach to data. While many vendors continue to push centralized data ingestion, he argues that this model is increasingly impractical.
“We’ve spent 20 years trying to get data perfect. It’s never going to be perfect. It just needs to be good enough.”
Instead of moving data into massive lakes, ServiceNow brings AI to systems of record.
“We connect to data where it lives, invert AI onto it, understand its value and quality, and then execute workflow on top of it.”
This approach, he says, avoids the cost and complexity of large-scale data movement while accelerating time to value.
“Most customers I speak to say, ‘I now need to rip up my data strategy, because you’re thinking about this differently.’”
CRM as End-to-End Customer Experience
Meanwhile, ServiceNow’s growing emphasis on CRM is not a departure from its heritage, but an extension of it, said Higham. He reframes CRM as a mechanism for orchestrating customer experience across the entire enterprise.
“We come at CRM from a customer experience perspective that connects the front office, middle office, and back office,” he said.
Customer interactions inevitably trigger downstream processes across finance, logistics, HR, and supply chain.
“Customer experience isn’t just relationship management. It’s executing something – whether that’s procurement, invoicing, or even who has the skills to talk to the customer.”
By horizontalizing these processes, ServiceNow positions itself as what Higham calls “the AI execution engine for the enterprise.”
Final Thoughts
As organizations look toward 2026, ServiceNow’s message is that AI success will depend less on experimentation and more on execution, governance, and people. The acquisitions of the past year suggest the company is building for that reality.