Knowledge 2025 has kicked off in style with a fiery keynote speech from Bill McDermott – with several new ServiceNow products being announced.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence was the topic unifying much of the morning, with McDermott telling attendees in Las Vegas that AI is the “gateway to prosperity”, as he predicted that the traditional app stack is “going to collapse”.
“The Gateway to Prosperity”
A wave of new ServiceNow AI platform products was also announced, including the AI Control Tower, AI Agent Fabric, and Apriel Nemotron 15B.
Presenting his vision for the future of ServiceNow and the technology sector, McDermott told guests at the keynote speech on Tuesday morning: “The software industrial complex in the 21st Century is converging on ServiceNow as the AI operating system for the enterprise.
“The new world order of things is AI, plus data, plus workflows, on one fully integrated platform that replaces all of the chaos with clarity.
“Today, we’re announcing the ServiceNow AI platform, one where AI isn’t just another tool, it’s deeply embedded in the way work gets done.”
McDermott asked the Knowledge attendees, who had gathered in Nevada for the three-day event, to imagine an “AI twin” that works for every persona in a corporation.
“Every person in a company is going to have an AI twin.”
Bill McDermott – CEO, ServiceNow
So, let’s take a look at the AI products being discussed at the first day of Knowledge.
What Is the ServiceNow AI Control Tower?
The AI Control Tower is a centralized command center designed to govern, manage, secure, and achieve value from ServiceNow and third‑party AI agents, models, and workflows on a unified platform.
Simply put, it is meant to maximize ROI on AI investments.
Embedded across all workflows in the ServiceNow AI platform, the AI Control Tower is meant to centralize strategy, governance, performance, and management across the entire AI ecosystem.
The AI Control Tower aims to help customers achieve the following:
- Enterprise‑wide AI visibility: This means keeping track of and managing every AI agent, model, and workflow – whether native or third‑party – in one place.
- Embedded compliance and AI governance: Manage risk and monitor compliance across the AI lifecycle with comprehensive, integrated governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) capabilities.
- End‑to‑end lifecycle management of agentic operations: From ideation to deployment to optimization, AI Control Tower is intended to enable contextual decision‑making and help enforce guardrails.
- Real‑time reporting: Dashboards provide insight and validate AI performance against key business outcomes like productivity and revenue impact.
- Improved alignment between AI and business strategy: The AI Control Tower helps customers match their AI initiatives with overall enterprise business and tech goals.
Ritu Jyoti, group vice president/general manager for Worldwide AI and Data Market Research and Advisory Services at IDC, said: “With AI solutions and services expected to generate a global cumulative impact of $22.3 trillion by 2030, the volume of AI assets organizations must manage will be unprecedented.
“The organizations that will see the greatest return on their AI investments will be those that utilize a centralized solution to govern, manage, and track their evolving agentic AI landscape, fostering trust and reinforcing the reliability and dependability of AI systems.”
What Is ServiceNow’s AI Agent Fabric?
AI Agent Fabric is described as a “communication backbone” for enterprise AI ecosystems which lets AI agents work together across tools, teams, and vendors. It is supposed to enable coordination with partners like Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, Oracle, and more.
Through AI Agent Fabric, agents and orchestrators share context, coordinate tasks, and drive outcomes across the enterprise ecosystem, whether built by ServiceNow, partners, or internal teams.
AI Agent Fabric aims to act as the “backbone” for cooperation within an AI ecosystem, meaning that agents can effectively communicate with other agents and tools. It can also facilitate communication between different agentic systems, ServiceNow says.
This is all achieved using common protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent protocol (A2A), meaning ServiceNow and third‑party AI agents, tools, and systems can dynamically exchange information, coordinate tasks, and take action in real time.
AI Agent Fabric means ServiceNow’s thousands of AI agents can “work side‑by‑side with third‑party agents” to drive outcomes, operating as part of a coordinated, intelligent system, the company says.
What Is Apriel Nemotron 15B?
Bill McDermott also spoke with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, and the pair discussed the newly-released Apriel Nemotron 15B, a reasoning LLM and data flywheel integration built by ServiceNow in partnership with NVIDIA.
It is intended to drive scalable, intelligent agentic AI. The new reasoning model is designed for performance, cost, and scale, enabling high accuracy, lower latency, lower inference costs, and faster agentic AI for every business.
The open‑source LLM is post‑trained with NVIDIA and ServiceNow‑provided data, aiming to deliver lower latency, lower inference costs, and faster agentic AI.
Jensen Huang shared singing praise for ServiceNow, telling the conference: “NVIDIA runs AI agents on ServiceNow… as a third party watching the world of enterprise AI, ServiceNow is destined to be the best platform, the operating system of enterprise AI agents.
“The reason for that is because every company in the world needs AI agents, and those AI agents are going to be curated, managed, made better by the IT department, and ServiceNow is already in every company’s IT department, so it was a natural thing for us to do and it’s been a great partnership.”
The two companies also unveiled plans to bring accelerated data processing to ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric by integrating select NVIDIA NeMo microservices, driving a closed‑loop data flywheel process that increases model accuracy and personalized user experiences.
ServiceNow says the Apriel Nemotron 15B reasoning model is a significant step forward in developing enterprise‑grade LLMs, built for real‑time workflow execution.
The model was trained using NVIDIA NeMo, the NVIDIA Llama Nemotron Post‑Training Dataset, and ServiceNow domain‑specific data with NVIDIA DGX Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
ServiceNow said in a statement: “It delivers advanced reasoning capabilities in a smaller size – making it faster, more efficient, and cost‑effective to run on NVIDIA GPU infrastructure as an NVIDIA NIM microservice.
“Benchmarks show promising results for the model’s size category, reinforcing its potential to power agentic AI workflows at scale. The debut of this model comes as enterprise AI continues to rise as a transformative force – helping businesses address growing complexity, navigate macroeconomic uncertainty, and drive smarter, more resilient operations.”
The Apriel Nemotron 15B model is expected to be available in Q2 2025.
ServiceNow CRM
ServiceNow’s ambitions are clearly not only tied to the world of AI though. The tech giant recently stepped into the CRM market, seemingly positioning themselves against the industry leader – and fellow AI agent creator – Salesforce.
In perhaps a veiled jibe at the cloud company, McDermott told Knowledge: “Why would anyone want to do CRM the old way? We know it’s not working… It’s time for change.”
He added: “Autonomous agentic AI finally makes the dream possible to deliver real-time empathy at mass scale.”
President, Chief Product Officer, and Chief Operating Officer Amit Zavery also spoke at the event, echoing McDermott’s thoughts. He said that “traditional CRM is broken” and it is “held together with duct tape and chewing gum.”
He added that “no other CRM” can match ServiceNowCRM – which was unveiled in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
The company describes its “next‑generation” CRM as an enhanced, AI‑powered offering that unifies selling, fulfillment, and service on one platform.
This lets businesses move from reactive support to proactive engagement across the entire customer lifecycle, according to ServiceNow.
Final Thoughts
Knowledge 2025 is well underway with a few big announcements, and some interesting remarks from ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott.
Stay tuned to NowBen for all the latest news and analysis from Knowledge 2025.