The more AI products are deployed, the harder it becomes to ignore conversations around risk, governance, and security. Increasingly, those who tackle this challenge head-on are the most likely to succeed in the AI era. This is precisely why ServiceNow created the AI Control Tower: a centralized command hub for AI agents, tools, and products right across an organization.
It’s been over a year since ServiceNow announced its release at Knowledge 2025. So where are we now? How does the AI Control Tower really work in practice, and how can it help you manage costs, security, and risk for your AI tools? From governance to impact, here’s everything you need to know about the evolution of ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower.
ServiceNow’s Solution to the AI Governance Problem
The AI Control Tower has evolved since it was first released in May 2025 at ServiceNow’s annual Knowledge conference. In the time since, the product has become a linchpin of ServiceNow’s AI strategy. The reasons why will be familiar to anybody who’s deployed AI products over the last few years.
Organizations across the world have raced to roll out new AI tools in every area of business. But this urgency hasn’t always left room for conversations about how they’ll be monitored, governed, and secured.
Therefore, the AI Control Tower includes a range of tools designed to detect, monitor, and govern the performance of AI agents – designed to be used by those in AI and IT leadership roles, so they can create and effectively roll out clear AI policies. This includes governing what tools are in use across the organization, which tasks they’ll complete, and what security measures are built around them. It also aims to provide visibility over the cost of AI tools and an estimate of the ROI being offered.
One of the most important aspects of the product is its vendor-neutral approach. It explicitly enables ServiceNow customers to detect, manage, and secure AI agents and tools from both ServiceNow and third-party vendors. This is crucial because it stops the AI Control Tower from becoming just another governance silo.
Key Capabilities: What Does the AI Control Tower Do?
So what can AI and IT teams actually do with ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower? ServiceNow defines five main categories of functionality for the product: Discover, Govern, Secure, Observe, and Measure.
But beneath these high-level capabilities, there’s a lot of complexity to unpick. Here’s a look at the main features across these five categories:
1. Discover
- AI detection and visibility: Automatically detect any AI agent, model, or MCP server to build a complete picture of agents in your IT environment. Crucially, this includes AI from both ServiceNow and third-party vendors. ServiceNow says this provides visibility over ‘any system, vendor, or cloud’.
- Comprehensive inventory: AI tools are recorded in a comprehensive central inventory, allowing IT teams to monitor and audit what products the organization uses over time. This applies beyond AI agents, also covering AI systems, models, data sets, prompts, and classic machine learning models.
2. Govern
- Risk frameworks: The platform also offers pre-built compliance packs for frameworks like the California AI Act, Colorado AI Act, and EU AI Act. Each includes regulations, citations, control objectives, and risk statements. This enables organizations to more quickly establish compliant AI practices.
- Integrated controls: Enforce practical controls around what AI can and can’t do, based on wider business goals or compliance frameworks.
3. Secure
- Permission monitoring: Get global visibility into the permissions assigned to AI agents and any access issues associated with them. This enables security/IT teams to extend least privilege to AI tools, reducing the overall attack surface.
- Block prompt injections: Prompt injections are some of the most critical security risks around AI agents. The AI Control Tower detects these in real-time and alerts the relevant admin. It can also disable agents where necessary and generate audit-ready documentation.
- Custom incident response: Define responses to specific AI-related issues. For example, you can choose to deactivate models that show suspicious behavior – or notify the relevant AI/security stakeholder.
4. Observe
- Continuous monitoring: The platform also includes live observation of AI agents as they work. Known as ‘runtime monitoring’, this enables organizations to watch agents think, see where they’re making decisions, and make adjustments in real-time. This is intended to replace periodic, manual audits.
- Bias and fairness auditing: Organizations can monitor performance issues across demographics, identify data bias, and calibrate the AI’s responses according to organizational values.
- Drift detection: Get alerts when the behavior and performance of an AI model is affected by issues like stale data, changing inputs, or other external factors.
5. Measure
- Cost monitoring: Track how many tokens your AI tools are using. This enables you to predict spend, optimize usage, and ensure you’ve chosen the right models for the task at hand.
- Monitor AI impact: Estimate ROI by comparing AI costs against adoption rates and realized value. You can also build custom ROI templates based on your own distinct metrics.
AI Control Tower Pricing: How Does it Work?
In early 2026, ServiceNow announced sweeping changes to the way AI products are packaged and priced across the ServiceNow ecosystem. These also apply to the AI Control Tower.
Now, all ServiceNow products will be available across three main tiers: Foundation, Advanced, and Prime. Crucially, AI Control Tower is included in Foundation, meaning it is offered by default. This means anybody on one of these tiers already has access to the AI Control Tower.
These changes are designed to make products like the AI Control Tower more accessible. Previously, many were bundled as self-contained licenses, meaning customers had to take out separate subscriptions before they could use it. Now, you just need to activate the product (more details below).
However, a quick caveat: This isn’t the same thing as the AI Control Tower being free for anybody with a paid ServiceNow license. That’s because the same set of changes also made consumption-based pricing the default setting for AI tools across the ServiceNow platform. Depending on your license and subscription tier, you’re assigned a certain number of AI tokens (‘Assists’) up-front, and anything beyond this is effectively charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. This applies to the AI Control Tower, as well as other products.
In practice, this means any ServiceNow customer already has access to the Control Tower application itself, including its dashboards/tabs, and baseline visibility over your AI estate. But the more you use it, and the more AI tools you monitor – the higher your overall costs are likely to grow.
ServiceNow has not published specific pricing mechanics for the AI Control Tower, so it’s difficult to provide more detail about what these costs are likely to be.
How to Get Started With ServiceNow AI Control Tower
As of the Australia release, the AI Control Tower is now bundled into every current-generation ServiceNow tier (Foundation, Advanced, Prime). If you’ve already moved over to the new pricing model, the AI Control Tower may already be auto-installed. Check System Applications first before assuming you need to activate anything manually. If it’s not there, ServiceNow’s official activation and installation documentation covers the current process.
If you’re still on a legacy pre-April-2026 contract, being technically upgraded to the Australia release isn’t the same as being commercially entitled to the new bundling. You might need to migrate to a new tier or potentially purchase the product separately until you do so. If in doubt, get in touch with your account team.
The Center of ServiceNow’s AI Strategy
Given ServiceNow’s unique heritage, it’s no surprise that the company has invested so much time and innovation in AI governance and security. Doing this well requires wide visibility over the workflows, technology, and infrastructure already in use in an organization’s IT environment. This is precisely the technical heritage that ServiceNow has spent decades building.
Whatever changes in the coming months and years, it’s clear that the AI Control Tower will form a crucial part of ServiceNow’s AI strategy. Indeed, it’s already had several updates since its initial launch. There’s now every chance there could be more to come in the months and years ahead.