Dive Brief:
- ServiceNow and IBM expanded their partnership to address barriers when scaling enterprise AI, the companies said Thursday.
- The partnership combines IBM’s AI, data and automation capabilities with ServiceNow’s AI platform in an effort to update legacy systems and prepare data for AI uses. The expanded partnership targets three areas: application modernization, enterprise data governance and autonomous infrastructure operations.
- IBM is bringing the tooling to ServiceNow’s platform to modernize aging enterprise systems, said John Aisien, SVP and general manager of central product management for security and risk at ServiceNow, in a statement. “Most enterprises have the ambition to deploy agentic AI, but lack the foundation to run it at scale,” he said.
Dive Insight:
The expanded partnership is the latest development from key tech vendors to help CIOs scale AI and update aging legacy systems.
The company partnered with OpenAI earlier this year to bring frontier model capabilities to its platform, and it has acquired and partnered with companies that bolster its AI and security capabilities over the last year. ServiceNow has worked to become part of the orchestration and governance layer for agents, with its updates to its AI Control Tower platform that offers data intelligence and security announced last month.
The pace of AI developments and agentic systems is forcing enterprises to overhaul legacy systems and aging IT. It’s an expensive endeavor, but lagging systems or friction between information sharing slows down modernization efforts.
ServiceNow and IBM are hoping to help organizations evolve their existing systems rather than replace them, the companies said in the announcement.
The collaboration brings IBM’s software onto the ServiceNow platform. Customers can expect to see new capabilities that modernize legacy systems using tools such as IBM’s Bob, an AI coding agent; Enterprise Application Runtimes, a product targeted at Java-based applications, and IBM watsonx.data, a data lakehouse.
The partnership expands customers’ AI governance capabilities using ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric with IBM watsonx.data on issues of data quality, observability and data management.
It also integrates Red Hat Ansible, an automation platform; IBM Bob; Instana for observability; HashiCorp Terraform, an infrastructure as code tool; and HashiCorp Vault, a secrets management platform, into ServiceNow IT workflows for more autonomous infrastructure, the companies said. Together, these tools will help detect, remediate and resolve issues automatically.
The joint capabilities are expected to be available in the second half of 2026.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott touted the company’s access to enterprise context and its interconnectivity across key systems as assets in the enterprise market during its Q1 earnings call in April.
“AI, data, security and governance are now built into every product and package, not a separate purchase,” McDermott said on the call.
“AI adoption at scale requires more than access to models. It requires rethinking the systems, data and workflows that support them,” said Raj Datta, VP of independent software vendor and AI partnerships at IBM, in a statement. “We’re building an open, flexible foundation for AI that can scale across operations and deliver real business value.”
