Dive Brief:
- ServiceNow entered into a multiyear agreement with OpenAI, granting its customers direct access to frontier model capabilities, the software company said Tuesday.
- Using OpenAI’s advanced models, ServiceNow plans to build speech-to-speech AI agents that let users speak in their preferred languages, triggering an action in real time such as opening a case or administering an approval, according to the announcement.
- Although OpenAI models were already available to ServiceNow customers, the two companies will work together "over the next few months" to address specific use cases and tailor experiences to businesses' needs, John Aisien, SVP of central product management at ServiceNow, told CIO Dive in an email.
Dive Insight:
ServiceNow’s collaboration with OpenAI comes as CIOs seek to scale AI throughout the enterprise while struggling to realize the technology’s full benefits.
AI adoption and increased automation is a top priority over the next five years for 46% of CIOs, according to a survey of 4,300 C-suite executives published by Rimini Street in December. Technologies like agentic AI “redefine expectations for speed, flexibility and intelligence,” Rimini Street Global CIO Joe Locandro said in a press release.
Despite lofty expectations, it could take even longer for enterprises to see a return on their investments. Rimini Street survey respondents believe it will take more than six years to see even a 48% benefit realization for their AI investments.
Still, IT vendors are meeting the AI moment through partnerships with AI developers to add more capabilities to their products. Snowflake in December announced expanded partnerships with Anthropic and Accenture to scale agentic AI in the enterprise.
ServiceNow’s deepened collaboration with OpenAI brings the developer’s models into the ServiceNow AI Platform. While the addition will complement enterprise customers’ ServiceNow configuration management database, it will offer native access to intelligence capabilities that can “further inform actions that will be taken within workflows,” according to the announcement.
The ServiceNow AI Control Tower will serve as the governance and orchestration layer, giving enterprises visibility into “how models are applied across workflows, how they interact with enterprise data and systems, and how AI-driven actions are executed at scale in a controlled, auditable way.”
ServiceNow spent 2025 heavily investing in broader AI capabilities. The software vendor added thousands of pre-built agents to its platform in January 2025, followed by the release of ServiceNow Studio in March for developers to build agents.
In May, ServiceNow expanded its partnership with Nvidia, developing an open-source AI model to better enable enterprise agents.
