Enterprise software has a long history of promising reinvention. Every decade or so, a new platform emerges with claims to unify data, streamline workflows, and make work frictionless. Rarely does the reality match the marketing. The latest example is ServiceNow’s new AI Experience, a multimodal, agent-driven interface that the company insists will define the future of enterprise AI. The pitch: forget juggling 17 different apps a day, just talk to a voice agent, drop in a screenshot, or type a request, and ServiceNow’s agents will do the rest.
It’s bold. It’s polished. It’s also the easy part.
The hard part, the plumbing behind that interface. is still waiting to be built. Enterprises are not struggling because they lack a prettier UI. They’re struggling with fragmented systems, messy data, governance tradeoffs, and employees who resist changing how they work.
Bill McDermott, ServiceNow’s CEO, calls AI “civilization’s greatest opportunity” and says the company is “turning complexity into simplicity” with a single pane of glass. His team emphasizes that this isn’t AI duct-taped onto legacy systems. Instead, they say, ServiceNow embeds agents directly into workflows, natively integrated and role-aware, powered by a unified Workflow Data Fabric.
In theory, it’s a direct shot at Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Einstein. Microsoft is embedding AI into Office and Teams, Salesforce into its CRM suite. ServiceNow, by contrast, wants to own the very interface of enterprise work, where employees spend their time, ask for actions, and make decisions.
Portals, dashboards, digital workspaces, each promised to replace silos with simplicity. More often, they ended up gathering dust while employees clicked back into Outlook, Excel, or Salesforce. The question is not whether ServiceNow can demo a chatbot that books meetings or approves offers. It’s whether workers will actually change habits to make it their daily front door to work.
ServiceNow has plenty of demos. Voice agents that approve offers and file IT tickets. AI Lens that turns screenshots into workflow triggers. AI Web Agents that click through forms in third-party apps. A Data Explorer that surfaces trends in context. In sales, its Configure, Price, Quote tool promises to cut quoting time in half. The company cites internal savings of $350 million and customer case studies from Adobe and EY as proof of value.
The problem: most of these capabilities aren’t generally available yet. AI Lens is live, but voice agents, web agents, and parts of the CRM suite are scheduled to roll out at the end of 2025 or into 2026. That means much of what ServiceNow is selling is still aspiration.
Meanwhile, enterprises remain wary of lock-in. ServiceNow insists it supports any model: its own, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft. But consolidating workflows under one pane inevitably raises neutrality questions. Microsoft already dominates productivity suites, Salesforce leads CRM, and both are embedding AI where people already work. ServiceNow is asking customers not just to adopt AI but to move their center of gravity to a platform best known for IT ticketing.
Adoption, not interface design, is the hill ServiceNow has to climb. Employees are creatures of habit. They don’t switch tools just because a new UI looks slicker. They switch when workflows genuinely become easier, faster, and more reliable, without requiring retraining or context-switching.
There’s also the matter of governance and trust. ServiceNow highlights its AI Control Tower as a differentiator, giving enterprises visibility and oversight over how AI agents behave. That could matter in regulated industries where compliance is as important as convenience. But governance alone doesn’t drive usage. What drives usage is whether employees feel their daily work gets easier.
ServiceNow’s challenge is compounded by perception. The company insists this is not “robotic process automation 2.0.” Yet, as its own Chief Innovation Officer admitted, many customers still use AI the way they used RPA: for automating tasks they were already doing, not reimagining workflows. The demos may look futuristic, but the value proposition is familiar, save time on approvals, deflect tickets, speed up quotes.
Unless ServiceNow can show that its AI-first interface leads to fundamentally new ways of working, it risks being another wrapper: impressive branding on top of incremental gains.
