Enterprises are starting to deploy AI agents. However, if organizations plan to deploy agent ecosystems at scale and improve employee buy-in, they could consider treating AI agents as background tools to avoid intimidating employees who feel they need to know how to use these tools.
Dorit Zilbershot, vp of artificial intelligence and innovation at ServiceNowtold VentureBeat that employees don’t need to know whether teams of AI agents are running in the background.
“There’s so much AI surrounding us that we’re not even aware of, and that’s how we think about AI agents at ServiceNow,” Zilbershot said. “It should just work. As an employee, I shouldn’t have to worry about AI agents running in the background.”
Zilbershot said staff turn out to be “managers” of AI agents in the sense that they simply have to do their normal jobs. Agents are mechanically launched to complete tasks.
Enterprises have begun to leverage AI agents and explore how to deploy them at scale, whilst enterprise adoption of generative AI has declined barely. Zilbershot said ServiceNow’s agent platform, Now Assist, is the company’s “fastest-growing product to date.” In September, Now Assist launched a library of AI agents for customers.
AI agents could ideally automate many workflows. This may include sales or product plans, where one agent may encode customer information, one other categorizes it, and yet one other notifies the employee of a status change. Zilbershot said agents don’t replace human staff, they take away some of their work, so people only need to concentrate to an agent when there is an agent who ought to be interacting with it.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told VentureBeat in a separate interview that generative AI, particularly applications around agents, “has grown beyond our expectations.”
“We have mastered workflow and management and are building agents that solve unique problems,” McDermott said. “Artificial intelligence will be present in every product we produce.”
As AI agents grow in popularity, Zilbershot said enterprises need to understand what makes agents work for their organizations and employees.
Agents, not assistants
Zilbershot said that beyond AI agents working quietly in the background, organizations need to understand that agents are not assistants. Otherwise, they risk placing the expectation on users that they need to learn to prompt agents slightly than allowing them to work independently for them.
“I think we’re doing our clients a bit of a disservice when agents act more as assistants, but we’re not changing the name,” Zilbershot said. “It just creates the wrong perception in the market and the wrong way people approach working with agents.”
Zilbershot added that AI agents perform best when there are other agents with which they will interact, so to cope with the expected variety of agents, orchestrator agents ought to be deployed to manage all agents. ServiceNow provides an orchestrator agent with the Now Assist platform.
Other firms have begun offering enterprises access to orchestrator agents and the creation of custom AI agents. Crew AI launched an agent platform this month, while Asana released an agent builder specifically for workflows.
Cooperation with Nvidia
To expand its agent ecosystem, ServiceNow announced that it’s going to begin building pre-built AI agents using NvidiaNIM Agent Blueprint.
Zilbershot said that using the NIM agent schema helps ServiceNow create more agents in the quantity they imagine is needed to increase agent performance.
“We are growing our ecosystem because there may be a limit to how much we can build on our own; we want to build strong partnerships with companies like NVIDIA to build native AI agents within the ServiceNow platform,” she said.
The first agent that ServiceNow will build together with Nvidia can be a vulnerability evaluation for the Container Security AI agent. The agent will automate vulnerability evaluation and can be available on the ServiceNow agent platform in 2025.
Zilbershot said the collaboration with Nvidia can be just the first of many possible partnerships ServiceNow will enter into to develop AI agents.