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Artificial intelligence “is everywhere, and the result for many of you has been chaos,” said John Aisien, SVP, Central Product Management at ServiceNow. “Instead of uniformly making our lives easier, in many instances, it’s sometimes inadvertently adding complexity to our professional lives.”
It was a striking way to kick off a keynote at ServiceNow’s World Forum 2026 at ExCeL London, particularly when the company’s cloud-based enterprise platform is designed to connect systems, automate workflows and simplify operations.
Much of the problem lies, Aisien explained, with legacy systems. Many organisations are trying to introduce autonomous and agentic AI into technology that wasn’t designed for it.
“Most of your organisations are built on the incumbent systems that were fit for purpose at the time that they were selected, architected, and so on,” he said. “But now they’re running on physical infrastructure, and they’re secured and governed by an architecture that wasn’t designed for this.”
ServiceNow executives predicted that the number of AI agents in production globally would exceed one billion by 2029. Speaking to TechFinitive from the show’s expo, ServiceNow partner NTT DATA Business Solutions agreed that many organisations are struggling to keep pace.
Executive Head of Marketing and Data Innovation Chris Gabriel said: “There is a proliferation of agents coming from everywhere [and] most organisations take time to absorb new technology and make it valuable.”
Gabriel calls this the “absorption gap”. Put simply, technology is developing faster than businesses can put it to work.
Three years ago, AI could draft an email. Today, it can open cases in highly regulated organisations, work across existing systems and even generate new automations with little human intervention.
But the investment isn’t necessarily paying off, according to ServiceNow’s maturity index.
“Organisations have invested a 110% more in AI over the last year compared to the year before. But only 9% are realising value,” said Aisien during the keynote. “Your AI budget has probably been exceeded sooner than you expected, and you probably haven’t obtained the return that you were hoping for.”
Adding to the chaos is shadow AI – employees using AI tools without the knowledge or approval of their organisation’s IT and security teams.
“Your teammates are unwittingly introducing security threats, unapproved tools, especially AI services,” said Luke Heald, Advisory Solution Consultant at ServiceNow.
Gabriel agreed, pointing to research commissioned by NTT DATA Business Solutions earlier in the year. “We found that 54% of people are regularly bringing their own AI to work; 20% are doing it all the time and in the 25- to 39-year-old cohort it’s 75%.”
He believes businesses may be missing out on the productivity gains their employees are making with AI. “If you can’t govern it, control it, see it, you can’t bank it and you can’t restructure an organisation around it.”
Keith Pearson, CTO for Financial Services at ServiceNow, summed up the problem during a breakout session at the conference. “There is an awful lot of shadow AI out there – and organisations are shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.”
ServiceNow’s answer is to connect AI, data, workflows and security on a single enterprise platform, giving businesses greater oversight of the tools and systems they’re already using.
Jayney Howson, ServiceNow’s Chief Learning Officer, explained the company’s approach during the keynote.
“Here at ServiceNow, we bring together data, AI, workflows, and security into one platform. And this is what makes ServiceNow the Super Intelligent control tower for business reinvention,” she said.
The platform, Howson explained, connects AI tools to workflows, systems of record and data sources, so organisations can manage activity across their existing systems.
“You can act across every workflow, every corner of your business, in every industry with simplicity. You can secure every agent, every identity, every decision.”
ServiceNow aims to bring autonomous workflows to business functions ranging from IT management and security to customer relationship management and employee services.
One example is ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower, designed to give organisations visibility of the AI agents operating across their business, including those deployed without IT oversight.
A global ‘policy agent’ helps employees find policies relevant to their role and location. An ‘agent record’ provides information about an AI agent’s performance, including quality and safety scores that can be linked to business outcomes.
ServiceNow’s argument is that businesses need to take control of the AI they’re already using before they can fully realise its value.
