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ServiceNow, Inc. is an American enterprise software company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, that builds the ServiceNow AI Platform (formerly the Now Platform), a cloud system for digitizing and automating workflows across IT, human resources, customer service, and other corporate functions. Founded in 2004 by Fred Luddy and led since late 2019 by chairman and CEO Bill McDermott, the company has become one of the most closely watched cases of generative AI and agentic AI monetization in enterprise AI. Its Now Assist AI product line surpassed $600 million in annual contract value (ACV) in 2025 [1], and ServiceNow has spent aggressively to deepen its position in AI agents, including the $2.85 billion purchase of Moveworks announced in March 2025 [2] and the $7.75 billion acquisition of cybersecurity company Armis completed in April 2026 [3]. McDermott has framed the strategy in expansive terms, telling Wall Street that ServiceNow aims to be "the AI operating system of the 21st century" for the enterprise [31].
ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) sells subscriptions to its platform, which began as an IT service management (ITSM) system and now spans IT operations, employee service delivery, customer service, security operations, and application development. The company reported subscription revenues of more than $12.8 billion for fiscal year 2025, up roughly 21 percent year over year [1], and in April 2026 raised its full-year 2026 subscription revenue guidance to between $15.735 billion and $15.775 billion [4]. The company says approximately 85 percent of the Fortune 500 use its products [5], and it ended 2025 with 603 customers generating more than $5 million each in ACV [1], up from 553 such customers as of the third quarter [6].
Under McDermott, ServiceNow has repositioned itself from a workflow vendor into a platform for deploying and governing large language models and AI agents across the enterprise. At a financial analyst day held alongside its Knowledge 2026 conference in May 2026, the company set a target of $30 billion in subscription revenue by 2030, with roughly 30 percent of ACV expected to come from AI by the end of the decade [7][4].
Luddy, previously chief technology officer of Peregrine Systems, founded the company in San Diego in 2004 under the name Glidesoft, renaming it Service-now.com in 2006; it went public on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2012 [8]. Frank Slootman served as CEO from 2011 to 2017, followed by John Donahoe from 2017 to 2019. McDermott, formerly CEO of SAP, took over in November 2019 and has driven the company's AI-centric strategy since.
ServiceNow's machine learning push accelerated in 2020, when it made four AI acquisitions in a single year: Loom Systems (log analytics), Passage AI (conversational AI), Sweagle (configuration data), and Montreal-based Element AI [9]. The Element AI deal seeded an AI innovation hub in Canada and brought Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, an Element AI co-founder, into an advisory role with the company [9].
In May 2023, ServiceNow Research and Hugging Face released StarCoder, a 15-billion-parameter open-access code generation model produced through the BigCode project the two organizations co-stewarded [10]. A specialized version of StarCoder became the basis for ServiceNow's text-to-code Now LLM, and the collaboration expanded to include NVIDIA with the release of StarCoder2 in February 2024 [11]. Generative AI reached ServiceNow's paying customers in September 2023 with Now Assist, and the company pivoted to agentic AI products in 2025.
ServiceNow announced Now Assist, its generative AI product family, on September 20, 2023 as part of the Vancouver release of the Now Platform; Now Assist for ITSM, customer service management, HR service delivery, and Creator became generally available in the ServiceNow Store on September 29, 2023 [12]. The features summarize incidents and chat interactions, draft knowledge articles, power conversational self-service, and generate code. They run by default on Now LLM, a domain-specific model trained on ServiceNow's configuration management database, service catalog, and coding conventions, though customers can connect other commercial or in-house models [13]. The text-to-code Now LLM was built on a specialized version of the 15-billion-parameter StarCoder, fine-tuned on ServiceNow flow data so that generated JavaScript adheres to platform best practices [11]. ServiceNow promoted the release as the first general-availability generative AI offering from a major enterprise software vendor [13]. Now Assist is packaged in premium Pro Plus and Enterprise Plus editions of the company's products [14].
On January 29, 2025, ServiceNow announced its move into agentic AI: AI Agent Orchestrator, a control layer that coordinates teams of specialized AI agents across tasks, systems, and departments, and AI Agent Studio, a tool for building custom agents, alongside thousands of prebuilt agents for IT, customer service, and HR [14][15]. Both became available in March 2025 and were included for Pro Plus and Enterprise Plus customers [14]. At Knowledge 2025 in May 2025, the company added AI Control Tower, a governance console for discovering, monitoring, and managing AI agents and models, including third-party ones, along with AI Agent Fabric for agent-to-agent communication [16].
At Knowledge 2026, held May 5 to 7, 2026 in Las Vegas, ServiceNow extended this stack with ServiceNow Otto, a unified conversational interface combining Now Assist with technology from Moveworks; Action Fabric, which opens the platform's automation layer to outside agents, including those built on Claude or Microsoft Copilot, through a generally available Model Context Protocol server; an expanded AI Control Tower spanning AI deployed on any system; and an "Autonomous Workforce" of role-specific AI specialists for security, finance, HR, legal, and other functions rolling out through 2026 [17][18][19].
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| September 2023 | Now Assist becomes generally available with the Vancouver release [12] |
| September 2024 | RaptorDB Pro ships with the Xanadu release as the platform's high-performance database [32] |
| March 2025 | AI Agent Orchestrator and AI Agent Studio reach availability [14] |
| May 2025 | The Now Platform is reintroduced as the ServiceNow AI Platform at Knowledge 2025 [33] |
| January 2026 | ServiceNow reports Now Assist ACV passed $600 million in 2025, with fourth-quarter net new ACV more than doubling year over year [1] |
| April 2026 | Now Assist ACV reaches $750 million; the 2026 target is raised from $1 billion to $1.5 billion [4] |
| May 2026 | Company targets $30 billion subscription revenue by 2030, with about 30 percent of ACV from AI [7] |
Adoption metrics have tracked the ACV ramp: in the first quarter of 2026, the number of customers spending more than $1 million annually on Now Assist grew over 130 percent year over year [4], and in the fourth quarter of 2025 the company closed 35 Now Assist deals worth more than $1 million each [1].
At Knowledge 2025 on May 6, 2025, ServiceNow reintroduced the Now Platform as the ServiceNow AI Platform, describing it as a foundation built "for the agentic and open era" that unifies intelligence, data, and orchestration to put "any AI, any agent, any model" to work across the enterprise [33]. The platform is organized around three layers the company calls fabrics: a Knowledge Graph that connects events, operations, and people; a Workflow Data Fabric that pulls in data from across systems; and the AI Agent Fabric that lets agents communicate and collaborate [33]. "We are the only ones who can orchestrate AI, data, and workflows on a single platform," McDermott said in announcing the rebrand [33].
Underpinning the platform is RaptorDB, a database engine ServiceNow built in-house. RaptorDB Pro shipped in September 2024 with the Now Platform's Xanadu release as a hybrid transactional and analytical (HTAP) database that uses a column-store architecture to run transactions and large analytical queries on the same live data [32]. ServiceNow says early deployments saw transaction times improve by as much as 53 percent and query response times up to 27 times faster [32]. By 2026 the company positioned RaptorDB Standard as the default primary database for AI Platform workloads, with the premium RaptorDB Pro tier for ultra-scale requirements, arguing that fast, governed access to real-time enterprise data is a prerequisite for putting autonomous AI agents to work [32].
Beyond StarCoder, ServiceNow's research arm has produced a family of small, efficiency-focused models branded Apriel. At Knowledge 2025 on May 6, 2025, ServiceNow and NVIDIA unveiled Apriel Nemotron 15B, an open-source 15-billion-parameter reasoning model built with NVIDIA NeMo, NVIDIA's Llama Nemotron open datasets, and ServiceNow domain data, and trained on NVIDIA DGX Cloud [20][21]. The model is designed for low-latency, low-cost inference behind ServiceNow's AI agents, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang joined McDermott's keynote for the announcement [20].
In October 2025, ServiceNow's SLAM research lab released Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker, an open-weights 15-billion-parameter multimodal reasoning model published under an MIT license on Hugging Face [22]. Built by depth-upscaling Mistral AI's Pixtral-12B and trained with staged continual pretraining and supervised fine-tuning rather than reinforcement learning, it scored 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, comparable to DeepSeek-R1-0528, while remaining deployable on a single GPU [22][23].
| Company | Announced | Price | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Element AI | November 2020 | About US$230 million at closing [24] | AI research and talent |
| Moveworks | March 2025 | $2.85 billion [2] | Conversational AI assistant and enterprise search |
| data.world | May 2025 | Not disclosed [25] | Data catalog and governance |
| Armis | December 2025 | $7.75 billion [26] | Cyber exposure management |
Element AI, the Montreal startup co-founded by Bengio, was announced on November 30, 2020 with terms undisclosed; SEC filings later showed ServiceNow paid roughly US$230 million when the deal closed in January 2021, below the startup's prior venture valuation [9][24]. ServiceNow wound down Element AI's standalone products and absorbed its researchers.
Moveworks, founded in 2016 by Bhavin Shah, Vaibhav Nivargi, Varun Singh, and Jiang Chen, built an AI assistant for employee IT and HR support and was valued at $2.1 billion in 2021 [2]. ServiceNow announced the $2.85 billion cash-and-stock acquisition, its largest to that point, on March 10, 2025 [2]. The deal drew an in-depth antitrust review from the US Department of Justice, which issued a second request for information, as Bloomberg and TechCrunch reported in July 2025 [27]. The acquisition cleared review and closed in December 2025; at the time, Moveworks' assistant was deployed to about 5.5 million employees and the two companies shared roughly 250 customers [28].
In May 2025, ServiceNow announced the acquisition of data.world, an Austin-based data catalog and governance company founded in 2015, to make customers' data "AI-ready" for agents; the price was not disclosed [25]. In December 2025, it announced its largest deal ever, agreeing to acquire Armis, a cyber exposure management vendor covering IT, operational technology, and medical devices, for $7.75 billion in cash [26]. The Armis transaction closed on April 20, 2026, following ServiceNow's earlier purchase of identity-security company Veza, and the company said the combination would more than triple its addressable market in security and risk [3].
NVIDIA is ServiceNow's most prominent AI partner, spanning the StarCoder2 open code models [11], the co-developed Apriel Nemotron 15B [21], and joint announcements at Knowledge 2026 [18]. ServiceNow has also announced integrations with Microsoft connecting Now Assist with Microsoft Copilot for collaboration, orchestration, and governance across the two ecosystems [29], and in 2026 launched a forward deployed engineering program with Accenture to accelerate enterprise agentic AI rollouts [30]. Through Action Fabric's Model Context Protocol server, ServiceNow has additionally positioned its platform as an execution and governance layer for third-party agents, regardless of the underlying model vendor [19].
In its core ITSM and workflow markets, ServiceNow competes with Atlassian, BMC, Freshworks, and others; in enterprise AI it increasingly faces Salesforce's Agentforce, Microsoft's Copilot ecosystem, and employee-AI specialists such as Glean [2][15]. McDermott has framed agentic AI as an opportunity to attack adjacent markets, saying it represents "a seismic shift that could render traditional CRM obsolete" [28].
ServiceNow's significance in the AI industry rests on its monetization evidence: Now Assist's climb past $750 million in ACV, with a raised $1.5 billion target for 2026, is frequently cited as among the clearest demonstrations that enterprises will pay for generative and agentic AI at scale [4][7]. At the same time, the company sits at the center of the debate over whether AI agents will expand software spending or erode seat-based SaaS economics, a tension analysts continued to weigh even as ServiceNow beat its guidance through early 2026 [4].