IBM and ServiceNow are teaming up for new services they say will help enterprise customers bring aging legacy environments into an AI-ready infrastructure. 

The collaboration will combine IBM’s AI, data, and automation capabilities and ServiceNow’s AI platform for a variety of offerings that will modernize aging systems, enable autonomous IT operations, and help organizations evolve existing systems rather than replace them, the companies stated. ServiceNow says its AI-Platform offers a workflow layer that sits on top of an enterprise’s existing systems and helps automate work across them.

Decades of deeply interconnected legacy systems are the biggest barrier to moving fast on AI, the companies stated. Their pairings will take advantage of Big Blue’s expertise in working with large systems, such as its mainframe environment, and extensive legacy applications, along with ServiceNow’s workflow and agent management platforms.

“Most enterprises have the ambition to deploy agentic AI, but lack the foundation to run it at scale,” said John Aisien, senior vice president and general manager, central product management, security and risk, at ServiceNow. “IBM brings the tooling to modernize the systems and extend ServiceNow’s data capabilities. ServiceNow provides the platform to put that data to work across every workflow in the business.”

The vendors will focus on three core services that will be available in the second half of 2026:

• Application modernization: Scans and refactors legacy systems using tools like IBM Bob, Enterprise Application runtime (Java) and IBM watsonx.data to help enterprises bring existing applications into the AI era without starting from scratch.
• Autonomous infrastructure operations: Integrates Red Hat Ansible, IBM Bob, Instana, Hashicorp Terraform, and Hashicorp Vault into ServiceNow IT workflows to detect, remediate, and resolve issues before they affect the business.
• Data governance: Extends ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric with IBM watsonx.data to unlock key capabilities like Data Quality, Observability, Master Data Management – employing the ServiceNow Data Catalog so that mutual customers can keep track of their AI-ready data.

IBM and ServiceNow have a long-standing relationship, having worked together to help large enterprise customers implement everything from cloud computing, automation, and security to IT service management and observability technologies.