'AI is now infused in every package that we offer to our addressable market,' SVP John Aisien told us
ServiceNow's latest product announcements show how hardcore the company has become about embedding AI across its go-to-market strategy.
ServiceNow senior vice president John Aisien, who oversees forward-deployed engineering and strategic partnerships with companies like Anthropic and Microsoft, outlined the major moves in a conversation with The Register.
“AI is now infused in every package that we offer to our addressable market,” he said.
For starters, ServiceNow has reorganized its pricing around three levels of AI capability. Customers can now choose the level of pricing that corresponds to their AI maturity.
Assistive AI summarizes data or generates content. Task Automation handles discrete jobs from start to finish. With Full Role Automation, AI workflows operate autonomously with minimal human oversight.
"Whether the organization is ready for assistive AI, AI automation, or full-blown role automation using autonomous AI, we've introduced a new packaging model that gives them access to the entirety of the ServiceNow price list organized into those three categories," Aisien said.
Aisien described the second announcement, Build Agent SDK, as "a real, real game changer." The tool is designed to let any developer create or modify ServiceNow applications from whatever coding environment they already use, whether that's GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codex, or various natural-language "vibe coding" tools.
“We want the maximum number of developers in the world – regardless of the development form factor and the development experience that they got – we want those developers to have the ability to build ServiceNow workloads super quickly, and run those workloads,” he said. “Build agent SDK is the technical manifestation of making that promise real.”
Aisien described a life sciences company in Pennsylvania with about 8,000 developers, 650 of whom build on ServiceNow Studio. That leaves more than 7,000 who don't – not because they lack interest, but because developers tend to be loyal to their preferred tools. The Build Agent SDK is meant to meet all of those developers where they already work.
ServiceNow’s Context Engine, another new offer, is an enterprise spin on the kind of personalization that users see in consumer apps like Netflix and Amazon — systems that learn from every click, hover, and pause to serve tailored experiences. Enterprise software, Aisien said, has lagged behind in adopting that technology.
"That historical context and continuous learning, that's been the norm in consumer apps," he told us. "Enterprise software really hasn't learned that well-worn pattern. AI is now forcing this construct to become real. Why? Because AI is software and ultimately needs data with which to make autonomous decisions."
He described the context engine as essential infrastructure for making autonomous AI work at enterprise scale. He called it "one of the last-mile technologies needed for enterprise AI to get real."
“The context engine in the back-end says ‘I'm going to determine the intent of what this human being wants to do with the digital asset, depending on the questions they ask, depending on the interaction paradigm, and then depending on their identities and permissions in the back end,’ “ Aisien said.
ServiceNow also introduced the Enterprise Service Management Suite, a new bundled package targeting companies with roughly 1,000 to 5,000 employees. It combines IT, HR, supply chain, and finance service workflows into a single offering and pairs that with an AI-powered implementation agent that dramatically simplifies deployment.
Where traditional ServiceNow implementations could take six months or more, Aisien said the new approach can compress that to about 30 days. He said most of that elapsed time comes from organizational logistics, not configuration.
"Actual time in the UI is maybe a day or two," he said.
The implementation agent provides a conversational interface that guides administrators through setup without requiring deep ServiceNow proficiency.
Aisien tried not to oversell it.
"You don't have to be my mom, who's 80 years old and only uses an Android device" — but he said anyone comfortable with a chat interface should be able to handle it. ®