Why ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower Matters

The emerging switchboard for enterprise AI

ServiceNow’s new AI Control Tower is one of the most innovative solutions and thoughtful market positionings I have seen from ServiceNow in some time. It seems incredibly prescient for ServiceNow to position their platform as the central hub or switchboard for enterprise AI.

With customers heavily investing in AI themselves (whether purchasing a model, developing their own solutions, or engaging partners) there is also a proliferation of AI agents within the enterprise application software stack. Everyone from Salesforce to Nexthink to Box now have a copilot.  The focus for many is creating their own unique AI experience with very few pursuing on a solution that allows for integration, collaboration and orchestration across these AI agents.

I think this future mirrors the Web 2.0 shift where we saw everyone move to APIs and service-based architectures. I believe the same will happen with AI. Every platform will have an AI that becomes the primary way you interface with it and likely the primary way you license it.

This future is where ServiceNow is placed perfectly, helping to make sense of all this.

ServiceNow essentially says, “Bring all of your AI agents here. Let us give you a centralized point of engagement for your end users—and, most importantly, leverage the power of our workflow and orchestration capabilities across all AI agents.”

This is why there’s so much interest in Control Tower, organizations know they need a way to organize all of this.

Have you seen other solutions that provide this level of centralization and orchestration for AI across tools? What other players are looking at it this way? 

Afterthought…

Where do I see this headed?…

The expanse of AI agents feels a lot like what happened in media: we left the single cable bundle for à-la-carte streaming, only to end up juggling a dozen apps and their subscription costs. Then came consolidation and rebundling under a few umbrellas like Disney+Hulu or Paramount+Showtime. I believe enterprise AI is on a similar path. With every platform now shipping its own “agent,” it will create fragmentation in UX, but also in managing subscriptions and cost.

In that world, ServiceNow Control Tower is well positioned to act as the aggregator: a single switchboard where users engage once, and requests route to the right agent with consistent governance, audit, and spend controls.

If I were in ServiceNow’s shoes, I’d push beyond the obvious orchestration to brokering.  Establishing pre-negotiated bundles with major enterprise apps so Control Tower includes not just the hub, but the entitlements to select AI agents.  These entitlements can be negotiated at scale and offered in clear tiers (integrations + usage rights) under one contract and one source of telemetry.

That’s the future I see: Control Tower as both the central control point and the subscription conduit simplifying how enterprises access, govern, and pay for AI across the stack.