With its new Context Engine and open developer tools, the enterprise software giant is betting that unified AI infrastructure will outpace a market crowded with patchwork solutions.
ServiceNow has announced that every product in its portfolio will now include artificial intelligence, data connectivity, workflow execution, security, and governance as standard, ending what the company calls the “sidecar AI era,” in which intelligence is bolted onto disconnected systems rather than built into them.
The Santa Clara-based company unveiled the changes alongside two major additions: Context Engine, an enterprise intelligence layer that grounds AI agent decisions in organizational history, policy, and relationships; and ServiceNow Build Agent, a developer toolset that lets engineers build directly from third-party environments — including Claude Code, Cursor, and OpenAI Codex — and deploy straight to the ServiceNow platform.
“Most organizations spend months assembling the pieces for enterprise AI. By the time they’re ready, the goalposts have moved,” said Amit Zavery, President, Chief Product Officer, and Chief Operating Officer at ServiceNow. He described the company’s approach as delivering a complete AI-native experience across all products by default, rather than requiring customers to undertake a separate procurement process.
Context Engine is designed to address a fundamental limitation of enterprise AI: agents that lack the organizational context needed to make reliable decisions. Drawing on ServiceNow’s Service Graph, Knowledge Graph, and data inventory, the engine connects identity relationships, asset dependencies, business intelligence, and data lineage in real time. The company says its platform processes 85 billion workflows and seven trillion transactions, positioning it to train AI on how a specific business actually operates — not just on language patterns.
On the developer side, Build Agent skills will be available from April 15, allowing teams to work from any major integrated development environment and deploy directly to ServiceNow. The company is offering 100 free Build Agent calls for customers and 25 for personal developer instances. A deeper native development experience is also available through ServiceNow Studio, which connects live data models, table relationships, and business rules in real time.
The announcements also include a new tiered offer model spanning AI assistance, agentic automation, and fully autonomous operations. For mid-size companies, ServiceNow is introducing Enterprise Service Management Foundation, which brings IT, HR, legal, finance, procurement, and workplace services onto a single platform, promising deployment in weeks rather than months.
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The company cited Robinhood as an early example of the approach in practice. Jay Hammonds, head of Technology Operations at the financial services firm, said ServiceNow AI deflects 70% of employee requests before human intervention is needed, reducing manual effort by 2,200 hours across 1,300 tickets each month.
ServiceNow’s broader argument is that enterprise fragmentation — the average large organization runs hundreds of applications, each with its own data model and governance logic — is a problem most AI vendors are making worse, not better. The company is positioning unified, governed, and contextually aware AI execution as the competitive differentiator that add-on intelligence cannot replicate.