ServiceNow is giving its AI Control Tower new features to make AI agents more governable — and a new name, Super Intelligence Control Tower (SICT), to please the US President. It is also updating EmployeeWorks to make building AI agents easier.
AI Passport, a new component of SICT, gives every agent, whether from ServiceNow or a third party, a verifiable identity, and provides runtime control over its activities.
As enterprises scale autonomous agents from pilots to production, they are facing new challenges, said Nenshad Bardoliwalla, SVP of AI product management at ServiceNow: “If companies can’t identify which agents are running, what they are doing, and what systems they can access, then scaling quickly becomes a risk.”
An AI Passport is a cryptographically signed credential for AI agents that is checked at runtime to verify the scope authorized by the enterprise. When an AI agent stays within its passport scope, it can operate freely, but if it tries to deviate, defined actions are enforced. These can include redirecting, restricting, or reconnecting the agent with proper context, or even triggering a kill switch. All actions are audited so agent activity can be tracked.
It is built on open specifications, so any governance product, identity provider, or enforcement point can issue and verify credentials for their own and third-party AI agents, and those credentials are verifiable at every step in multi-agent workflows.
A bouncer at every door
This is a real step forward, said Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research. “Most agent governance today is a security camera. It records what happened so someone can review the tape later. AI Passport is a bouncer at every door.”
The controls extend beyond ServiceNow’s own agents, he said: “For third-party agents, the passport replaces the agent’s own ‘claims’ about its permissions,” he said. “Taking an agent’s word for what it is allowed to do is an Achilles’ heel of agentic AI.”
And, he said, “A passport is only as trustworthy as the office that issues it. Here, the issuing office is ServiceNow’s CMDB, its GRC policies, and its workflow approvals. If that data is stale, the passport is stale. Credit ServiceNow for building on open specifications, but an open spec matters only when others adopt it. Nvidia is the launch partner, and ServiceNow says that enforcement implementation is still being built.”
In addition to AI Passport, ServiceNow has further beefed up its governance tools with a number of other features, including shadow-AI detection to locate unapproved agents on the network; more than 400 connectors to enable AI discovery across platforms and vendors; access mapping; and continuous enterprise AI observability.
It also announced cost governance; “value intelligence” that connects consumption, cost, quality, and “realized user value” to help teams optimize their AI use; AI cost management as part of ServiceNow IT Asset Management, which integrates with the Control Tower; and policy enforcement.
AI Passport, Shadow AI detection, and AI Cost Management are expected to be available by year end.
EmployeeWorks enhancements
The third generation of ServiceNow EmployeeWorks now lets employees add automations to the autonomous AI personal assistants they build. ToolSmith is a new agentic developer environment that takes tool building “from days to minutes,” the company said.
What companies have been trying to do, said Bhavin Shah, SVP of ServiceNow’s employee experience group, “is to give developers a way to build, but in a way that’s governed, that allows them to stay within the guardrails and the controls that that are required in order to do the kinds of safe but deep and capable work that they want for their constituents inside the company.”
ToolSmith helps address that problem. It’s a vibe-coding environment with which developers can build automations for ServiceNow EmployeeWorks AI assistants by describing what they need in natural language. ServiceNow said ToolSmith was trained on over 75,000 APIs and optimized for reliability and token efficiency. Developers can test and refine its output using the same conversational interface.
ServiceNow said that ToolSmith also identifies what to build next, scanning logs “to identify opportunities to fix, improve, or invent the next best workflow.”
Non-coding employees, on the other hand, can build new Productivity Assistants to perform contextual or persona-based work including long-running tasks, the company said. There are also pre-built assistants available, beginning with several for HR service delivery.
EmployeeWorks itself includes two assistants out of the box: a research assistant that can scan internal and external sources for answers, based on the user’s role, and a calendaring assistant that, ServiceNow said, “goes beyond typical calendar booking solutions by orchestrating nuanced requests like scheduling quarterly
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