Briefing Overview

  • ServiceNow and IBM announced an expanded partnership on Thursday aimed at addressing obstacles enterprises face when deploying AI at scale.The companies said。
  • The collaboration combines IBM's AI, data, and automation capabilities with ServiceNow's AI platform, focusing on updating legacy systems and preparing data for AI applications. It centers on three key areas: application modernization, enterprise data governance, and autonomous infrastructure operations.
  • John Aisien, senior vice president and general manager of central product management for security and risk at ServiceNow, said in a statement that IBM is bringing tools to the ServiceNow platform to help modernize legacy enterprise systems. "Most enterprises have ambitions to deploy agentic AI but lack the foundation to run it at scale," he said.

Deep Insights

This expanded partnership is the latest move by major technology vendors to help CIOs scale AI and update aging legacy systems.

Earlier this year, ServiceNowpartnered with OpenAIto bring frontier model capabilities to its platform, and over the past year hasacquired and partnered withmultiple companies to enhance its AI and security capabilities. ServiceNow has been positioning itself as the orchestration and governance layer for agents, with updates to its AI control tower platform announced last monthrevealed, which provides data intelligence and security features.

The pace of AI and agentic systems is forcing enterprises to overhaul legacy systems and aging IT. This is an expensive undertaking, but lagging systems or friction in information sharing canslow modernization efforts。

ServiceNow and IBM said in the announcement that they hope to help organizations evolve existing systems rather than replace them.

The partnership brings IBM software onto the ServiceNow platform. Customers will see new capabilities for modernizing legacy systems using tools such as IBM's Bob (AI coding agent), Enterprise Application Runtimes for Java applications, and the data lakehouse IBM watsonx.data.

The collaboration extends customers' AI governance capabilities by combining ServiceNow's Workflow Data Fabric with IBM watsonx.data to address data quality, observability, and data management issues.

The partnership also integrates Red Hat Ansible (automation platform), IBM Bob, Instana (observability), HashiCorp Terraform (infrastructure-as-code tool), and HashiCorp Vault (secrets management platform) into ServiceNow IT workflows to enable more autonomous infrastructure. The companies said these tools will work together to automatically detect, remediate, and resolve issues.

The combined capabilities are expected to be available in the second half of 2026.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott emphasized during the company'sQ1 earnings callin April that the company's access to enterprise context and connectivity across critical systems is an asset in the enterprise market.

"AI, data, security, and governance are now built into every product and suite, rather than purchased separately," McDermott said on the call.

Raj Datta, vice president of IBM's independent software vendor and AI partnerships, said in a statement: "Scaling AI adoption requires more than model access. It requires rethinking the systems, data, and workflows that underpin them. We are building an open, flexible AI foundation that can scale across operations and deliver real business value."