ServiceNow’s Yokohama platform release focuses on agentic AI

ServiceNow today launched its newest Now Platform release, Yokohama, which doubles down on the company’s commitment to agentic AI.

Building on its 2024 AI-driven enhancements, including the AI agents that made their debut in November 2024 in the Xanadu release, Yokohama includes teams of preconfigured AI agents that, ServiceNow said, “deliver productivity and predictable outcomes from day one, on a single platform.” These include:

• Security Operations (SecOps) expert AI agents to transform security operations by streamlining the entire incident lifecycle, eliminating repetitive tasks and empowering SecOps teams to focus on quickly stopping real threats.
• Autonomous change management AI agents that, ServiceNow said, “act like a seasoned change manager, instantly generating custom implementation, test, and backout plans by analyzing impact, historical data, and similar changes.”
• Proactive network test & repair AI agents thatoperate as AI-powered troubleshooters that automatically detect, diagnose, and resolve network issues before they impact performance.

In addition, the new ServiceNow AI Agent Studio will allow no code, low code, and pro code developers to build, manage, and monitor their own AI agents, and to chain agents together to create automation workflows. Both it, and the previously announced AI Agent Orchestrator, are now generally available.

The AI will be fuelled by the Workflow Data Fabric, which provides fully-governed, enterprise-wide data connectivity.

Additional new features in Yokohama include new generative AI-powered skills to help developers accelerate testing, optimization, and deployment of their agents, RPA bot generation to create bots using natural language, app summarization to create AI generated summaries to app descriptions, and Automated Test Framework (ATF) generation to create testing scenarios.

“With this release, we’re redefining how AI agents work, supercharging our workflows and integrating real time data, increasing business connectivity and elevating the customer experience,” said Amy Lokey, EVP and chief experience officer, during a media briefing. She highlighted two additional new features: service observability and self-service portals.

“Service observability: one system, total visibility. Companies juggle dozens of monitoring and observability tools; we unify them into a single source of truth,” she said. “AI-driven insights are pinpointing root causes faster. They’re assessing the business impact, and they’re resolving issues before they escalate. So we’re really excited to have this built into our platform.”

And the self-service sales and order management portals, she said, let customers place orders, configure products, and trace status, without the need for a sales and support agent.

Those features resonate with Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, who noted that ServiceNow sees an opportunity similar to the one Oracle inadvertently gave itself when it missed the first wave of public cloud and was then able to learn from the experiences of the first wave hyperscalers.

“I think ServiceNow sees a similar opportunity here in terms of the legacy universe of Salesforce customers that may have highly configured systems that are not the most functional, data that’s not been maintained and cleaned over time,” he said, noting that ServiceNow can tell those customers, ‘Let’s give you a fresh start. Let’s be able to leapfrog some capabilities that would take you years to reconfigure and re-architect in a legacy system.’

“That’s a promising opportunity for them, as well as maybe hitting the mid-market with some of that capability as well,” he said.

Service observability, he observed, is a use case ready-made for AI; it can look at signals that tend to be standardized and determine if there are anomalies.

“Then it’s pretty simple to put in rules around where you want to see variances called out, and then what likely reasons are for those variances, and even start building automated root cause analysis,” Bickley said. “That would be pretty powerful. ServiceNow also has a unique value proposition, linking maybe their IT operations management (ITOM) and their sales and order planning together for Operational Technology type of use cases.”

Salesforce, he said, doesn’t have that capability.

However, he added, customers should start small. “Clients or customers need to really consider  taking a cautious and well thought out approach to how they’re going to evaluate and deploy these technologies,” he said. When reading the promotional material, it appears that it’s ready for prime time today, but only if things like data management, clean processes, well defined use cases, and internal cross functional teams that have been built to bring these scenarios to life are in place will customers start to see some value.

“But in most cases, organizations are going to have to work towards that,” he said.