ServiceNow and Microsoft have expanded their strategic alliance with a focus on improving front office business processes. The catalyst: Microsoft Copilot and the company’s AI agents.
A strengthened relationship
More recently, the ServiceNow Now Assist integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot helped customers facilitate smoother workflows and enable self-service features in Microsoft applications. One use case cited by ServiceNow is the ability for users working in Microsoft Teams to use Copilot to access the ServiceNow knowledge base.
“With Copilot as the user interface for AI, we are ushering in a new ecosystem of AI agents that enable increased interoperability with partners like ServiceNow,” said Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Commercial and Industry Copilot at Microsoft.
“Our strong partnership and shared vision with ServiceNow provides the opportunity to help customers transform their business processes with Copilot and our agents.
With this expanded partnership, ServiceNow and Microsoft aim to address the front office with Microsoft Copilot and ServiceNow AI agents.
This collaboration leverages the distinctive capabilities of both platforms, enabling automated front-end agents to resolve customer issues in Copilot while integrating back-end workflows. As with all AI agents, the ultimate goal is to enable these two technologies to perform tasks on behalf of employees.
“A strong partnership between ServiceNow and Microsoft means customers get the best of both worlds: seamless, secure and intelligent workflows,” said Jon Sigler, senior vice president of platform and AI at ServiceNow.
“By combining our strengths, we enable organizations to harness AI and automation in ways that fundamentally change the way they work: reducing complexity, increasing productivity, and helping teams scale faster. This partnership is not just about technology; it’s about preparing customers for long-term success in a digital world.
Third Party Agent Network
ServiceNow is not the only independent software vendor (ISV) developing an agent or connector for Copilot. Recent Microsoft Ignite conference, the company announced that agents from 70 independent software vendors had been developed, many of which will be easily recognizable to customers.
For example, the Cohere Agent for Copilot uses Cohere’s advanced LLMs, along with multilingual augmented retrieval generation (RAG) and grounding technology, to provide secure, customizable access to enterprise data for rapid decision-making.
Additionally, the Workday agent in Copilot integrates an organization’s Workday and Microsoft 365 data to help managers conduct performance reviews, simplify HR tasks, and improve employee productivity.
Final Thoughts
Microsoft has certainly stepped up its commitment to agentic AI and is bringing its partners on board. The shift from employee productivity to front-office autonomy is indeed a game-changer.
Just a few years after the deployment of GenAI, we see the Top 10 Cloud Wars leader devotes the majority of its conference programming to automating tasks that, not long ago, could only be accomplished by human labor.
With its Now Platform, ServiceNow perfectly complements Microsoft’s ambitions in terms of Copilot. Not only does the platform allow Microsoft to deliver the benefits of Copilot in the back-end, but ServiceNow’s enterprise-wide reach ensures that front-office and customer engagement activities can be grouped in the same package.
