Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: March 13, 2025
ServiceNow has announced its latest platform release, named Yokohama, which the company says leverages agentic AI to enable autonomous workflows across the entire organization. The platform’s notable features include an AI agent orchestrator, AI agent studio, and workflow innovations that enable more advanced AI agent functionality, greater service observability, and the ability to power self-service functions. Separately, ServiceNow also announced the agreement to acquire Moveworks, which will combine ServiceNow’s agentic AI and automation strengths with Moveworks’ front-end AI assistant and enterprise search technology.
What is Covered in this Article:
- New Platform Features: ServiceNow Yokohama release introduces AI agents for enterprise tasks, emphasizing scalability and rapid deployment.
- Control Tower Concept: Positioned as an AI agentic transformation hub, enabling workflows across ServiceNow and third-party systems.
- Key Enhancements: Includes over 50 new AI agent integrations, ServiceNow Studio for application development, and AI Agent Orchestrator for managing workflows.
- Service Observability: Unified monitoring and AI-driven insights to enhance issue resolution and business impact assessment.
The News: ServiceNow announced Yokohama, its latest platform release, which incorporates several new features and capabilities that are powered by agentic AI and automation technology. ServiceNow says its latest platform release is designed to highlight what it believes are key differentiators for its ServiceNow’s AI agents: enterprise readiness and scalability, immediate impact and fast time-to-value, and the ability to leverage AI to connect the entire business.
ServiceNow has positioned its platform as a “Control Tower” for AI agentic transformation, enabling workflows to be orchestrated and carried out across not only the ServiceNow platform, but across other third-party applications and systems. ServiceNow AI agents incorporate agentic workflows, an AI agent orchestrator, and various tools that are used to perform tasks and leverage the platform’s data fabric that breaks down silos, integrates applications, data warehouses, and data lakes, and provides a unified data layer for AI and automation.
The key enhancements that are incorporated in the Yokohama release include:
- New AI Agents: The Yokohama release includes more than 50 new AI agent integrations, including specialized AI agents for SecOps, change management, and other enterprise functions. New accessibility features include voice input and text suggestions, which are designed to democratize automation, improve productivity, and provide more intelligent, connected workflows across the entire enterprise.
- ServiceNow Studio: This AI-powered workspace for developers is designed to support application generation using natural language. It allows applications, workflows, and AI agents to be built in one interface. The Studio also includes features like app summarization and RPA bot generation.
- AI Agent Orchestrator: This orchestration application enables the management, governance, and performance analytics for AI agents. The Yokohama release supports multi-agent workflows across enterprise systems.
- Service Observability: The latest platform release is designed to unify monitoring and observability tools into a single source of truth and provides AI-driven insights to pinpoint the root causes of issues more quickly, thereby helping to proactively assess business impact and resolve issues.
- Self-Service Portals: Integrated with ServiceNow CRM and industry workflows, these portals allow customers to place orders, configure products, and track status, thereby reducing the need for constant sales or support agent intervention.
Separately, ServiceNow announced its intention to acquire Moveworks, a front‑end AI assistant and enterprise search technology provider. The acquisition provides ServiceNow with a more perceptive AI-based enterprise search that can be used to find fast answers to requests, automate and complete everyday tasks, and increase productivity.
Will ServiceNow’s Yokohama Release Deliver Value to Enterprises?
Analyst Take: ServiceNow is actively entering the agentic world with the latest release of its platform, Yokohama, continuing the pattern of naming new releases after cities. The latest release addresses several of the challenges that enterprises currently face in deploying AI agents, largely around ensuring that AI agents are easy to create, deploy, and manage and that they can act upon all relevant data, wherever it may reside.
The Yokohama release features AI Agent Studio, which is designed to make it simple for organizations to create and deploy AI agents. AI Agent Studio allows no code, low code, and pro code developers to build, manage, and monitor their own AI agents. AI Agent Orchestrator, which was previously announced, then enables chain agents together to create automation workflows across the enterprise technology stack.
One of ServiceNow’s key differentiators is its Workflow Data Fabric, which provides fully-governed, enterprise-wide data connectivity. This enables AI agents to work across the organization, and combined with the growing number of integrations with other enterprise software, the ability to create and manage enterprise-wide AI agents is now available. This is critical for organizations that are seeking to automate workflows that touch multiple departments and data sources.
Bringing AI Agents to Fruition Quickly
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. These out-of-the-box skills are designed to help organizations deploy AI agents quickly without significant development costs, which can hinder agent adoption, use, and ROI.
The use of voice input and text suggestion not only addresses accessibility issues but also makes it even easier and more intuitive for all users to interact with data within the system. Usability is a key driver of agent adoption, and likely will be a differentiating factor for AI agents provided by disparate vendors. This is particularly true as AI agents’ capabilities will largely be comparable as the technology matures.
Another feature incorporated into the Yokohama release is Service Observability, which is part of ServiceNow IT Operation Management (ITOM), and gives organizations a single solution to manage and act on insights across their entire observability ecosystem. The benefit of Service Observability is the ability to combine information from any source, using AI‑driven insights to identify anomalies and pinpoint root causes faster, quantify business impact, and resolve issues before they escalate, by using a single, unified AI-powered hub that is integrated with their existing platform.
Pricing and Packaging
ServiceNow explained that its goal is to encourage the adoption of AI agents, and they are part of the Pro Plus and Enterprise Plus licensing models. The company is also looking at bundled Now Assist SKUs where AI agents and agentic AI technology will be included. There is also a consumption-based component as well, where if customers exceed their allotment of credits included with their license, they can buy an additional SKU to handle additional usage.
This appears to be a solid strategy that balances the need to encourage the usage of agentic AI while ensuring that customers do not over-consume based on the price they are paying. Because ServiceNow does not own the compute resource to power the AI model training or inference tasks, a credit or SKU-based pricing approach ensures maximum pricing flexibility for generative AI and agentic AI features. If the cost of the resource declines, ServiceNow can allow a greater number of generative AI credits per license without reducing the license fee. Conversely, any increases in AI charges incurred can be offset by reducing the number of credits offered within a license or additional SKU without getting into granular pricing discussions.
ServiceNow Announces Acquisition of Moveworks
The acquisition of Moveworks is another piece in ServiceNow’s strategy of improving the way customers can interact with and access data across the ServiceNow platform. Moveworks provides improved facility around end-to-end search and self-service experience for all users across each workflow. This will enable AI agents to not only serve as autonomous, self-service tools, but as useful tools that help human workers accomplish their work faster and more efficiently.
The Impact of ServiceNow’s New Platform and Acquisition Strategy
ServiceNow has built a robust platform that has been used successfully by hundreds of enterprise customers. As such, ServiceNow AI agents are built directly into the ServiceNow platform and have access to billions of records and millions of workflows, enabling them to take action on relevant data and processes.
To compete against agentic offerings from competitors such as Microsoft and Salesforce, each of which has a large and loyal customer base, ServiceNow has to differentiate its offerings. The company has done a good job of leaning into the concept of making agentic AI easy to deploy and use. Yokohama’s pre-built agents, AI Agent Orchestrator and AI Agent Studio, are solid feature additions that address the key challenges faced by many organizations around agentic AI – getting started and ensuring a relatively fast time-to-value.
The addition of additional search and AI functionality, such as the ones added through the acquisition of Moveworks, can also be viewed as a positive for the company, which needs to take a balanced approach to innovating internally and through acquisition in order to manage costs and ensure timely integration of new features.
What to Watch:
- Watch to see whether ServiceNow’s new tools in Yokohama spur greater utilization of AI among customers, and pay attention to whether customer case stories contain solid KPIs and ROI figures.
- ServiceNow’s AI skills for developers are an interesting addition to Yokohama. It will be interesting to see whether these tools truly reduce the time it takes to deploy AI agents or if customers leverage them to allow developers to roll out agents across multiple workflows or departments.
- ServiceNow’s pricing model for generative AI is based on a seat license model plus a consumption component. It will be interesting to see how this model evolves as AI agent projects migrate from small pilots to widespread production rollouts.
- Salesforce and Microsoft are unlikely to stand still; expect them and other large SaaS players to double down around ease-of-use and time-to-value messaging to reinforce their own market positioning.
See the complete press release on the Yokohama release, as well as the news on the acquisition of Moveworks.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
ServiceNow Q4 FY 2024: Sales Outlook Falls Short on AI Adoption Focus
ServiceNow’s Q3 FY2024 Results Highlight AI-Driven Growth & Expansion
Will Agents Finally Help SaaS Vendors Drive Revenue from GenAI?
Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
