ServiceNow on Thursday introduced Autonomous Workforce, a platform of AI “specialists” designed to execute specific enterprise work, to move beyond providing enterprises with generic AI agents that can perform only one task to an AI co-worker that does the job from start to finish.
Autonomous Workforce is different from agentic AI systems, according to the platform-as-a-service and IT self-service vendor.
The team of AI specialists goes beyond completing individual tasks to performing all the duties of an entry-level worker. ServiceNow’s first specialist, called the L1 Service Desk AI specialist, will be available to customers in the second quarter. The L1 Service Desk specialist can help resolve detected workplace technology incidents. It can diagnose the problem, determine the right course of action, and close the incident.
“These AI specialists leverage enterprise knowledge, historical data and proactive mediation workflows to deliver consistent and accurate resolutions,” said John Aisien, senior vice president of product management at ServiceNow, during a media briefing. “Because they’re not sentient, they never sleep. They don’t go to the bathroom; they operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.”
Autonomous Workforce reflects the maturation of AI co-workers and the prospect of displacement facing entry-level white-collar workers amid the introduction of new AI tools. The evolution of the AI co-worker began with Microsoft Copilot and grew as AI agents became more popular. The introduction of the open source framework OpenClaw and the instant popularity of Anthropic’s Claude Cowork plugins for professional fields are also examples of this growth.
The Opportunity
With the rapid advances in agentic workers, SaaS providers such as ServiceNow see an opportunity to expand and provide the next level of AI co-worker: one that goes beyond performing a single task well to effectively handling all the duties of a job role effectively, without the need for human intervention.
“Legacy SaaS players realize that there is competition coming from others in the market, if not to displace them, certainly to be deployed on top of their platform,” said Keith Kirkpatrick, an analyst at Futurum Group. He added that one way SaaS platforms are working to mitigate that risk is by deploying their own autonomous agents and demonstrating that they can better understand organizations’ workflows than new entrants.
ServiceNow is not the only SaaS vendor displaying its expertise in understanding organizations’ workflows. Salesforce on Thursday launched Agentforce for communications, a group of prebuilt AI agents for the telecom industry.
The Challenge
While the SaaS vendors can take advantage of their expertise, execution might be difficult. While Autonomous Workforce and AI specialists may sound appealing, enterprises looking to integrate the technology into their workflows might not be able to do so easily, Kirkpatrick said.
“It’s probably not as simple as just sort of doing a quick implementation and boom, they’re going to work perfectly,” he said, adding that ServiceNow will need to deploy engineering resources to help customers get AI specialists off the ground.
While it is likely that ServiceNow can help implement AI specialists, enterprises considering the technology will need to ensure they have a strong data structure that feeds the system correctly.
Also, irrelevant data can affect how a service desk specialist, for example, resolves a problem without human intervention.
Other than the Autonomous Workforce, ServiceNow revealed it has added EmployeeWorks, a conversational tool from agentic AI platform developer Moveworks that connects conversational AI chat with enterprise search. EmployeeWorks follows ServiceNow’s acquisition of Moveworks in March 2025. EmployeeWorks can be used in Teams, Slack, or any browser, ServiceNow said.
