TECHNICAL VALIDATION

ServiceNow Autonomous Service Operations

Begin Your Journey to Self-healing IT

By Justin Boyer, Senior Validation Analyst
Omdia
JANUARY 2026

Introduction

This Omdia Technical Validation details our analysis of ServiceNow’s Autonomous Service Operations solution. We validated how ServiceNow uses the power of AI agents to enable organizations to increase service operations productivity, reduce costs, and increase service resilience and business agility. ServiceNow accomplishes this while improving end-user experience and satisfaction.

Background

AI is affecting nearly all aspects of business today. Organizations are investing heavily in AI agents due to their potential ability to save time, help employees and customers, and perform more mundane tasks with accuracy and efficiency. According to research conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (now Omdia), 69% of survey respondents intend to spend $500,000 or more on AI agents over the next 12 months, with 42% planning to spend $1 million or more.
IT operations can see many benefits of agentic AI and automation, as IT has only become more complex over time. When asked about the top priorities for their organization’s adoption of AI agents, 62% of survey respondents cited IT operations and infrastructure management. Organizations believe in the transformational power of AI agents. This can be seen in research by Enterprise Strategy Group (now Omdia) research where 91% of surveyed organizations said that AI agents will improve their organization’s efficiency and automation. A further 86% reported that AI agents can streamline complex tasks and reduce manual workloads. Finally, 87% stated that AI agents will enable them to solve problems they previously couldn’t solve (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Organizations See Many Benefits to Using AI Agents

Source: Omdia

These benefits are essential for many IT operations teams that struggle to keep up with growing complexity and demand. With siloed data and tools, limited automation, and a growing number of incidents, IT operations teams struggle to resolve issues quickly while keeping employee and customer satisfaction high.

ServiceNow Autonomous Service Operations

Although agentic AI can be applied to many domains, IT service operations, the intersection of IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) functions, is one where AI can have a transformational impact. ServiceNow has developed its solutions to take advantage of these benefits, such as improving efficiency, reducing manual workloads, and leveraging data-driven insights while improving customer experience. ServiceNow uses agentic AI to automate ITSM and ITOM, using such agents to triage and resolve incidents faster, increase productivity and accuracy, and save time. ServiceNow refers to this capability as Autonomous Service Operations.

For more than 20 years, ServiceNow has developed a comprehensive configuration management database (CMDB) solution that enables customers to manage all of their various IT systems and assets. ServiceNow has taken the next step by pulling first-party data—business context from the CMDB and monitoring services—along with data from third-party sources, into the ServiceNow platform. With this context available, AI agents can perform rapid investigations by integrating with and querying several applications and bodies of knowledge quickly to determine a root cause and course of action. This context gives AI agents the knowledge and ability to proactively remediate issues. AI agents help organizations deploy innovations faster, mitigate risk, streamline product releases, and analyze data to identify opportunities for proactive improvement.
ServiceNow then uses AI agents to provide a smooth and unified employee experience with intelligent self-service. As seen in Figure 2, a typical workflow begins when an end user discovers and reports an issue with a service or application. This ticket is then assigned to the IT team. A human agent reviews the ticket and manually routes it to the correct team for troubleshooting, often after time-consuming investigation through knowledge bases or previous cases. The human agent reaches out when the resolution is complete, which is then validated by the end user. Even though ITSM helps teams prioritize tickets, it still relies on a human who needs to take breaks. Depending on the issue and other circumstances, and despite the skill of the IT teams, traditional tickets can take hours or even days to resolve.
With ServiceNow Autonomous Service Operations, the employee reports the problem using an omni-channel, unified interface, after which a triage AI agent classifies and routes the incident to the correct IT team. AI agents use Now Assist generative AI to provide the team with an incident summarization and suggested resolutions based on historical data, eliminating the lost time and productivity due to context switching by IT operations staff. Often, the AI agents automate the resolution, which can then be validated by the end user. This process can reduce the resolution time drastically, down to minutes instead of hours. Through this agentic focus, the AI agents can perform time-consuming or tedious work, freeing humans up to resolve multiple tickets more effectively. Additionally, humans remain in the loop to approve any recommendations the AI agents propose for resolution.
Figure 2. Before and After ServiceNow Autonomous Service Operations

Source: ServiceNow and Omdia

Omdia Technical Validation

IT Operations teams that embrace the power of AI agents can realize several key benefits, including increased productivity, reduced costs, and improved customer experience. Omdia explored how ServiceNow brings these benefits to bear for organizations of all sizes.

Increase IT Productivity and Reduce Costs

Omdia validated ServiceNow’s ability to increase IT productivity and reduce costs. ServiceNow’s comprehensive CMDB consolidates application data and business context across the organization. ServiceNow consolidates first-party and third-party data sources together, scanning the environment to discover IT assets, applications, and environments. In many cases, data from only one source won’t be enough to discover the root cause of issues, requiring IT operations teams to switch between various tools and logs to find where issues originate and how best to remediate them.
ServiceNow’s ITOM utilizes its comprehensive CMDB to help IT organizations gain insight into available services to provide context to issues and build a holistic view of service options. ServiceNow provides the operator with a single consolidated view into the underlying performance of the service. With visualization, ServiceNow enables faster root cause analysis (see Figure 3). This view provides the user with the necessary information to prioritize at a glance and take corrective action, including the criticality of the issue, the potential business impact, and who is responsible for the service.
Figure 3. Service Operations Workspace

Source: Omdia

Much of the data that exists within organizations is siloed, creating many challenges. Data, along with the services and applications that generate that data, often resides in silos across datasets, teams, or departments. However, the data existing within these silos could be critical in discovering root cause and remediation strategy for issues or incidents. ServiceNow’s AI capabilities work to reduce silos within IT and among functional areas within the organization by gathering the context of an issue using data from all teams and functional areas. These include IT operations, incident response, change management, security teams, compliance teams, and business and customer service teams.
IT operators can use AI agents to investigate issues and generate new knowledge base content, enhancing enterprise knowledge and continually improving data quality and results. This removes the common blockers that prevent human agents from performing effectively such as tedious manual work or context switching to find relevant incident data.
With AI agents, multiple data sources can be used to enable automated investigation and remediation efforts, resulting in significant time and money savings. However, ServiceNow never removes humans from the equation. Autonomous Service Operations balance the speed of AI agents with the technical experience and knowledge humans possess. Humans are always kept in the loop, and when humans are needed for resolution, ServiceNow’s AI agents can notify the right technical and business stakeholders and any necessary subject matter experts to review and approve recommendations.

Why This Matters

IT service management and operations is an essential business function, but many challenges can make it costly and burdensome. According to research conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (now Omdia), 71% of survey respondents indicated that identifying root cause across teams is at least somewhat burdensome and complex, with another 71% indicating that correlating metrics across tools is also burdensome. These factors increase complexity and cost for IT operations and other teams that depend on strong IT service management, such as change management, compliance, and security teams.

Omdia validated how ServiceNow’s Autonomous Service Operations solution helps organizations strategically use AI agents to save time, effort, and cost. By utilizing the strong CMDB that underlies ServiceNow’s offerings, AI agents can quickly scan multiple data sources to find root causes and recommend remediation strategies. Humans are kept in the loop at every step but no longer have to dig into multiple tools to find problems. ServiceNow surfaces service data across IT silos and helps to build a unified view of IT services and highlight where there might be production problems, helping IT teams to proactively fix problems faster than before.

Using ServiceNow, organizations can use AI to quickly gather information, understand context, and find and fix troublesome issues with efficiency and speed. Doing so saves time and costs while building a strong, cohesive foundation for IT operations to better serve the organization.

Improve Employee Experience and Satisfaction

Employees are the main customers of IT service desks. Providing an employee-friendly user experience is often a challenge due to the increasing complexity in many IT environments. IT operations teams juggle a complex technology stack, planned and unplanned changes, outages, and performance challenges. Further complexity results from a demand for new technologies like cloud and cloud-native applications that could increase business value while continuing to support legacy infrastructure, such as mainframe systems. Regardless of these challenges, employees expect ease of use, quick resolutions, and professional service that are available to them 24/7.
There is a constant push for service desks to improve their services and provide an always-on, seamless employee experience. ServiceNow answers this need by enabling a self-healing infrastructure, where employees don’t always need to submit support tickets. ServiceNow’s AI agents gather data, identify anomalies and outages, and work to resolve them before they become major issues. If employees do need help from human agents, they have access to them through a unified omnichannel experience on any device. ServiceNow combines automation, AI agents, and agentic workflows to help IT teams deliver proactive services that boost productivity while supporting employees anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
AI insights across datasets and teams provide richer context into problems, enabling AI agents to automate tasks and recommend actions, improving efficiency throughout the process. Intelligent self-service helps employees easily submit tickets, which AI agents can triage to find resolutions and even remediate without human intervention. Humans aren’t kept out of the loop, but rather, AI agents can make suggestions to human operators for approval and assist humans in finding and fixing issues. Also, IT staff can switch their focus toward challenging problems and process improvements, while AI agents handle repetitive, lower-level tasks such as resetting passwords or preparing a new laptop for employees.
Figure 4. Employee Center

Source: Omdia

Increase Service Resilience and Business Agility

Ensuring service uptime and reducing and preventing outages are some of the most important IT responsibilities. Autonomous Service Operations is designed to enable organizations to transform their infrastructure into a self-healing system. It does this via ServiceNow’s service-focused CMDB, which provides a strong foundation for increased services and business agility as organizations try to find better ways to service employees, find potential issues, and resolve issues quickly before they become overwhelming.
ServiceNow helps organizations to make the best use of the tools they have to provide greater context and resilience. Using ServiceNow, IT teams can find and resolve problems with a holistic view of all an organization’s data sources.
We saw an example of a frontend service experiencing inconsistent load times, indicated by end users’ rage clicks. The IT operator queried an AI agent to determine how many users were affected by this outage. The AI agent also provided root cause theories and the most likely root cause, significantly reducing the time and effort required to find and fix the issue (see Figure 5).
Figure 5. Now Assist Generative AI Helping to Diagnose Service Interruptions

Source: Omdia

ServiceNow AI agents have the context of recent changes, team ownership, active and past incidents, knowledge base articles, and service maps to help diagnose and make recommendations. ServiceNow brings together all the data necessary for several teams to work together, such as operations, security, incident management, change management, compliance, and business and customer experience.
ServiceNow brings third-party observability by integrating with tools such as Dynatrace, Datadog, Google Cloud, Kentik, and New Relic. By bringing this data into ServiceNow, the IT operator can interrogate and analyze the data in context of a particular alert. The IT operator can use these data collection tools to gain insight into what’s happening from different angles, such as application logs, performance metrics, and user monitoring. Having all this context at their fingertips enables IT operators to weigh remediation activities more accurately, understanding the potential impact of rolling back a change or other remediation strategies without leaving the ServiceNow interface. Doing this prevents context switching that slows down IT operators and leads to longer-lasting issues.
Omdia also explored ServiceNow’s AIOps 360 Overview dashboard. This view outlines how ServiceNow has impacted IT operations and provides a high-level summary of where time and cost savings have impacted the business (see Figure 6).
Figure 6. AIOps Overview Dashboard

Source: Omdia

The AIOps 360 Overview features critical metrics such as estimates of the work time saved across all critical IT processes and mean time to resolution improvements. There is also a separate categorization of automation workflows that have been triggered to help resolve issues without human intervention. Since so many different monitoring tools from across the environment are trying to create incidents, ServiceNow works to sift through these alerts to group related alerts and remove duplicates and correlate related signals, reducing the amount of alerts IT operators need to review. The AI Ops 360 Overview features a noise reduction dial to highlight how ServiceNow is actively saving time for IT operators via these powerful capabilities.

Why This Matters

IT operations teams have to deal with more complexity in addition to increasing expectations to keep up with new technologies and resolve issues quickly. According to Enterprise Strategy Group (now Omdia) research, 95% of survey respondents indicated that their IT operations team is expected to operate at least 25% faster than they did three years ago, with 54% of these organizations reporting that they need to operate at least 50% faster than three years ago and another 19% indicating that they’re expected to act at least twice as fast when compared to three years ago. Expectations for agility and responsiveness continue to rise, which is taking a toll on IT operations teams.

Omdia validated that ServiceNow can help organizations increase service resiliency, support business agility, and continue to respond to alerts and tickets with speed and accuracy. ServiceNow’s service-focused CMDB integrates with monitoring tools throughout the environment to give IT operators a clear view of root causes along with the context necessary to plan remediations. The AIOps 360 Overview provides a clear picture of how ServiceNow has helped organizations save time, reduce noise, and resolve incidents, showing a clear ROI from using ServiceNow’s AIOps capabilities.

Conclusion

IT operations have continued to become more complex as new technologies emerge, and IT infrastructure has become more distributed and challenging to manage. IT operators are challenged to provide fast, reliable, and professional service to resolve issues, whether they come from end users or automated alerts for service disruptions, while being available 24/7. Furthermore, as AI agents have become more capable, they have increased in their ability to help IT teams manage challenging environments. With 62% of surveyed organizations indicating that they see IT operations and infrastructure management as top priorities for AI agent implementation, it’s clear that many are planning to take advantage of AI agents to make IT operations run more smoothly.
ServiceNow Autonomous Service Operations is a solution designed to help IT operations become more proactive, more efficient, and less wasteful by giving AI agents controlled access to an organization’s unified data found in ServiceNow’s service-focused CMDB. ServiceNow integrates with several data sources and monitoring solutions to help provide the context necessary for IT operators to quickly diagnose and resolve issues. Powerful AI agents can perform triage and trigger automated workflows to resolve problems without human intervention as well as surface recommendations for approval by subject matter experts when necessary. All of these features provide a smooth end-user experience with self-service portals available on multiple devices.
As IT infrastructure continues to grow in size and scale, with an exploding number of endpoints, applications, and services to maintain, it’s become increasingly difficult to find root causes and resolve issues quickly. Omdia validated that ServiceNow helps IT operations teams use the power of AI automation to reduce noise, increase employee satisfaction, and increase service resiliency across the enterprise, ultimately saving time for IT operators and reducing costs for companies. Utilizing ServiceNow Autonomous Service Operations helps IT teams set up a firm foundation for a fully autonomous IT future, where organizations can build a truly self-healing infrastructure and fix issues before they have any negative impact. If your organization is looking to take advantage of AI automation to improve IT service management and operations, we recommend you seriously consider ServiceNow.

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