There has been an announcement regarding a substantial extension of the strategic partnership between technology companies IBM and ServiceNow. In the form of an AI-driven platform that will facilitate organizational change, the two tech leaders aim to eliminate two big obstacles to enterprise-wide AI adoption – poor data and legacy software stack.
By merging IBM’s deep capabilities in data governance, automation, and artificial intelligence with the robust infrastructure of the ServiceNow AI Platform, the collaboration seeks to help organizations transcend outdated tech frameworks. The initiative focuses on engineering collaborative systems designed to update aging architectures, enrich ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric with IBM’s enterprise data solutions, and facilitate fully autonomous IT operations. Ultimately, this allows global corporations to tap into the full, transformative potential of agentic AI.
Decades of deeply layered and complex legacy systems have historically restricted how fast businesses can implement advanced AI. Rather than forcing organizations to undergo costly and risky complete system overhauls, IBM and ServiceNow are introducing solutions that allow existing setups to evolve seamlessly, support any preferred AI model, and fully leverage the depth of buried corporate data.
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“Most enterprises have the ambition to deploy agentic AI, but lack the foundation to run it at scale,” said John Aisien, general manager and senior vice president, central product management, at ServiceNow. “IBM brings the tooling to modernize the systems and extend ServiceNow’s data capabilities; ServiceNow provides the platform to put that data to work across every workflow in the business. Together, we’re helping enterprises move from AI ambition to real, scalable outcomes.”
“AI adoption at scale requires more than access to models. It requires rethinking the systems, data and governance that support them,” said Raj Datta, general manager of ISV and AI partnerships, IBM. “Together with ServiceNow, we’re building an open, flexible foundation for AI that helps enterprises move faster while maintaining control and trust.”
The deepened relationship tightly weaves IBM’s software suite directly into the ServiceNow AI Platform, concentrating on three primary pillars of corporate innovation:
- The Modernization of Enterprise Applications: Through the use of state-of-the-art technology such as IBM Bob, Enterprise Application runtime (Java), and IBM watsonx.data, the collective solutions will analyze and modernize old frameworks. It would help companies move their outdated applications into the AI world without having to go through a full rip-and-replace approach.
- Improving Data Governance: With an enhancement in the ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric via IBM watsonx.data, the joint solutions would provide essential capabilities such as Data Quality, Master Data Management, and Observability. Together with the ServiceNow Data Catalog, joint customers could make sure that their data is optimal for AI operations.
- The Automation of Autonomous Infrastructure Operations: The collaboration between the tools such as Red Hat Ansible, IBM Bob, Instana, Hashicorp Terraform, and Hashicorp Vault into ServiceNow would allow systems to detect, contain, and resolve problems without causing disruptions within business processes.
Market rollout for these co-developed enterprise solutions is slated for the second half of 2026.
