“Today, they rely on ServiceNow to be their AI control tower for business reinvention,” said ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott in a recent press release on the company’s Q1 2026 earnings. “Customers trust our platform because we integrate with any model, cloud, interface, data, and system they choose to deploy. As new technologies create both opportunity and risk, our two decades of engineering combined with deep business context enable us to orchestrate and secure the agentic enterprise.”
Knowledge 2026 attendees should expect more vision and clarity from McDermott’s opening keynote, titled “Welcome to Agentic Business,” which promises they will “see how the world's leading companies are moving from AI chaos to control.”
A Peek Under the Hood of ServiceNow’s Platform Improvements
While McDermott’s keynote, which includes special guests such as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, is all about setting the vision for agentic workflows, ServiceNow President, Chief Product Officer and COO Amit Zavery’s keynote, titled “The Blueprint for Agentic Business,” scheduled for day two of the conference, is all about getting into the nuts and bolts of feature and technical improvements. The session description promises that attendees will learn “how ServiceNow brings together your data, AI, workflows, and security to build and scale AI you can trust. This is the engineering behind the AI platform that executes.”
In a recent press release, Zavery laid out the company’s aspirations for incorporating AI in its product at a foundational level: "ServiceNow is redefining how companies realize value from AI, with the capabilities required for enterprise scale. From Context Engine's enterprise intelligence to data connectivity, governance, and execution, everything is included by default, all operating inside the flow of work, and open to the tools developers already use,” he said.
While the keynote will feature company leaders and partners such as Google talking about noteworthy product updates and announcements, there will be plenty of opportunities for IT professionals to get hands-on with the new tech through demos, labs and activities.
READ MORE: How businesses can build out AI strategy and governance.
One new feature attendees will probably want more support and guidance on implementing is ServiceNow’s Now Assist generative AI suite. CDW is leading a session titled “Now Assist at Full Throttle” at the conference that promises to assist customers as they learn about this new offering from the company.
The session, led by CDW Technology Strategy Lead Kelli Hoeppner, promises to guide attendees through the journey, according to the session abstract: “Through one early-stage deployment story, we examine the dependencies that determine whether AI accelerates value or exposes gaps in data, knowledge, and process. If you are beginning your Now Assist journey, this session provides a practical starting framework to help you move confidently from activation to sustained performance.”
Here are a few other compelling demos and hands-on lab sessions Knowledge 2026 attendees can attend:
- Agentic Workflows in Action: Smarter Automation on the Now Platform
- Deliver an AI-Powered Employee Experience From Hire to Retire
- AI Control Tower Challenge
- Flow Like a Pro: Master Real-Time Data to Build Flows That Work
Real Customers, Real Use Cases and Real Results
One of the most compelling things about the way that ServiceNow’s Knowledge conference is structured is that so many of the sessions are built around the stories and use cases of real customers talking about their actual results from using the platform.
Attendees across a wide variety of industries — including retail, manufacturing and healthcare — can find sessions that align with their industry-specific needs or challenges.
For example, financial services organizations can look forward to learning from Huntington National Bank on how it has successfully integrated AIOps in the session titled, “Unlocking Predictive IT Operations Through Data-Driven AIOps Adoption.”
Here’s a teaser from the session description:
“In our mission to modernize IT operations, Huntington reimagined monitoring as a predictive, data-driven ecosystem. By integrating AIOps with intelligent metrics, anomaly detection, and adaptive thresholds, we turned fragmented monitoring into proactive insight. This foundation now evolves toward Agentic AI — where systems learn, adapt, and act autonomously — creating a resilient, scalable model that delivers faster, smarter, and self-healing IT operations across the enterprise.”
Attendees should filter sessions based on their target industry to home in on the most relevant customer stories and cases studies for their professional development and ongoing education.
EXPLORE: How AI is transforming physical security.
Stay Tuned for More News and Coverage From Knowledge 2026
The BizTech team will be on the ground covering the most interesting and noteworthy announcements and conversations coming out of Knowledge 2026. We’ll be speaking directly with IT thought leaders on the news coming out of the conference as well as getting their point of view of how AI (specifically, AI agents) are reshaping how they and their organizations think about digital transformation, workflow automation and enterprise service management.
For those looking for a good primer ahead of the conference, be sure to check out our recent coverage from NVIDIA GTC 2026. Not only is that conference one of the leading AI conferences in the tech industry, but because NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will be featured as part of McDermott’s keynote, you can expect a lot of dots to be connected between GTC and Knowledge.
Bookmark our Knowledge 2026 conference coverage page to keep up with all of the articles and videos that we’ll be producing.
