ServiceNow Knowledge 2026: Enterprise AI Implementation Needs Guardrails and Control

With Great AI Power Comes Great Responsibility

The promise of agentic AI is exciting, but McDermott and other ServiceNow leaders gave equal weight to the risks of enterprise AI that is implemented without governance, guardrails and safety first.

“Governance isn’t a feature, it’s the whole ballgame. Because without it, your whole company could come down,” said McDermott.

“Today, agents are being deployed with no identity, audit trail or compliance posture. But look at the world today — let's be realistic, people — cybercrime is the third-largest economy behind the United States and China. It's a trillion-dollar-a-month problem. The more you deploy, the more you expose. Intelligence without rules and rails is a dangerous blind spot,” he added.

This AI blind spot  is why the company is so bullish on its AI Control Tower, which is a centralized administrative hub and oversight application that is now part of ServiceNow’s standard AI-enabled product portfolio.

“AI can do so much for your business. It’s equally important to ask yourself what AI will do to your business,” said Amit Zavery, president, chief product and operating officer at ServiceNow.

“AI Control Tower also allows you to govern and secure your AI. There are thousands of new standards and regulations emerging every year nowadays, and so AI Control Tower automates the full governance lifecycle, from intake and risk assessment to compliance mapping. It also detects hallucinations, bias, toxic content, leakage and drift while AI is running,” he added.

FedEx Goes All in With ServiceNow, Enterprise AI at Scale

As more businesses have embarked further into the digital age, it has meant a move away from the physical realm in many instances. But for FedEx, which like many logistics companies has seen a boom in business as e-commerce has become more common, digital technology will always be the supporting character in its world as packages, people and products remain central to its mission.

“On a daily basis, we move 18 million packages around the world, passing [through] 220 countries and territories. This means working together across our global network to find the best routes and the most efficient processes,” said Vishal Talwar, chief digital and information officer for FedEx.

McDermott brought out FedEx during the opening keynote at Knowledge 2026 to impart lessons learned from the company’s journey with ServiceNow and enterprise AI.

But just because the business remains rooted in the physical world, that doesn’t mean that digital technology and AI can’t improve how things work.

“If you think about the global supply chain, there’s a lot of inefficiency. There’s $1.8 trillion of inefficiency in global supply chains, and we want to move up that value chain to orchestrate global supply chains, even if it moves outside of FedEx,” said FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam.

READ MORE: Four ways manufacturers can protect their supply chains from cyberthreats.

The logistics company has embraced ServiceNow’s vision of enterprise AI that is interconnected and scalable, but done in a responsible, secure and trustworthy manner.

“We’re leveraging ServiceNow’s capabilities to help us build a digital backbone on how we run as an enterprise across finance, HR, legal, across procurement and technology. We execute 5 million ServiceNow workflows across three critical processes: hire-to-retire, service-to-pay and ship-to-collect. With ServiceNow, we are building an AI Control Tower to make sure that we responsibly introduce this capability inside our environment,” said Talwar.

While startups can get away with a “move fast and break things” mindset, that’s not a philosophy that works for FedEx — or for many large, established enterprises. The trust that customers place in its reliability and accuracy are core tenets of its value proposition that a sloppy implementation of enterprise AI could erode.

“For a company like FedEx, where our brand has been synonymous with trust for the last 50 years, there is no room for error,” said Talwar. “As we undergo our digital transformation to make supply chains smarter for everyone, as Raj just highlighted, we’re ensuring that trust and security is engineered into every facet of this transformation from the start.”

The experience of further integrations with digital transformation and enterprise AI have forged a deep, connective bond between the two leaders at FedEx, underscoring just how influential IT leaders are becoming in business decision-making.

“I think the role of any business is technology, and technology is business. So, whenever we talk about any strategic thing, especially in the world of FedEx and where we are headed now, the CDIO, and Vashal [Talwar] in particular, is my thought partner; he’s my strategic partner from a business-angle point of view,” said Subramaniam.

NVIDIA CEO Dubs ServiceNow the ‘AI Enterprise Operating System’

Executive presence is useful in pumping up a room full of IT professionals about new product features and announcements. So, McDermott decided to double up on his executive star power by inviting NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to the stage to discuss how the companies have joined forces as they both embrace the agentic AI age.

“I said two years ago that ServiceNow is essentially the AI enterprise operating system, and that is really coming true,” said Huang. “You started out being the human operating system for enterprise, and so now you’ve got the AI agentic operating system as well.”

While the two companies are indeed partners, NVIDIA is actually itself a customer of the ServiceNow platform.

“Of course, we use ServiceNow to support all of our employees,” said Huang. “We’ve cut the amount of interaction with any employee intervention, any employee support issue, by two-thirds. Two-thirds of the time, it no longer needs any human to support it. All of the chatbots and all of the Q&A and questions that our employees have are now backed by ServiceNow, and behind it is an NVIDIA AI called AI-Q. And so, we’ve been working together on this platform, and it’s becoming more and more agentic.”

The productivity NVIDIA is seeing by deploying ServiceNow and its AI-enhanced features is allowing employees to be more productive in ways that are resulting in promising gains for the company. Those gains, in turn, are raising the bar for what NVIDIA believes it can accomplish.

“I’ve got all of my employees now using agents, and they’re busier than ever. And the reason for that is because now they’re freed up, elevated, to go solve the problems they want to solve, pursue ambitions like you’ve never known before,” said Huang. “Our expectations are sky-high now. What used to take months, we think should take days. What we thought could take years we now believe we can get done this month.”

Attendees gathered at Knowledge 2026 are hoping to walk away from the sessions, panels and hallway conversations feeling similarly energized as they return to their organizations with agentic AI ambitions.

Bookmark our Knowledge 2026 conference coverage page to keep up with all of the articles and videos that we’ll be sharing.