Shopify focuses on AI, data, agility in uncertain economy

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Can data, AI and agility enable merchants to navigate economic volatility and scattershot tariff policies? Shopify is betting on it.

Speaking on Shopify's first quarter earnings call, President Harley Finkelstein outlined a bevy of data and AI tools to help merchants--including a bevy of small businesses--to navigate tariffs.

For Finkelstein, economic uncertainty only highlights Shopify's data platform and AI-driven agility. "We're monitoring for potential slowdowns but our data through April shows little of that. It's still early to assess the full impact of the current environment," said Finkelstein. "We're here to help merchants of all sizes absorb change rapidly and at scale."

Finkelstein also said the goal is to make merchants more resilient. Resilience has been a common theme among enterprises.

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And to build resilience, a flywheel of commerce data goes a long way. Finkelstein said that Shopify's 875 million unique buyers on the platform give the company visibility into what consumers and merchants are doing and how both sides react to economic uncertainty. "Because of our visibility, we're learning a ton," he said.

Here's what Shopify is doing to boost merchant resilience.

Product development

Shopify shipped features focused on cross-border trade and making it easier to buy local, calculate duties and ship. These features went into production days after the US announced its tariff plan, which morphed almost daily. Shopify said that when new duties are announced most merchants can be compliant within hours. Finkelstein said the goal is to allow merchants to manage markets independently.

On the Shop app, Shopify added a feature to allow buyers to filter products by country and buy local. Since the feature has rolled out "hundreds of thousands of unique sessions" have been generated said Finkelstein.

The company also launched duty inclusive pricing so merchants can set international prices including duties for transparent processing at the start of a transaction.

Shopify also launched tariffguide.ai. This tool provides duties based on a product description and country of origin so merchants can source goods based on tariff rates.

AI first

The commerce platform company took a lot of heat for its AI-first memo, but Finkelstein said Shopify is transforming its processes with AI. Finkelstein highlighted the following efforts.

Shopify built a dozen of model context protocol (MCP) servers that make the company's work accessible to AI. "Anyone within Shopify can ask questions, find resources and leverage those tools for greater efficiency. This reflects the use of AI goes well beyond internal improvement. It supercharges our team's capabilities and drive operational efficiencies, keeping us agile," said Finkelstein.

On the merchant side of AI, Shopify overhauled its AI engine for deeper reasoning, enhancing processing of large data sets and supporting multiple languages. The AI engine powers Shopify Sidekick, the AI support copilot, for merchants as well as employees. "Our monthly average users of Sidekick continue to climb more than doubling since the start of 2025," said Finkelstein. "Now this is still really early days, but the progress we are making is already yielding some really strong results from merchants, both large and small."

Shopify also closed the acquisition of Vantage Discovery, which has technology that accelerates the development of AI multi-vector search across search, APIs, shop and storefront search.

Shopify reported a first quarter net loss of $682 million on revenue of $2.36 billion, up 27% from a year ago. Adjusted net income was $226 million.

As for the outlook, Shopify projected second quarter revenue growth in the mid-twenties percentage range. The company didn't provide an outlook for 2025.

IBM sees quantum advantage 2026, fault tolerant quantum in 2029

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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IBM said quantum computing will hit quantum advantage in 2026 starting with chemistry use cases followed by optimization and mathematical computation.

Speaking at an IBM Think keynote, Jay Gambetta, IBM Fellow and Vice President of IBM Quantum, said the industry has moved to solving problems in a hybrid way with quantum systems and classical supercomputers. The next step would be leveraging quantum computing to solve problems classical computing can't. "We believe quantum advantage will actually happen by 2026," said Gambetta. "And it's not just us. It's a community of researchers. Every month, every week new papers are put out with different examples."

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Gambetta added:

"We're going to see quantum advantage in chemistry first, followed closely by optimization. And third, there is a lot of exciting work in mathematical problems where the teams are exploring AI quantum machine learning problems that could even have an impact in AI in the future."

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna noted in his Think keynote that bigger things were on tap for quantum computing and scale will occur "in the 4-, maybe 5 year time frame."

Krishna said:

"Quantum is no longer science fiction. It's now in the realm of engineering. And when you're in the realm of engineering, the question becomes, how do you get that next step? And then these systems are going to be at a scale that is going to be truly remarkable and truly surprising."

He said IBM can bring the same engineering rigor to quantum computing that it brings to the mainframe.

"What do I mean by engineering rigor? We should stand up a quantum computer, and it runs for a full year without breaking down, without needing a room full of experts to kind of retune it after every application, and it can stay and maintain itself. People can access it with just an API. That's what I mean by the engineering rigor of making it a computer, not just a science experiment," said Krishna.

Gambetta said that "we have a roadmap to create a fault tolerant quantum computer by 2029." He said IBM will have more to say about the roadmap in the weeks ahead.

IonQ’s plan: Quantum networks extending into space

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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IonQ just keeps buying quantum networking companies. The company is determined to become a leader in quantum networking as it acquired two more companies--Lightsynq and Capella Space--to flesh out its quantum internet roadmap.

The move highlights how the money in quantum computing may revolve around the network over time. After all, there are multiple types of quantum computing systems and at some point we're going to hit the VHS vs. Betamax moment. There are superconducting quantum systems (IBM, Google and Rigetti) as well as trapped ion (IonQ and Quantinuum), neutral atom (QuEra), quantum annealing (D-Wave) and topological (Microsoft).

A quantum network moves and transmits qubits and will be necessary to connect quantum computers. Quantum internet projects have been started by the US, European Union and China that are emphasizing quantum-secure links between sites.

With its first quarter earnings report, IonQ said it was acquiring Lightsynq Technologies, a startup founded by experts in quantum memory with more than 20 patents. IonQ said Lightsynq's technology will help it build repeaters to network quantum systems over longer distances.

IonQ also said it will acquire Capella Space, which has government contracts for top-secret projects, to launch a space quantum key distribution (QKD) network. IonQ is looking to have a quantum network that extends into space.

Those two purchases follow IonQ's acquisitions of Qubitekk and ID Quantique, two companies focused on quantum networking. IonQ also recently inked a memorandum of understanding with Intellian Technologies, a provider of satellite communications antennas and ground gateway technologies. In our 2025 play-by-play of quantum computing developments, IonQ has been clearly busy.

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Terms of all these deals haven't been disclosed, but IonQ is strategically using its balance sheet with $687 million in cash and equivalents to pick up parts and patents to build an integrated quantum system. IonQ reported a first quarter net loss of $32.2 million on revenue of $7.6 million. Most pure play quantum computing companies talk in terms of backlog instead of actual recognized revenue.

On IonQ's first quarter earnings call, Executive Chairman Peter Chapman said the company is focused on its "path to tens of thousands and ultimately millions of qubits is to photonically interconnect qubits across the network to run applications across multiple QPUs acting as one large single quantum computer."

IonQ CEO Niccolo de Masi said:

"Whether on the ground or in space, IonQ solutions are poised to be there and lead. We believe our now near-boundless photonic interconnect scalability provides IonQ customers with the winning quantum computing and internet ecosystem, not just this decade, but we expect for the entire 21st century."

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The networking play

IonQ recently put Jordan Shapiro in charge of networking as President and GM of Quantum Networking. Shapiro joined IonQ in 2020 and was previously a venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates. Shapiro has spearheaded IonQ's networking shopping spree and will be in charge of developing the roadmap.

Like IonQ's approach with its quantum systems, the company is focused on business value today ahead of quantum supremacy that may take years--some would say decades. The pre-quantum supremacy world revolves around government contracts with the likes of DARPA, hybrid systems with classical high-performance computing, use cases in chemistry, life sciences, finance and engineering, and experimental projects.

While IonQ has a strong balance sheet it is competing with giants including all the hyperscale cloud giants, IBM, which has networked its quantum systems together into an offering, and a bevy of others.

The giants:

• Cisco launches quantum lab, unveils quantum networking chip
• IBM launches Flex Plan for quantum computing, aims to expand use cases
• Microsoft unveils Majorana 1, aims to scale quantum computing
• Google outlines performance of Willow quantum chip, highlights roadmap
• AWS launches Ocelot quantum chip, claims error correction breakthrough

IonQ's de Masi said networking is a way to compete with giants. He said Nvidia's rise provides a blueprint.

"Lightsynq's technology is expected to accelerate IonQ's existing photonic interconnect activities and enable our commercial systems to scale to tens of thousands and eventually millions of qubits. The Lightsynq architecture is uniquely powerful and will underwrite our quantum computing leadership for decades to come.

The parallels are strong, so I would not be surprised if in the fullness of time, Lightsynq becomes as accretive for IonQ, as Mellanox has been for NVIDIA. Equally exciting and importantly, Lightsynq's technology will also power the future quantum internet by allowing repeaters to ultimately be spaced over 100 kilometers apart."

That distance de Masi referenced also highlights how early it is in quantum system development. Nevertheless, IonQ sees itself as a quantum vendor creating an entire ecosystem.

"Quantum networking will naturally be the foundation of the quantum internet, which will be a watershed achievement in creating a worldwide ultra secure communications grid," said Shapiro.

It's early

Chapman explained the quantum networking today doesn't go more than about 20 miles. Lightsynq is part of a plan to build a repeated network that could go more than 100 miles and build from there. Space is also a factor.

"Ultimately, what you need to do and you're seeing this now in China and also the EU, is to build quantum networks in space from satellite to satellite and ultimately from satellite to ground station. And protecting that with the QKD network as well," said Chapman.

He added that IonQ's purchase of ID Quantique gives it access to real world environments since it works with South Korea's SK Telecom. Capella adds the space environment.

However, Chapman said there's a big difference between the real-world and lab. "It's one thing to get it working in a lab, it's another thing to get it working in a busy city with trucks driving over your fiber and all the rest of that," said Chapman. "So all these things are about building out the capability and making sure they work in the real world."

Today, IonQ has four quantum networks running globally for government and commercial customers, said Shapiro.

What about quantum computing?

IonQ's first quarter earnings call was notable because executives didn't talk much about the actual deployments of its quantum computing systems and roadmap. Chapman and de Masi said IonQ can focus on both networking and compute because they're converging.

" Last year, we announced that we were doing quantum networking, but it required two quantum computers to be built. We announced it as a networking project, but we actually built two quantum computers to network the two quantum computers together," said Chapman. "You're pushing the compute side so that you can do the networking."

de Masi said:

"The business's focus on quantum computing remains. We're determined to be the ultimate ecosystem there. We've expanded our ecosystem to do quantum networking, obviously organically and inorganically. The quantum internet requires pretty much all the pieces that we've assembled. You need the nodes to be computers, you need repeaters to have any kind of distance between the nodes, you need QKD to be able to actually send information securely. And you need to be able to do that as an integrated communications network on the ground and in the heavens.

We see growing opportunities in computing and growing opportunities in networking, both short-term, medium-term and long-term."

Microsoft supports Google Cloud's Agent2Agent standard

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Microsoft said it will support Google Cloud's Agent2Agent (A2A) standard in Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio.

Microsoft’s support for A2A likely means the enterprise software ecosystem will follow.

At Google Cloud Next, Google Cloud launched A2A, a communications standard that also has some big backers. A2A complement's Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP). Both standards have gained wide support quickly since vendors need their various agents to work across platforms. Anthropic created MCP as an open standard for connecting AI assistants to systems where data lives. OpenAI and a bevy of others are backing MCP.

The promise of AI agents is that they can reason, navigate work and act autonomously. As Microsoft noted in its blog, "interoperability is no longer optional” because enterprises "want their agents to orchestrate tasks that span vendors, clouds, and data silos."

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• ServiceNow, UKG integrate AI agents across platforms

Microsoft said A2A support will be in Azure AI Foundry so enterprises can build multi-agent workflows across vendors, partners and infrastructure. Copilot Studio agents will extend beyond Microsoft's platforms.

The software giant said it will contribute to A2A as well as MCP. Microsoft also joined the A2A working group in GitHub.

SAS updates Viya platform for intelligent decisioning, AI agents

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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SAS launched a bevy of updates or its Viya platform including synthetic data, tools for building and deploying AI agents, and managed cloud services. The company also launched new AI models and digital twins for manufacturing.

The news, announced at SAS Innovate, aim to position SAS more in the AI technology stack.

Here's a look at what was announced:

• SAS Viya said its SAS Data Maker, a synthetic data generator, will be generally available in the third quarter. SAS Data Maker was announced in private preview last year.
• SAS Viya Intelligent Decisioning, which will incorporate the ability to build and deploy AI agents. SAS' approach revolved around balancing LLMs with humans to determine the right levels of autonomy and governance based on tasks.
• SAS Viya Essentials, a managed cloud services offering aimed at smaller enterprises, includes a hosted version of select SAS Viya products.
• SAS Viya Copilot, a conversational assistant that's embedded throughout SAS Viya, is available in private preview with availability in the third quarter. The SAS Viya Copilot was built on Microsoft Azure AI Services.
• SAS Viya Workbench, a cloud-based coding environment, will get support for R coding to complement Python through Visual Studio Code or Jupyter Notebook. Viya Workbench will now be available on AWS Marketplace as well as Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
• The company launched new models for AI-driven entity resolution and documentations, medication adherence risk in healthcare, supply chain optimization in manufacturing and payment integrity for food assistance and tax compliance for sales tax in the public sector.
• SAS Digital Twins for manufacturing. SAS has developed enhance digital twins for manufacturers in a partnership with Epic Games.  Georgia-Pacific was cited as a customer.

AMD’s data center sales surge in Q1

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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AMD saw a data center surge in the first quarter as sales grew 57% compared to a year ago. AMD's PC chip business saw sales growth of 28%.

The chipmaker, which is playing catch up to Nvidia in AI infrastructure, reported first quarter earnings of $709 million, or 44 cents a share, on revenue of $7.4 billion, up 36% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 96 cents a share.

Wall Street was looking for first quarter AMD earnings of 93 cents a share on revenue of $7.12 billion.

CEO Dr. Lisa Su said the company's growth continued to accelerate due to "strength in our core businesses and expanding data center and AI momentum." She added that the company's outlook reflects the ability to navigate "the dynamic macro and regulatory environment." What’s unclear is whether tariffs accelerated buying of AI processors.

AMD data center business continues to shine in Q4

AMD said data center growth was driven by AMD EPYC CPU and AMD Instinct GPU sales. Client revenue was $2.3 billion in the quarter, up 68% from a year ago due to demand for Zen 5 AMD Ryzen processors. The company also closed the purchase of ZT Systems.

As for the outlook, AMD projected second quarter revenue of $7.4 billion, give or take $300 million.

AMD's Su noted that AMD's fifth-gen EPYC server chip is being adopted by multiple cloud providers including new instances at Alibaba, AWS, Google, Oracle and Tencent. "Enterprise adoption of EPYC instances was very strong in the quarter. The number of EPYC-powered cloud instances activated by Forbes 2000 enterprise customers more than doubled year-over-year, including new wins with internet-native streaming, transportation, financial services, and social media companies," said Su. 

EPYC is now deployed by all of the top 10 telecom, aerospace, and semiconductor companies, 9 out of the top 10 automotive, 7 out of the top 10 manufacturing, and 6 out of the top 10 energy companies on the Forbes 2000. 

On the AI business, Su said MI325X shipments are ramping and more than 35 MI300 series platforms are in production at service providers. 

"We are actively working with multiple customers to scale Instinct from single-node deployments to distributed inferencing clusters. Training engagements also ramped in the quarter as multiple tier one hyperscale, AI, and enterprise customers scaled Instinct GPU clusters to train internal and next-gen frontier models," said Su. "In parallel, we're making meaningful progress with Sovereign AI deployments as countries expand investments to establish domestic, nation-scale AI infrastructure."

Looking forward, Su said MI350 series is garnering customer interest with second half deployments on tap. "Looking ahead, our MI400 series development remains on track to launch next year. The MI400 series is designed to deliver leadership performance for both inferencing and training, scaling seamlessly from single servers to full data center deployments. Early customer feedback has been very positive, marking a major step forward in our Instinct roadmap and significantly expanding our AI Accelerator TAM as customers plan broader Instinct deployments to power a larger share of their AI infrastructure," said Su. 

AMD will hold an event June 12 with more details about the roadmap. 

"While we face some headwinds from the dynamic macro and regulatory environments, including the recently announced export controls for Instinct MI308X shipments to China, we believe they are more than offset by the powerful tailwinds from our leadership product portfolio," said Su, who noted that AMD took out $700 million in revenue from the second quarter guidance due to the headwinds in China.

ServiceNow, UKG integrate AI agents across platforms

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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ServiceNow and UKG, a human resources and workforce management software provider, said they will integrate AI agents across their respective platforms using Google Cloud's Agent2Agent protocol.

The announcement, made at ServiceNow's Knowledge 2025 conference, is notable on a few fronts.

• UKG has its own AI tools and UKG People Fabric will integrate with ServiceNow's AI Agent Fabric.
• The two companies will streamline tasks and workflows across payroll, workforce management and HR.
• ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott and UKG CEO Jennifer Morgan both were executives at SAP at the same time.
• For UKG, the ServiceNow partnership can give the company more exposure and reach. ServiceNow expands its HR footprint.

The integration between ServiceNow and UKG is enabled by multistep A2A that can be started and finished within either application. Each platform will also have its new agents. The news lands as ServiceNow announced its expansion into CRM.

During a keynote with Amit Zavery, ServiceNow's Chief Product and Chief Operating Officer, Morgan said UKG is already a ServiceNow customer. The goal is to connect front line workers to "the technology and insights they need."

Morgan said:

"Frontline workers feel that they're very disconnected from the enterprise, and so our opportunity is to create that single point of interaction that really connects our joint customers who are out in the field with our customers back into the enterprise. It could be as simple about a question about pay, hours and schedules. Rather than logging a ticket or figuring out how I need help, it's immediate."

Holger Mueller, analyst at Constellation Research, said:

"Enterprises want and need to use agents to achieve what matters, Enterprise Acceleration. Recreating the data islands of the past as AI agent islands is not going to achieve the transformation and deliver the return of AI that people and enterprises need. It is good to see ServiceNow and UKG partnering to provide out-of-the-box and vendor maintained agent-to-agent integration. What it will mean for the respective vendor’s agent population remains to be seen. We just heard the starter pistol for the race of the ultimate agent control plane."

As for the use cases, ServiceNow and UKG AI agents are working together as part of the AI Agent Framework.

Use cases include:

• Employee experiences including onboarding, leaves of absence, internal job changes and time off requests.
• Payroll that leverages AI agents to connect systems, end manual processes and keep pace with tax laws, regulations and wage mandates across jurisdictions.
• Industry specific agents able to forecast and optimize scheduling, absences, time management and frontline workers.

Also see:

• UKG Writes Its Next Chapter in the Future of Work

ServiceNow launches ServiceNow CRM: Aims to redefine category with platform, AI, workflows

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

ServiceNow unveiled ServiceNow CRM in a move that aims to expand its total addressable market, leverage its ability to automate workflows with AI and couple selling, servicing and marketing across multiple functional groups.

The launch of ServiceNow CRM, outlined at ServiceNow's Knowledge 2025 conference, was one of the most telegraphed launches ever. On the company's first quarter earnings call, CEO Bill McDermott made the company's CRM ambitions crystal clear. "There's not a day that passes when we don't hear from customers who are dissatisfied with their status quo," said McDermott. "For a long time, I've been saying no one has to lose for us to win. Our customers have now adjusted me. They want someone else to lose, so they can continue to invest more in ServiceNow."

Also: ServiceNow, UKG integrate AI agents across platforms

McDermott, speaking at ServiceNow Knowledge in a keynote, said that "AI is the absolute requirement for survival." "You've got to balance the audacity of the dream with new business models driven by AI so you grow for 10 years from now," said McDermott. "That's why we're going to bring AI agents to every corner of your business."

There's no need to name what vendors McDermott expects to lose in CRM, but you can connect the dots. It's obvious ServiceNow is going after Salesforce. ServiceNow is coupling lead and opportunity management, configure, price and quote, order management and fulfillment, customer service and support, field service and customer success and renewals. ServiceNow also can connect CRM across other functions, inventory and supply chain.

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• ServiceNow Yokohama release ups AI agent game

Amit Zavery, ServiceNow's Chief Product and Chief Operating Officer, said "let's face it, traditional CRM is broken. It is a patchwork of point solutions held together with duct tape and chewing gum. The result more complexity, more cost and less value."

In a briefing, ServiceNow CRM cited customers including Xerox, National Hockey League, Lumen and Kainos as well as Pure Storage. In the first quarter, ServiceNow said CRM is its fastest-growing workflow business.

The secret sauce for ServiceNow is its AI and workflow platform, which has expanded into multiple functions and use case from its IT service management days. By working horizontally across multiple data stores, ServiceNow's approach has been to connect systems, processes and workflows without needing you to move into one data store.

ServiceNow's CRM's pitch is relatively simple: Solve issues fast, adapt, run customer operations at half the cost and go live quickly. The approach is to service, sell and deliver on one platform that combines AI, data from multiple systems including inventory, contracts and operations and workflows.

ServiceNow said its CRM is aimed at a seamless experience that integrates processes and uses AI eliminate multiple screens, applications, spreadsheets and "human middleware." According to ServiceNow, CRM's limitation is that it is a system of record that ends at the front office. John Ball, ServiceNow EVP and GM of CRM and Industry Workflows, said ServiceNow can deliver "complete workflow automation from order capture through fulfillment, allowing customers to focus on value-added selling and delivering exceptional service to their own customers, not wasting time tangled up in out-of-date systems."

Differentiating with platform

ServiceNow's approach with CRM is enabled by a series of efforts outlined at Knowledge 2025 and put in place over the last two years.

The big message from Knowledge 2025 is that ServiceNow's Now Platform can be leveraged for any industry, any AI, data platform, workflow, cloud and system. Chief Innovation Officer, Dave Wright, said ServiceNow has the right to play in CRM because "we're the only company that unites AI, workflow and data on one enterprise platform."

"All our AI is delivered natively in every layer of the platform whether it's the UI, database, or automation layer, it's enterprise grade from day one," said Wright. "We can consume all the data that AI needs. We develop the workflow data fabric to be able to connect to all the data, to be able to unify it, and then be able to activate it."

This platform approach is also enabling AI agents and models on a broad level and combining to manage a digital workforce. Here’s a look.

AI Control Tower, which is a hub to govern, manage and secure any AI agent across IT, HR and CRM, model and workflow. The system covers multiple models from OpenAI, Google Gemini, Meta Llama and more, integration with AI systems from Google, Microsoft, LangChain and Amazon Bedrock. Key points about AI Control Tower include:

• Centralized monitoring of all AI systems (ServiceNow and third party).
• Ability to track AI asset adoption and usage.
• Risk and compliance.
• Value metrics to understand AI business impact.
• A single interface for different roles that oversee AI assets with data such as number of AI systems onboarded, deployment status, risk and compliance.

AI Agent Fabric, which connects agents across applications, provides interoperability and orchestrates agent workflows and data access on Now Platform and externally. Key features include:

• Dynamic layer so AI agents to communicate, coordinate and learn from each other.
• Coordinates ServiceNow and third party AI agents and external systems from the likes of Microsoft and others.
• Support for Model Context Protocol and agent-2-agent protocols and standardization of communication and partnerships with the likes of Box, Google Cloud and Microsoft.

AI Orchestrator, which was announced in January along with a broad partnership with Google Cloud. Features include:

• Ability to create teams of AI agents.
• Specialized agents across functions.
• Out of box agents for IT, CRM, HR and other enterprise workflows.

Those three capabilities, along with the data and workflow tools underneath, are powering CRM AI Agents, which are a suite of specialized agents that are designed to autonomously orchestrate and complete tasks from selling and fulfilling to servicing.

According to ServiceNow, its CRM AI Agents can do the following:

• Determine best course of action by resolving inquiries instantly, routing complex cases with full context, and managing workflows across departments.
• Start with conversational interactions to capture requests.
• Take that data and manage the fulfillment process and coordinate with humans when intervention needed.

The other enabling features behind CRM AI Agents is the broader platform as well as ServiceNow's efforts with its Workflow Data Fabric, announced in 2024. This data fabric was later enhanced with the Yokohama release. RaptorDB is also critical to the Workflow Data Fabric effort as well as connectors to multiple enterprise systems.

Zavery said the company is expanding its AI agent and workflow footprint due to its platform. He said:

"I'm here to show you exactly how we are delivering that platform to our customers and why we are different from all the AI pretenders out there. The reality is that today, AI is scattered across enterprises in silos, fragmented, disconnected, and to truly transform your business, we are bringing AI, data and workflows into the enterprise, enterprise grade platform you already rely on."

Zavery worked through AI agent orchestration, agent studio and connections to other agents from third parties via the AI Control Tower. "All others are building AI agents for their silos. Our AI agent orchestrator ensures the right agent handles the right task at the right time. It works behind the scenes, coordinating, resolving and accelerating work across the enterprise. It truly is AI intelligence built for scale," he said.