ServiceNow adds verifiable AI agent identities alongside new automation tools

ServiceNow is giving employees more ways to automate work while introducing credentials meant to keep AI agents within their authority. Its October 15 announcement pairs AI Passport, which defines agents’ identities and permissions, with new EmployeeWorks assistants and development tools. The distinction is availability: the automation enhancements have controlled access now; key governance features are still scheduled for delivery.

Permission checks while the agent works

AI Passport sits inside the governance platform ServiceNow has renamed Super Intelligence Control Tower. It is a cryptographically signed credential—a digitally verifiable record—designed to identify an agent, its accountable owner, permitted actions and accessible systems. ServiceNow says the credential can travel across tools and vendors, with permissions checked as work executes.

A ServiceNow demonstration described by SiliconANGLE made that boundary concrete. A third-party customer-service agent was authorized to process refunds below $25, with unrelated capabilities disabled. An $18 refund went through automatically. A $40 request was rejected at runtime because it crossed the threshold requiring human review.

The proposed response is not simply an on-off switch. Organizations can pause agents by revoking session tokens, restrict their tools and endpoints, or deactivate their credentials. Agents can later be restored with a recorded explanation. ServiceNow also says actions are audited, allowing teams to trace what an agent did.

ServiceNow says open specifications let other governance and identity systems issue and verify credentials for its own and third-party agents. Nvidia is a design and launch partner, connecting AI Passport with its Open Agent Safety Platform. But analyst Frank Dickson told CIO that enforcement implementation was still being built.

A passport is only as trustworthy as the office that issues it.

Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research, speaking to CIO

More autonomy for everyday work

The EmployeeWorks updates widen what employees can delegate. Productivity Assistants can be customized for a job or business function, including their behavior, information sources and tools. Initial offerings include research, calendaring and HR-focused assistants. Administrator-defined controls govern what employees can build and access.

Productivity Routines go further, repeating background tasks without human intervention. Employees describe the work, select tools and deploy the routine. One example is preparing for a salesperson’s day by reviewing upcoming meetings, researching prospects and assembling account materials before work begins.

Developers get ToolSmith, a conversational environment for building assistant automations from plain-language instructions. ServiceNow says it was trained on more than 75,000 application programming interfaces, the connections software uses to interact. It can plan integrations, retrieve logs, suggest fixes and support testing. Developers can refine its output through the same conversational interface.

The rollout and the spending brake

• Governance: SiliconANGLE puts AI Passport, shadow AI detection and AI Cost Management later this quarter. CIO describes their expected availability as by year end.
• Automation: the new EmployeeWorks assistants, routines, underlying harness, ToolSmith and Conversations API are in controlled availability, rather than a general rollout.

Control Tower’s other additions include detection of unapproved agents, more than 400 discovery connectors, access mapping and continuous monitoring. Cost capabilities track spending by user, department and runtime. EmployeeWorks pricing combines seat licenses with bundled AI credits called assists; customers can buy additional credits.

Dickson’s concern is the difference between measuring activity and stopping it. He noted that graduated spending alerts, throttling and blocking were described in future tense. He advised buyers to assign every agent and routine an owner and budget, ask whether hard caps exist today, and check ServiceNow’s dashboards against their own invoices.