A practical ServiceNow AI review for 2025

If you’ve spent any time working in a large company, you’ve probably come across ServiceNow. It’s the powerful engine that runs in the background, handling everything from IT support tickets to complex business workflows. Now, like pretty much everyone else, they're going all-in on artificial intelligence, embedding it directly into their platform.

But what does that really mean for the people using it every day? This practical ServiceNow AI review is here to get past the marketing hype. We’ll look at what its AI can actually do, try to make sense of the complicated pricing, and point out some of the real-world limitations. This should help you figure out if it's the right choice for your team, or if a more flexible tool might be a better fit.

What is ServiceNow AI?

First off, ServiceNow AI isn’t a single product you can just buy and switch on. It’s a collection of AI tools built into the main Now Platform, all designed to help automate business processes from start to finish. The goal here isn't just about answering questions; it's about actually getting work done.

The whole system is built on a few main parts:

• AI Agents: These are set up to be autonomous systems that can make decisions and handle multi-step tasks across different departments. For example, one could manage an IT ticket from the moment it’s created to the final confirmation that the problem is solved.

• Now Assist: This is the name for their generative AI features. It helps with tasks like creating summaries of long ticket histories, drafting email replies, and powering the chatbots that employees interact with.

• AI Agent Fabric: This is a framework that lets ServiceNow’s own AI agents connect and work with other AI tools your company might be using, pulling everything into a more unified system.

• AI Control Tower: You can think of this as a central dashboard. It’s where you can monitor, manage, and keep an eye on all the AI activity happening across the platform.

The big idea is to use AI to coordinate work across the entire business from one place, helping to break down the walls that often pop up between departments like IT, HR, and customer service.

ServiceNow AI features

So, what can the platform actually do? Its features are definitely powerful, but they feel very much designed for a certain kind of large, complex organization.

A little introductory text here before the H3 as per the guidelines. We'll explore the main capabilities one by one.

Autonomous AI agents and orchestration

ServiceNow’s vision for its AI Agents is much bigger than a simple chatbot. They are designed to be proactive systems that can manage complicated workflows without needing a human to guide them every step of the way.

The real muscle behind this is the AI Agent Orchestrator, which basically acts as a project manager for a team of digital workers. It can break down a complex event, like a major IT outage, and assign different pieces of the job to specialized AI agents. This ensures the entire process is managed from the initial alert all the way to the final resolution. For teams that want to create their own custom agents, the AI Agent Studio offers a low-code environment to build and tailor them for specific business needs.

This is a seriously impressive system for creating a digital workforce, but it's built for businesses that are already fully committed to the Now Platform. It’s not something you can just plug in and try out; it's a fundamental part of a much larger operational world.

Now Assist for generative AI capabilities

For the people working on the front lines, Now Assist is where you'll see the most immediate impact. It adds helpful generative AI features directly into an agent's daily workflow to make their jobs a bit easier.

Here are some of the key things it can do for IT service management (ITSM) teams:

• Incident and chat summarization: Agents can get the gist of a long, tangled ticket thread in seconds without having to read every single message.

• Resolution notes generation: It automatically drafts the summary of how an issue was fixed, which saves agents from the headache of writing up documentation after every ticket.

• Email reply recommendations: Now Assist can suggest replies based on the context of the conversation, helping agents respond faster and with a more consistent voice.

• LLM-based proactive prompts: The Virtual Agent can give employees and managers a smart nudge to complete tasks they might have forgotten about, like approving a request or finishing up mandatory training.

These features can save a ton of time, but their usefulness really hinges on your team living inside the ServiceNow Agent Workspace. They work by pulling context from data that already exists within the platform.

Governance and integration with AI Control Tower

For big companies, trying to manage a whole fleet of AI tools can quickly turn into a messy headache. The AI Control Tower is ServiceNow's solution. It's a single dashboard where you can oversee every AI model and agent, whether it’s a native ServiceNow tool or something from a third party.

This is backed by the AI Agent Fabric, the technology that lets all these different AI agents talk to each other. For any large organization worried about security, compliance, and preventing "shadow AI" from popping up in various departments, this is a pretty big deal. But for smaller teams or those with a simpler tech stack, this kind of central command might just feel like another layer of complexity to deal with.

ServiceNow AI pricing and packaging

This is where things start to get a bit fuzzy. ServiceNow’s AI features aren't a simple add-on you can tack onto any plan. They're bundled into specific, high-end packages, and you won't find any pricing on their website.

Here’s a simplified look at how their ITSM packages are set up, so you can see where the advanced AI tools become available.

Package Tier	Key Features Included	AI Capabilities
ITSM Standard	Incident, Problem, Change, Asset Management	None
ITSM Pro	Includes Standard + Virtual Agent, Predictive Intelligence	Foundational AI (not generative)
ITSM Pro Plus	Add-on for Pro	Includes AI Agents, AI Agent Studio, Now Assist for ITSM (summarization, resolution notes, etc.)
ITSM Enterprise	Includes Pro + Workforce Optimization, Process Mining	Foundational AI
ITSM Enterprise Plus	Add-on for Enterprise	Includes AI Agents, AI Agent Studio, Now Assist for ITSM

The main thing to notice here is the complete absence of dollar signs. You can’t find a price for these plans online. Every single package requires a custom quote from their sales team.

What does that mean for you? Well, it means you're in for a potentially long sales cycle just to get a ballpark figure. It makes the total cost of ownership hard to calculate, and it’s certainly not built for teams that need a predictable monthly budget to work with.

The potential downsides of ServiceNow AI

ServiceNow AI is a beast, but it comes with some significant trade-offs. Here are a few important limitations to think about before you jump in.

The implementation and complexity challenge

Let's be clear: the ServiceNow platform is an enterprise-grade machine. It's incredibly powerful, but it also demands a lot of setup, configuration, and, often, help from professional consultants to get it running properly. This is a platform that gets implemented over several months, not a tool you install on a Friday afternoon.

This isn't something you can easily trial and launch over a weekend. For teams who need a more nimble, self-serve tool, platforms like eesel AI are designed to go live in minutes, not months, with no mandatory demos or sales calls required. You just connect your help desk, point it to your knowledge sources, and you can start automating support right away.

The all-or-nothing platform approach

ServiceNow AI's biggest strength, its deep integration with the core platform, is also its biggest weakness. You only get the full benefit when your entire workflow, from ticketing and knowledge bases to HR processes, is running inside the Now Platform.

If your team is already working efficiently on another help desk like Zendesk or Intercom, moving everything over to ServiceNow is a massive undertaking that involves huge costs and can disrupt your whole business. A more realistic approach for many is to add an AI layer that works with the tools you already have. For example, eesel AI's solution for ITSM plugs right into your existing help desk and unifies knowledge from scattered sources like Confluence and past tickets, without forcing you through a painful migration.

Opaque pricing and unpredictable costs

I know we already touched on this, but it's a big deal. The lack of straightforward pricing is a major roadblock for any team that needs to manage a budget. The "request a quote" model makes it tough to forecast your expenses and always leaves the door open for unexpected costs down the road.

This can be a real barrier for teams that need to know what they're spending each month. In contrast, solutions like eesel AI have clear, public pricing with flexible monthly plans and no sneaky per-resolution fees, so you always know exactly what you'll pay.

Is ServiceNow AI right for you?

So, what's the verdict? ServiceNow AI is an incredibly powerful and complete platform for large enterprises that are already deeply committed to the ServiceNow ecosystem. If your main goal is to automate complex, cross-departmental workflows and you have the budget and people for a major implementation project, it’s probably one of the best options out there.

However, it is not a good fit for teams looking for a fast, simple, and flexible AI tool that can work with their current setup. The platform lock-in, the complexity of getting started, and the mysterious pricing model are big hurdles for any organization that values speed and agility.

This independent review provides an overview of ServiceNow, including its pros and cons.

If you need powerful AI automation that can improve your current help desk, bring all your scattered knowledge together, and be up and running this afternoon, then a full platform migration isn't your only choice. Take a look at how eesel AI can bring immediate value to your IT support team without all the heavy lifting.