Bill McDermott opened ServiceNow's Knowledge 2026 conference with a number that framed much of what followed: the world is heading toward a shortage of 50 million workers by 2030, and despite enterprises pouring billions into AI, only 16 percent have actually embedded AI workflows across their business functions. The message was clear: AI adoption is accelerating, but turning that investment into meaningful, enterprise-wide execution remains a much bigger challenge.

The centerpiece of ServiceNow's answer is ServiceNow Otto, introduced on May 5, 2026, and now rolling out as the unified AI experience across ServiceNow's platform. McDermott's framing for it was direct: the world is moving from AI chaos to control, on a platform built to sense across the enterprise, decide the right action, act across any workflow, and secure every step along the way. Otto is where that framing turns into something an employee actually uses.

Where enterprise AI falls short

Most major software vendors ship AI inside their own applications, and each one works in isolation, unable to reach past its own product boundary to finish a request that spans departments. A copilot inside a CRM can draft an email. It cannot check whether the person asking has budget authority, chase the second approval that request needs, and close the loop in the actual system of record. That gap between a helpful AI answer and a finished piece of work is exactly what Otto is built to close.

“Otto is ServiceNow's new AI experience that turns intent into enterprise work for every person and across every workflow.”

Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Group Vice President of AI Products, ServiceNow

The pitch is deliberately uncomplicated. Employees, partners, and customers ask. Otto handles the rest, across whichever systems that request actually touches.

What Otto brings together

Otto did not appear as a single new build. It's ServiceNow folding three previously separate products into one interface.

Now Assist is ServiceNow's native generative AI, the layer that already summarizes, drafts, and categorizes inside existing workflows. Moveworks is the conversational AI and enterprise search company ServiceNow acquired for $2.85 billion, a deal announced in March 2025 and closed on December 15, 2025, the largest acquisition in the company's history. It brought a reasoning engine already wired into more than 100 enterprise systems. AI Experience is the multimodal, agentic orchestration layer ServiceNow previewed at Knowledge 2025, built to coordinate a request across systems rather than answer it inside one.

“Moveworks understood what employees needed. ServiceNow could do the work. Together, we built ServiceNow Otto, an AI experience that completes work, across any system, department, or any workflow. Employees no longer need to know where to go or who to ask. They just ask ServiceNow Otto, and it can handle the rest within the guardrails the enterprise requires."

Bhavin Shah, SVP and GM of Employee Experience and AI, ServiceNow

What Otto actually does

Four capabilities carry most of Otto's workload today.

Conversational AI is the core interface. Plain-language requests come in through chat, and Otto works out the intent, maps it to the right workflow or agent, and executes it end to end. Ask for access to a system and Otto doesn't forward a ticket into a queue. It checks the role, routes the approval, and confirms once access is granted.

Enterprise Search pulls answers from documents, wikis, databases, and internal knowledge sources, personalized to whoever is asking. The difference from a standard search bar is that Otto doesn't hand back a list of links to read. It hands back the answer, already in context.

AI Voice Agents handle natural-language conversations in multiple languages, without a menu tree or a hold queue, running through the same intent and execution layer as text. For service desks and contact centers, this is where the shift is most immediate.

AI Data Explorer lets anyone query enterprise data in plain language and get a structured answer back, no analyst or report-builder required.

What ties the four together is memory. Ask something through chat in the morning and pick it back up over voice in the afternoon, and Otto doesn't make the person explain themselves twice. Context follows the person rather than the channel, and updates arrive on a monthly release cadence rather than sitting inside a slower annual cycle.

Governed by design, not by afterthought

Autonomy without an audit trail is not something regulated industries can accept, and ServiceNow built Otto around that constraint from the outset rather than adding it later. Every routing decision and every workflow Otto triggers runs through AI Control Tower, which Bardoliwalla frames around five jobs: discover what AI is running across the business, observe how it behaves, govern it against policy, secure it, and measure the impact it's having.

That governance layer gained real depth alongside Otto's launch. ServiceNow's acquisition of Traceloop brought runtime observability into how agents actually reason, not just what they output. Its acquisition of Veza brought identity governance detailed enough to catch a permission change on a model and automatically trigger a re-scoping workflow. An earlier acquisition, Armis, extends that same governance into physical and operational technology rather than software systems alone. As Bardoliwalla put it, this replaces the periodic manual audits most enterprises still rely on with something closer to watching an agent think in real time.

For any organization operating under GDPR, or navigating the data residency and sovereignty requirements that shift from one European or Gulf jurisdiction to the next, this is the detail worth reading past the launch headlines for. Otto's autonomy isn't sold separately from its audit trail. Every action it takes traces back to the policy, permission, or approval chain that allowed it to happen.

Where Otto stands, and what it costs

Otto is not everywhere in ServiceNow yet. As of Knowledge 2026, it's live inside ServiceNow EmployeeWorks and AI Control Tower, with the company committed to extending it across the rest of the product portfolio through the remainder of the year, building on the Australia and Brazil release.

The commercial model shifted at the same time. On April 9, 2026, ServiceNow retired its five legacy licensing tiers (Standard, Pro, Pro Plus, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus) and replaced them with three AI-native ones: Foundation, Advanced, and Prime. Now Assist, Moveworks, Workflow Data Fabric, and AI Control Tower are bundled into every tier rather than priced as separate add-ons. What changes moving up the tiers isn't whether AI is present. It's how much of a workflow it's allowed to finish without a person in the loop, moving from assisted work in Foundation, to agentic multi-step automation in Advanced, to fully autonomous completion through the Autonomous Workforce in Prime.

For any organization already licensed for Now Assist or running on the AI Platform, that matters immediately. Otto is less a new purchase decision than a new interface arriving on infrastructure already being paid for.

Proof, not just a launch

ServiceNow named Booking.com, Honeywell, PayPal, and the NHL among the organizations already running results through the platform Otto now sits on top of. Booking.com, headquartered in Amsterdam and running one of the largest customer service operations in European travel, is a genuinely useful reference point for any enterprise in the region weighing whether this holds up outside a US keynote stage.

Siemens offers a similar signal closer to home for much of Europe. At the German engineering group, conversational AI now delivers IT support and internal communications directly to employees, cutting into the administrative back and forth that used to eat into the working day. Elmar Spreitzer, head of IT Digital Foundation at Siemens AG, described the shift in plain terms: bringing conversational AI directly to employees removed administrative friction and freed the workforce to stay focused on the outcomes that actually matter to Siemens customers.

ServiceNow EmployeeWorks, which brought Otto's conversational capabilities to customers ahead of the wider rollout, closed six deals in its first month, each exceeding $1 million in net new annual contract value. That's the clearest early signal that the completion problem, not just the conversation problem, is what customers are actually paying to fix.

Otto against the field

Otto is not the first attempt to make conversation the interface for enterprise software. Microsoft has Copilot. SAP has Joule, which matters directly to the large share of European enterprises running SAP alongside ServiceNow. Salesforce has Agentforce. Each is chasing a version of the same idea: employees should be able to describe what they want rather than click through a menu to get it.

ServiceNow's case for Otto rests on execution rather than conversation. Putting a chat window in front of a large language model isn't difficult for any vendor with the budget to try it. Owning the approval chains, permissions, and cross-system workflows a request actually has to pass through to get done is a different, much older kind of asset. ServiceNow's argument is that Otto works because the platform underneath it has been running those workflows for close to two decades already. Whether that holds up against SAP or Microsoft in a specific estate is something worth testing against real workflows, not taking on faith from a keynote stage.

What your instance needs before Otto arrives

Otto's routing decisions are only as good as the data, workflows, and permissions it's routing against. A fragmented data model, undocumented approval chains, or years of workflow customization built without governance in mind don't become coherent just because a conversational layer sits on top of them. Otto will surface whatever is underneath it, confidently, whether that foundation is actually ready or not.

That's the work worth closing out now, before Otto reaches every corner of an instance. It means a clean, validated CMDB and data model Otto can actually trust. It means workflows that are documented and owned consistently across business units, rather than reinvented country by country, which matters more for organizations running a single instance across several European or Gulf markets than it does for a single-country deployment. And it means AI governance policies that exist before an agent is asked to act autonomously, not stitched together after something has already gone wrong.

FAQs

What is ServiceNow Otto? Otto is ServiceNow's unified AI experience, announced at Knowledge 2026. It combines Now Assist, Moveworks, and AI Experience into one interface that understands a request in plain language and carries it through to completion across ServiceNow's connected systems.

How is Otto different from Microsoft Copilot or SAP Joule? All three are chasing conversation as the interface for enterprise software. ServiceNow's distinction is that Otto sits on top of workflows, approvals, and permissions the platform has run for close to two decades, rather than a chat layer built to sit beside applications it doesn't own end to end.

Does Otto support the data residency requirements we operate under across Europe and the Gulf? Every action Otto takes runs through AI Control Tower, which enforces policy and produces an audit trail regardless of jurisdiction. The specific residency and sovereignty configuration still has to be set up correctly on your instance, and that setup is worth validating before rollout rather than after.

What happens to our existing Moveworks or Now Assist licenses? Otto isn't a separate purchase layered on top. Now Assist, Moveworks, Workflow Data Fabric, and AI Control Tower are now bundled into ServiceNow's Foundation, Advanced, and Prime tiers as part of the April 2026 licensing change, so organizations already paying for these components are largely paying for the infrastructure Otto runs on.

When will Otto reach the rest of the ServiceNow portfolio? Otto is live today inside ServiceNow EmployeeWorks and AI Control Tower. ServiceNow has said it will extend Otto across the full product portfolio through the remainder of 2026.

What should we fix in our instance before rolling Otto out? A validated CMDB and data model, documented and consistently owned workflows across business units, and AI governance policies that exist before an agent acts autonomously rather than after something goes wrong. Otto routes against whatever is already configured, so a fragmented foundation produces unreliable results no matter how capable the conversational layer looks in a demo.

If you're evaluating ServiceNow, already running it, or trying to work out whether your instance is ready for what Otto expects underneath it, that's a conversation worth having early. Reach out to EnableNow to talk through what an Otto-ready ServiceNow instance actually looks like for your organization.