48 INTERVIEW Silvio Bessa explains how Microsoft’s alliance with ServiceNow is bringing governance to the age of AI agent sprawl – and why the next year will see users, not software, calling the shots Gartner forecasts that 40 per cent of enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents by 2026, up from less than five per cent in 2025. But speed of adoption is only half the story. The analyst also predicts that over 40 per cent of agentic AI projects are at risk of cancellation by 2027, citing inadequate risk controls as one of the key reasons why. For the executives arriving at ServiceNow’s recent Knowledge 2026 event, the tension between the pressure to deploy and the need to control is the defining challenge of the moment. Ashlea Miller, senior manager of executive and employee communications and marketing at ServiceNow, sat down with Microsoft’s Silvio Bessa, who leads the global partnership between the two companies, to explore the evolution of the alliance and understand why the enterprises that master AI governance now will be the ones that define what a frontier firm actually looks like in the future. The partnership between Microsoft and ServiceNow has been evolving for years. Can you tell us how? ServiceNow is a particularly strategic partner for us at Microsoft. We believe in the strategy, we believe in where ServiceNow is going as a company – and Microsoft wants to be part of that. The partnership has moved from supporting IT service management as a system of actions, through to supporting AI, and now ServiceNow’s AI control tower (a centralised governance layer for managing AI agents across the enterprise) and the governance data around that. The ServiceNow AI control tower has been a big topic of conversation at this event. What does it do for customers when you combine it with Microsoft Agent 365? Every customer comes to AI with a different context, landscape and set of regulatory pressures. That results in a lot of AI chaos – customers deploying agents everywhere, from a simplistic business process through to an entire chain. This needs to be governed. We need some sort of AI governance to ensure security, AI robustness and loyalty to the data. When combined, Agent 365 and the AI control tower provide that end-to-end capability – the system of intelligence meeting the system of actions. Microsoft also talks about ‘frontier firms’ – human-led organisations where agents are doing a lot of the work. What does that look like in practice? Right now, organisations aren’t just managing people, they are managing people and agents. If we look back a year ago, we were talking about simple chatbots. Today, agents are primarily activating business processes and doing the work itself. Frontier enterprises are those that will engage with AI to transform their business model, to expedite and provide more customer satisfaction. Each company has a different journey to the frontier, but they all have a north BY ASHLEA MILLER A new era of enterprise AI “ We believe in where ServiceNow is going as a company – and Microsoft wants to be part of that”
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