Companies are starting to deploy AI agents. However, if organizations plan to deploy agentic ecosystems at scale and improve employee acceptance, they might consider treating AI agents as tools working in the background to avoid intimidating employees who think they need to know how to use these tools.

Dorit Zilbershot, vice president of AI and innovation at ServiceNowtold VentureBeat that employees don’t need to know if teams of AI agents are working in the background.

“There’s so much AI around us that we’re not even aware of it, and that’s how we think about AI agents in ServiceNow,” Zilbershot said. “It should just work.” As an employee, I shouldn’t care if AI agents are in the background.

Zilbershot said employees become “managers” of AI agents in the sense that they simply have to do their regular jobs. Agents are automatically triggered to complete tasks.

Businesses started adopt AI agents and explore how to deploy them at scale, even when deploying generative AI in businesses declined slightly. Zilbershot said ServiceNow’s agent platform, Now Assist, is the company’s “fastest growing product to date.” Now help launched an AI agent library for customers in September.

AI agents could ideally automate many workflows. This might include sales or product roadmaps, where one agent may encode customer information, another categorize it, and yet another notify an employee of a status change. Zilbershot said agents don’t replace human employees, they take work away from them, so the only time humans need to pay attention to an agent is if there is an agent who is supposed to interact with them.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told VentureBeat in a separate interview that generative AI, particularly applications around agents, “has grown beyond our expectations.”

“We master workflow and governance, and we train agents who solve unique problems,” McDermott said. “AI will be present in all our products.”

As AI agents gain popularity, Zilbershot said companies need to understand what makes agents work for their organization and their employees.

Agents, not assistants

Beyond AI agents working quietly in the background, Zilbershot said it’s critical for organizations to understand that agents are not assistants. Otherwise, they risk making users expect them to learn how to incentivize agents instead of letting them work for them autonomously.

“I think we do our customers a bit of a disservice when agents function more like assistants, but we’re not changing the name,” Zilbershot said. “It just creates a false perception in the market and how people think about working with agents.”

Zilbershot added that AI agents work best when there are other agents with which they can interact. Thus, to manage the expected proliferation of agents, orchestrator agents must be deployed to manage all agents. ServiceNow delivers an orchestrator agent with its Now Assist platform.

Other companies have begun offering businesses access to use orchestrator agents and create custom AI agents. Crew AI Launch an agent platform this month, while Asana released a creative agent specifically for workflows.

Partnership with Nvidia

To grow its agent ecosystem, ServiceNow announced that it will begin building ready-to-use AI agents using NvidiaThe NIM agent plan.

Zilbershot said using the NIM Agent Blueprint helps ServiceNow create more agents at the volume it deems necessary to make agents more efficient.

“We are expanding our ecosystem because there may be a limit to what we can build on our own; we want to build a strong partnership with companies like NVIDIA to build native AI agents within the ServiceNow platform,” she said.

The first agent that ServiceNow will build with Nvidia is a vulnerability scanning agent for Container Security AI. The agent will automate vulnerability scanning and will be available on ServiceNow’s agent platform in 2025.

Zilbershot said the work with Nvidia would be just the first of many possible partnerships ServiceNow would enter into to develop AI agents.