Cisco joins ServiceNow Control Tower Alliance as founding member

Cisco and ServiceNow are not starting from scratch. The two companies expanded their partnership in April 2025, and two Cisco AI Defense integrations from that work are already listed on the ServiceNow Store. One feeds the AI assets Cisco discovers into a customer's Control Tower inventory; the other routes AI security detections into ServiceNow AI Security Exposure Management, where teams assign owners and track fixes. Cisco describes AI Defense as the source of security insight and protection, with ServiceNow acting as the system of action for governance and remediation.

The Alliance adds a shared-standards layer on top of that. Partners build on the Super Intelligence Control Tower, must stay compatible with ServiceNow releases, and pass qualification, certification, and integration testing before listing. They also align with ServiceNow on how joint solutions are sold and supported. Cisco says it will bring its research experience to the Alliance's shared standards, starting with safety guardrails. That experience includes founding membership in MITRE ATLAS, membership in the NIST AI Safety Institute, and contributions to the OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications.

The practical gap Cisco is targeting is context. A standalone security tool can flag a risky model or an agent that might leak data, but it cannot say which business service is affected, who owns the fix, or how urgently it matters. With agents, models, datasets, and MCP servers arriving from many clouds and vendors, that gap grows alongside the inventory. Cisco's pitch is that Control Tower customers can close it now rather than after a future release.