ServiceNow launches AI Passport to govern AI agents

ServiceNow frames the announcements around two connected problems for businesses expanding their use of autonomous AI: giving workers tools that can act across enterprise systems, and keeping those tools inside approved boundaries. The governance pitch rests on enforcement rather than visibility. ServiceNow says identifying agents and monitoring their behavior are not enough without enforceable limits on their authority, which is the gap AI Passport is meant to close by drawing on business context from ServiceNow's configuration management database, governance policies and workflow approvals.

A demonstration showed the limits in practice: a third-party customer service agent configured to process refunds below $25 let an $18 refund proceed automatically, while a $40 request was rejected at runtime because it exceeded the threshold for human review. When agents exceed their authority, ServiceNow says organizations can pause an agent by revoking session tokens, restrict access to approved tools and endpoints, or deactivate it by revoking credentials, with restoration accompanied by a recorded explanation. Nvidia Corp. is a design and launch partner, linking AI Passport with its Open Agent Safety Platform.

The EmployeeWorks updates extend the same approach into daily work through a third-generation AI harness combining reasoning, memory and connections to business systems, under administrator-defined controls. Alongside Productivity Assistants and Productivity Routines, the ToolSmith environment builds tools and integrations from natural-language instructions and is trained on more than 75,000 application programming interfaces. NTT Data Inc. is using AI Control Tower to address shadow IT and is beginning to adopt EmployeeWorks, as it works through overlapping AI tools, duplicate use cases and fragmented employee systems.