Companies are starting to deploy AI agents. However, if organizations plan to deploy agent ecosystems at scale and improve employee adoption, they might consider treating AI agents as tools that work 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 Service Nowtold 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, and that’s how we think about ServiceNow’s AI agents,” Zilbershot said. “It should work. As an employee, I shouldn’t care if AI agents are in the background.”

Zilbershot said employees become “managers” of the AI ​​agents by simply doing their regular work. Agents are automatically triggered to complete tasks.

Businesses started embracing AI agents and exploring how to implement them them at scale, even as a generative implementation of AI in businesses fell slightly. Zilbershot said ServiceNow’s agent platform, Now Assist, is the company’s “fastest growing product to date.” Now Assist released a library of AI agents for customers in September.

Ideally, AI agents could automate many workflows. This might include sales or product roadmaps, where one agent can code customer information, another categorizes it, and yet another notifies an employee of a change in status. Zilbershot said agents don’t replace human employees, they take a busy job, so the only time people need to pay attention to an agent is if there’s an agent they’re supposed to be interacting with.

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

“We’ve mastered workflow and governance, and we’re building agents that solve unique problems,” McDermott said. “AI will be in every product we have.”

As AI agents grow in popularity, Zilbershot said enterprises need to understand what makes agents work for their organization and employees.

Agents and not assistants

Beyond AI agents working quietly in the background, Zilbershot said it’s critical for organizations to understand that agents are not assistants. If not, it risks setting users an expectation that they will have to learn how to request agents instead of letting them work for them autonomously.

“I think we’re doing a little bit of a disservice to our customers when the agents function more like assistants, but we don’t change the name,” Zilbershot said. “It just creates the wrong perception in the market and how people approach working with agencies.”

The AI ​​agents added by Zilbershot work best when there are other agents they can interact with, so to handle the expected expansion of agents, orchestrator agents must be deployed to manage all agents. ServiceNow delivers an orchestrator agent with its Now Assist platform.

Other companies have started giving enterprises access to use orchestrator agents and build custom AI agents. Crew AI has been released an agency platform this month, while Asana launched a creative agent specifically for workflows.

Partnership with Nvidia

To expand its agent ecosystem, ServiceNow announced that it will begin building off-the-shelf AI agents using NvidiaNIM agent’s plan.

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

“We’re expanding our ecosystem because there may be a limit to how much we can build ourselves; we want to have a strong partnership with companies like NVIDIA to build native AI agents within the ServiceNow platform,” she said.

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

Zilbershot said working with Nvidia will be just the first of many possible partnerships ServiceNow will forge to expand AI agents.