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A customer told me recently: “We’ve created a Frankenstein with ServiceNow.” I couldn’t resist a small correction. Frankenstein is the scientist. The creature never even got a name. (Yes, my wife often tells me I am a party pooper..) But the correction actually matters. The creature has no name because its creator never took responsibility for it. I see the same story on a lot of ServiceNow platforms. Plenty of people build. Every project (well.. almost) has a sponsor, a budget and a business case. But nobody is measured on what the whole platform returns. That’s how you end up paying for value you’re not getting. I call it the ServiceNow Value Gap, and it usually shows up in more than one of these forms: → Trapped value: Modules bought, licensed, delivered… and barely used. → Fragmented value: ITSM here, HR there, CRM somewhere else. Each one done properly. None of them connected into a platform. → Lost value: Customisation and technical debt. Someone pays every year to maintain a decision that was approved once, as a project. → Unrealised value: New capability nobody has the time or the standing to push. So it sits on a roadmap as “someday”. If you want the full picture, I built a short survey that scores your platform on all four. 8 questions, link in the first comment. So: which one is your creature made of?

I got confused by ServiceNow AI passport.. Wasn’t Control Tower already doing this? So I went digging. (there are so many announcements at the moment from ServiceNow, I am loosing track). Here’s what I found (minus the tech) Control Tower gives you the view of your whole AI estate: Which agents exist, what they cost, where the risk sits. It tells you what’s happening across the company. What it didn’t do was give each individual agent its own limits, enforced while the agent is working. That’s the gap AI Passport fills. The easiest way I found to picture it: → Control Tower is the HR department. It knows every employee. → AI Passport is the badge and the job description. It says what this one employee can touch, decide and approve. → NVIDIA is security at the door. It checks the badge every time the agent acts. And the passport is issued from Control Tower itself. So it fits inside what you already have, one level deeper. Take an agent handling customer refunds: → It can read orders. It can approve refunds up to €500. → It can’t open payroll. → It can’t approve €50,000 because a customer asked nicely. Until now, most of those limits lived in a policy document. Everyone just hoped the agent would behave. What leaders actually get: → Agents that can’t wander outside their mandate → A clear answer to “which agent did this, and who owns it?” → Autonomy without a human approving every single step → The confidence to move past the pilot stage My bet: the next phase of enterprise AI will be won by companies that trust their agents enough to give them real authority. The number of agents will matter a lot less. So the question now: will this contracted as a cost per passport to be renewed every x years?

World Forum Chicago last week was the first ServiceNow keynote in a long time that made me look at the platform from a completely different angle. Bhavin Shah and Jeffrey Hausman didn’t walk us through the usual workflow story. They showed AI Control Tower in action. With two new pieces right in the middle: → Armis, to see every asset. IoT, OT, cloud, code, devices. And now AI agents. → Veza, to know who (or what) has access to what. Identities, roles, permissions. Add the knowledge layer on top (policies, regulations, vulnerabilities, attack paths) and you get Autonomous Security. Security for AI. AI for security. One number stuck with me: → 40% of assets are invisible to traditional discovery tools (!!) Forty percent. Think about your CMDB for a second. Now think about the AI agents you’re planning to let loose on it. You can’t govern what you can’t see. That’s exactly where Armis fits, and why AI Control Tower suddenly looks a lot more serious to me. Then came EmployeeWorks. The part I keep thinking about. Everyone talks about AI. Very few show where it actually changes someone’s working day. Here it’s concrete. AI can replace the employee portal. And even more radical, the emails employees send when they don’t know where else to go. Think about how much work still starts with “Hi, quick question…” in someone’s inbox. EmployeeWorks picks it up right there. To me, that’s a radical innovation. Applied AI, solving a problem every company has. I walked out pumped. Now, the booth. We had a Gold booth. My verdict: mixed feelings. Morning: busy expo hall, good conversations. Afternoon: way too quiet. And happy hour didn’t bring the crowd back. What did work was something we built specifically for the event. A Value Gap survey. 8 questions, 3 minutes, and you get a report showing where your ServiceNow investment is leaking value: → Trapped, → Fragmented, → Lost → or Unrealised. Link in the first comment. Take it and tell me which one you got. Trapped, Fragmented, Lost or Unrealised?

ServiceNow is one of the most capable enterprise platforms ever built, and yet most implementations deliver a fraction of what they promised. The pattern is consistent enough that it points to something structural rather than bad luck. The cause traces back to how delivery got industrialized: outcomes were rarely defined before the buildout, and success ended up measured in tickets closed and modules shipped. The platform kept its potential but the model around it was built for something else. The Diamond Playbook lays out the three conditions under which ServiceNow platforms actually deliver, drawn from twenty years of experience inside the ecosystem. Inside you'll find five self-assessments to run on your own platform. Download it below.

Most ServiceNow roadmaps are built at kickoff and left untouched. Strategy drifts. Ownership fragments. Value erodes, quietly, and without anyone being accountable for it. Find out what actually separates the platforms that compound from the ones that stall.

Most ServiceNow platforms are live. Few are delivering what they were supposed to. The gap is rarely about the technology. It's about alignment, adoption, governance, and whether anyone ever stopped to measure what's actually working. We built a scan that shows you where you stand. 38 questions. 11 dimensions. Instant personalised report. Designed by our Chief Architect. Free.