A week in Las Vegas, and what I am bringing home
Superb event in the hot and sunny Las Vegas. I spent the week at ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 with the Netox team, and there is a lot to unpack.
Keynotes, customer sessions, hallway conversations, partner meetings, and a whole lot of energy. I always believe that to do good work you have to step outside your own bubble, and this week was exactly that.
Rather than recap every session, I want to share what I took away from the week. We are not in the ServiceNow consulting or implementation business, so I am looking at all of this as a customer of ServiceNow myself. The angle here is what companies looking for new ways to operate should be paying attention to.
The model is not the differentiator
This was the theme of the week, no matter who was on stage.
Most enterprises are still focused on choosing the right large language model. Productivity gains from those models are real. But the model itself is unpredictable. It will give you different answers to the same question. It can be tricked. It can act outside its scope.
The competitive advantage is not in the model. It is in the governance, integration and orchestration around the model. That is the part most organizations are still missing.
From AI Chaos to AI Control Tower
Bill McDermott opened with the AI blind spot.
The average enterprise runs hundreds of applications, and AI is being bolted onto each of them like a sidecar. That is not putting AI to work. That is AI chaos.
And this is where ServiceNow makes its strongest move. It positions itself as the AI Control Tower for the enterprise. A single place to discover every AI asset, govern its behavior, observe what it is doing, measure the value it creates, and stop it when something goes wrong.
A live demo on stage made the point sharply. An AI agent was hit with a prompt injection attack and started setting shipping prices to one dollar. One button stopped the agent, rolled back the actions, generated a P1 incident and produced an audit trail. The point was not the dramatic moment. The point was that this kind of containment has to be built into the platform, not added later.
Governance is not a feature. It is a foundation.
Action Fabric and Otto: From insight to execution
Two announcements stood out for me, and both are about closing the gap between intelligent and useful.
ServiceNow Action Fabric opens the full ServiceNow system of action to any AI agent in the enterprise. Whether the agent is built on ServiceNow, on Claude, on Copilot, or developed in house, it can tap directly into the workflows, business rules, approvals, SLAs and audit trails that already run the business. Anthropic is the first design partner, connecting Claude directly into ServiceNow as the governed system of action.
I find this significant. Most AI today reads and writes data. Action Fabric lets agents actually execute governed work, with permissions, audit trails and policies attached to every action. That is a different category.
Otto is the new unified AI experience for the enterprise. It combines Now Assist, Moveworks and AI Experience into one front door that sits across the whole organization, not inside a single application. Employees ask in natural language, and Otto handles the rest. It understands intent, adapts to each person’s role and location, and routes the work to the right place. Every action is governed by AI Control Tower, with policies, audit trails and explainability built in.
ServiceNow named the problem clearly. Most enterprise AI today has a completion problem. It can answer questions but it cannot finish the job. Employees still toggle between applications and chase their own approvals. Otto is built to close that gap.
Insight without action is a slide. Action without governance is a risk. This is an attempt to solve both at the same time.
A Strategic Choice: ServiceNow and Microsoft
At Netox, we made a deliberate choice some time ago to build around two core platforms. ServiceNow and Microsoft.
ServiceNow is the operating layer for how work gets done. It defines how processes flow across the organization, how decisions are governed, and how AI is kept under control. Microsoft brings the identity, security and productivity layer that everyone uses every day, and with Agent 365 it adds the agents that sit closest to the people doing the work.
One thing worth noting. Microsoft does not have its own AI governance solution. ServiceNow AI Control Tower fills that gap and pairs cleanly with the Microsoft ecosystem and Agent 365. For organizations standardizing on Microsoft, this is a meaningful detail.
Knowledge 2026 reinforced that this is the right direction. Two platforms. One direction. AI ready operations on a foundation that is intentional rather than accidental.
Ambition Elevation, Not Cost Reduction
Bill was joined on stage by Jensen Huang from NVIDIA. He said something every leader should hear.
Stop framing AI as cost reduction. Start framing it as ambition elevation. Empower the people you already have to do what they could not do before.
This reframes the conversation completely. The question is not how many roles AI can replace. The question is what your team could accomplish if the routine work was handled, the data was reliable, and the agents were governed.
That is a much more interesting question. And it is the one Netox is helping our customers answer.
The Takeaway
AI does not stand alone. It needs an operating model, a governance layer and a system of action underneath it. That was the message of the week, and it matches exactly the direction we have been building toward at Netox.
For us, this is what we are building. And there will be a lot more to share in the coming weeks.
The Real Reason to Be Here
A week like this is exhausting. Long days, time zones, jet lag, and a constant stream of new information. But when you ask why it is worth it, the honest answer is not the keynotes or the announcements. It is the people.
The conversations in the hallway. The dinner with someone you have never met before. The chance run-in with a product team building something you have been wondering about. The new contacts who become sparring partners months later when you hit a problem at home.
It was also great to see Finland represented in this ecosystem. Appmore had their own booth at the largest ServiceNow conference in the world, showcasing a strong product built on top of ServiceNow. That is not a cheap or easy thing to do. Worth checking them out if their space overlaps with yours.
My recommendation to other companies is simple. If you cannot send your team to events like this today for financial or other reasons, work on changing that. Make it possible for your people to see how the rest of the world solves problems. These trips are heavy, but done right, they are some of the most valuable investments you can make in your team.
And One More Thing
What an ending. As a born in the 80s kid, watching Backstreet Boys at Sphere was something else. Old pop meets new tech, in a venue that did not exist a few years ago. It worked.
Shoutout to ServiceNow, this is how you throw a conference. It reminded me of the good years at Microsoft events in Orlando. I love to see that there is still a tech company who can throw an amazing event without making it bad because of costs and profits.
Thank you ServiceNow for this. And to all of the readers who got this far: Govern your AI. Govern it today.
