ServiceNow introduced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI to convey GPT-5.2 into its AI Management Tower and Xanadu platform, reinforcing ServiceNow’s technique to deal with enterprise workflows, guardrails, and orchestration relatively than constructing frontier fashions itself.
For enterprise patrons, the deal underscores a broader shift: general-purpose fashions have gotten interchangeable, whereas the platforms that management how they’re deployed and ruled are the place differentiation now lives.
ServiceNow lets enterprises develop brokers and functions, plug them into present workflows, and handle orchestration and monitoring by means of its unified AI Management Tower.
The partnership doesn’t imply ServiceNow will not use different fashions to energy its companies, mentioned John Aisien, senior vp of product administration at ServiceNow.
"We will remain an open platform. There are things we will partner on with each of the model providers, depending on their expertise. Still, ServiceNow will continue to support a hybrid, multi-model AI strategy where customers can bring any model to our AI platform,” Aisien said in an email to VentureBeat. “Instead of exclusivity, we give enterprise customers maximum flexibility by combining powerful general-purpose models with our own LLMs built for ServiceNow workflows.”
What the OpenAI partnership unlocks for ServiceNow customers
ServiceNow customers get:
Voice-first agents: Speech-to-speech and voice-to-text support
Enterprise knowledge access: Q&A grounded in enterprise data, with improved search and discovery
Operational automation: Incident summarization and resolution support
ServiceNow said it plans to work directly with OpenAI to build “real-time speech-to-speech AI agents that can listen, reason and respond naturally without text intermediation.”
The company is also interested in tapping OpenAI’s computer use models to automate actions across enterprise tools such as email and chat.
The enterprise playbook
The partnership reinforces ServiceNow’s positioning as a control layer for enterprise AI, separating general-purpose models from the services that govern how they’re deployed, monitored, and secured. Rather than owning the models, ServiceNow is emphasizing orchestration and guardrails — the layers enterprises increasingly need to scale AI safely.
Some companies that work with enterprises see the partnership as a positive.
Tom Bachant, co-founder and CEO of AI workflow and support platform Unthread, said this could further reduce integration friction. “Deeply integrated systems often lower the barrier to entry and simplify initial deployment," he advised VentureBeat in an electronic mail. "Nonetheless, as organizations scale AI throughout core enterprise techniques, flexibility turns into extra essential than standardization. Enterprises finally want the power to adapt efficiency benchmarks, pricing fashions, and inner danger postures; none of which stay static over time.”
As enterprise AI adoption accelerates, partnerships like this counsel the true battleground is shifting away from the fashions themselves and towards the platforms that management how these fashions are utilized in manufacturing.
