Enterprise software giant ServiceNow Inc. has inked a three-year deal with OpenAI Group PBC so it can integrate the ChatGPT maker’s most advanced artificial intelligence models into its platforms.

The terms of the contract were not disclosed, but the Wall Street Journal reported that it includes a revenue commitment from ServiceNow. The exact value of the deal will be determined by how many customers end up using OpenAI’s models inside ServiceNow’s platforms.

The agreement is a significant boost for OpenAI, which has been striving to build up an enterprise business, by selling its services both directly to enterprises and through third parties. It’s part of a concerted effort by the AI firm to boost its revenue so it can actually pay for all of the computing resources its AI models use. But so far, its compute costs far exceed the sales it has been able to generate, primarily via consumer subscriptions.

OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap said the deal is primarily about agentic AI, the autonomous, independent bots powered by AI that can perform work on behalf of humans with minimal supervision. “ServiceNow is helping enterprises bring agentic AI into workflows that are secure, scalable and designed to deliver measurable outcomes,” he said. “With OpenAI frontier models and multimodal capabilities in ServiceNow, enterprises across every industry will benefit from intelligence that handles work end-to-end in even the most complex environments.”

ServiceNow, which sells software that automates and manages various business workflows, primarily in information technology service management, customer service and human resources, is one of a number of enterprise software companies pushing the agentic AI narrative. Salesforce Inc. has made AI agents a core part of its flagship sales and marketing platforms, while SAP SE and Workday Inc. have rolled out AI agents that can automate various business processes. These companies all stress the same idea: Embedded AI agents are key to generating real value from AI.

The deal benefits ServiceNow by giving it access to some of the most advanced AI models around, as an alternative to its proprietary large language models. For example, it said it will use OpenAI’s cutting-edge voice models to develop customer service agents that can converse in an almost humanlike way.

The company also wants to tap into OpenAI’s pioneering agentic capabilities, including its computer-use model, which allows AI agents to emmpoy third-party software tools such as web browsers and databases. Among other things, it will be able to perform tasks such as updating a computer’s operating system software and restarting it to implement the changes.

ServiceNow COO and Chief Technology Officer Amit Zavery told the Journal the company is also developing AI agents that will be able to help businesses access data that’s siloed in older systems such as mainframes. He added that ServiceNow’s engineers will benefit from OpenAI’s technical guidance and expertise when developing new agents, and it will also make “forward deployed engineers” available to customers to show them how to take advantage of their capabilities.

Zavery stressed that partnerships like this one are going to be instrumental in driving adoption of agentic AI. “As companies shift from experimenting with AI to deploying it at scale, they need the power of multiple AI leaders working together to deliver faster, better outcomes,” he insisted.

Photo: ServiceNow