A multi-year partnership aimed at helping enterprises modernize legacy systems, unlock data, and integrate AI across core business operations.
IBM and ServiceNow have expanded their collaboration to tackle two major challenges limiting enterprise AI at scale: the AI-ready data problem and the legacy application layer. By combining IBM’s strengths in AI, data, and automation with the ServiceNow AI Platform, the partnership aims to help organizations move beyond outdated systems and activate their data for AI-driven outcomes. Together, they plan to deliver integrated solutions that modernize legacy systems, enhance ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric with IBM’s enterprise data capabilities, and support autonomous IT operations—enabling large enterprises to fully realize the potential of agentic AI.
Decades of deeply interconnected legacy systems have become the primary obstacle to accelerating AI adoption. IBM and ServiceNow aim to overcome this by developing solutions that help organizations evolve their existing systems instead of replacing them, support AI across any model of choice, and fully unlock the value of enterprise data.
“Most enterprises have the ambition to deploy agentic AI, but lack the foundation to run it at scale,” said John Aisien, general manager and senior vice president, central product management, at ServiceNow. “IBM brings the tooling to modernize the systems and extend ServiceNow’s data capabilities; ServiceNow provides the platform to put that data to work across every workflow in the business. Together, we’re helping enterprises move from AI ambition to real, scalable outcomes.”
“AI adoption at scale requires more than access to models. It requires rethinking the systems, data and governance that support them,” said Raj Datta, general manager of ISV and AI partnerships, IBM. “Together with ServiceNow, we’re building an open, flexible foundation for AI that helps enterprises move faster while maintaining control and trust.”
The collaboration brings together IBM’s software solutions with the ServiceNow AI Platform to develop new solutions across three key areas:
* Application modernization: Scans and refactors legacy systems using tools like IBM Bob, Enterprise Application runtime (Java) and IBM watsonx.data so enterprises will be able to bring aging applications into the AI era without starting from scratch.
* Enterprise data governance: Extends ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric with IBM watsonx.data to unlock key capabilities like Data Quality, Observability, Master Data Management – leveraging ServiceNow Data Catalog so that mutual customers can keep their data AI-ready.
* Autonomous infrastructure operations: Integrates Red Hat Ansible, IBM Bob, Instana, Hashicorp Terraform, and Hashicorp Vault into ServiceNow IT workflows to detect, remediate, and resolve issues before they affect the business.
These joint solutions are expected to be available in the second half of 2026.
