ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 Thoughts

Early May came around and Knowledge happened at the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas as has been the case for the past several years. So wanted to share some thoughts after attending and now that I'm back home.

This Year's AI

AI continues to be the big thing at Knowledge with this year's focus on the AI Control Tower. Understandably every company has to continue to show they're maturing with AI and ServiceNow is no different, going from 2024 where it was about using Now Assist in your instance to last year focusing on agents and now this year focusing on governance and compliance with AI Control Tower.

For me, the AI in ServiceNow can be useful, especially as you try to automate things and simplify the mundane tasks. For example, building a scoped app from scratch and having to create the different tables, roles, etc. But I still see it not being fully polished yet in ServiceNow as even doing some of the labs at this year's Knowledge, Now Assist would return errors and you would have to re-run it again, similar to the same issues we've seen since it's been introduced.

Is it realistic to expect it to have the polish of chatbots like ChatGPT which has a much simpler user experience? Maybe not, but until it's closer to that polished less error experience and the pricing goes down (I do like that they now include it in your vendor demo instances), I still see some barriers to adopting it in your instance.

The opening keynote on Tuesday May 5 was the most heavily attended as they had all the theater screens set to it and even though I arrived about 20 minutes before the 10am start, I still had to end up standing in the back of one of the theaters behind all the seats to watch. As you expect, the other keynotes as the conference went on (two additional keynotes on Wednesday and another two on Thursday including the CreatorCon keynote to end the show) were less and less attended so by the CreatorCon keynote on Thursday May 7 at 1pm, you could easily walk in right when it started.

All the keynotes focused on AI and with my developer background, I found the CreatorCon keynote interesting as it did talk about how AI can help developers do things faster, answering questions like this:

That's the one thing I've seen from most of the AI stuff that ServiceNow has put out is the focus on making it so non-developers can easily do things in ServiceNow including build no/low-code apps. And which goes with the general trend in the industry to rely less on developers as a way to more efficiently (and really a way to reduce costs) do tasks that in the past required large engineering teams.

So it was good to see them talk about how they can make developers' lives easier while still placing importance on them since AI in its current state can be really useful but it's not there yet to completely replace developers. It's a good watch if you have the time.

Data in and out of ServiceNow

I attended a couple of sessions related to RaptorDB Pro and Stream Connect and the dichotomy between the two was interesting.

The features they're adding to RaptorDB Pro with Live Archive and Live Connect so that you can access your archived data easily in ServiceNow (with faster performance) and be able to connect external BI tools to your ServiceNow data without having to export the data goes with the model of ServiceNow wanting to be the source of truth and having all your data. So them adding these features to the Pro version of RaptorDB to get you to upgrade to it makes sense for this model.

But at the same time they do offer Stream Connect to connect to Apache Kafka so you share out data from your instance when events are triggered (such as updating a record or any other type of workflow) directly into Kafka for use with external systems, allowing you to do what you want with the data. So I'm curious to see if this will continue to be the preferred approach for most customers and their BI/data teams or if they will be more willing to leave the data in ServiceNow. Especially as people use AI more to analyze data and trying to reduce the complexity of having data in many different places (but is ServiceNow the best place to hold all the data?).

Other Tidbits

The sessions were organized pretty well as even if sessions were full, you could just show up at the session door to be in the waitlist and they started letting the waitlist in 5 minutes before the session started. I did this for a couple of sessions and saw other people doing it for sessions I registered for and you could get into pretty much all sessions considering there were always no-shows.

I registered for sessions the first day you could and was able to add most of the sessions I wanted to (there were only 2 I couldn't), which was much better than last year when I was only able to register about half the sessions I wanted to. But last year, also I would do the waitlist which had a lot more people in line who probably ran into the same problem with not being able to register.

The rooms for the sessions were the same size as last year so not sure if people registered and/or went to less sessions this year since they said the attendance was around 25,000 just like last year.

The expo floor layout this year continued with the trend of putting ServiceNow front and center when you walked in but this time they placed all the partners around the entire hall, including right in front of each of the theaters and even for the smallest booths, they were double the size of last year's small kiosk style.

To me, this seemed good in the sense that you would walk right by partner booths as you went to the different theater sessions on the floor but with this setup, people did mention the negative that people weren't focused on the booths themselves, but instead on going to the theater sessions. So their intent wasn't to actively walk around looking at partner booths (which would be the case when the booths are explicitly in their own areas) but to go to the theater sessions. And if you were like me, you would doing this based on timing of the different sessions so really didn't have time or want to spend time stopping by the booths on the way to the sessions.

The Knowledge afterparty was again at the Sphere and I was surprised to see ServiceNow book Backstreet Boys (BSB) for this considering they're doing a residency at the Sphere and the shows have been selling out and doing pretty well.

I'm used to seeing artists at conferences that don't have anything active at the moment (but are still big name artists like how Lenny Kravitz performed as part of Delta Airlines' keynote at CES 2025) and these artists doing a short 30-60 min set. But BSB actually performed for nearly 1 hour and 40 minutes and did almost the entire setlist as their residency.

In the end Knowledge is always good to attend to see what ServiceNow is cooking up and meet with partners and clients. See you again May 4-6, 2027 in Vegas for the next Knowledge.