The AI Control Tower: How ServiceNow Is Orchestrating Government's AI Future

The AI Control Tower: How ServiceNow Is Orchestrating Government’s AI Future

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In this episode, Triad’s Team welcome Barry Ridgway, Vice President of State and Local Government and Education at ServiceNow. Fresh off ServiceNow’s annual Knowledge 26 conference, Barry shares how the company is rebranding its platform as the “AI Control Tower for Enterprise”—and for government specifically. He explains that ServiceNow’s 20+ year history as a workflow company uniquely positions it to become the orchestration layer that helps public sector organizations manage the proliferation of AI tools, LLMs, and agents across their enterprises. Barry highlights three key acquisitions—ARMIS (network device visibility), VESA (identity and access governance for humans and AI agents), and Moveworks (natural language interface)—that are filling critical gaps in security, governance, and user experience. He also discusses the workforce crisis facing state and local governments, the need to automate work (not replace workers), and how AI can radically transform service delivery rather than just “paving the cow path.” ServiceNow is meeting customers where they are with a three-tiered go-to-market model (Foundation, Advanced, Prime) that scales from AI-assisted work to fully autonomous workflows. Barry emphasizes that ServiceNow is investing heavily in partner ecosystems like Triad, skills development through ServiceNow University, and mission-focused conversations over product pitches. His core message: AI is moving fast, but ServiceNow wants to be a trusted strategic partner that helps government customers navigate this transformation—not as a vendor selling one AI, but as an AI-agnostic orchestrator of work that drives efficiency, better employee experiences, and better constituent outcomes.

From IT Workflows to the AI Control Tower for Government:

“At our core, we’re a workflow company, right? We started in IT workflows. We’ve expanded our capabilities into HR workflows, into customer workflows, and for government, that would be citizen-facing workflows… 80 billion, workflows going through our platform, across, 85% of the Fortune 500 customers, and obviously in the government space, we have lots of, lots of customers, both at the federal and the state and local level, using, our, our platform. And really what’s exciting about that is it’s sort of like, there’s this moment with AI where, I think we’re making acquisitions, to that platform to sort of support that vision of AI as the control tower, or ServiceNow as the AI control tower for government.”

ServiceNow as the AI Operating System and Orchestration Layer:

“One of the things that we’re trying to do at ServiceNow is position the ServiceNow platform as really the AI operating system. We’re sort of that orchestration layer, because of our roots and workflow, is how do we become the orchestrator of AI across an enterprise and help them make sense of that? How do they leverage different AI capabilities.”

The Workforce Crisis Facing State and Local Government:

“They got a workforce crisis… constituent services are going up, employee retention’s going down. There’s a retirement bow wave of people leaving and exiting government… budget pressures, obviously… more pressure on the governor and his cabinet to deliver more with less, and hold on to the great talent that they already have, and then try to recruit and build new talent.”

Simplifying Constituent Experience with AI

“The complexity for the constituents is super top of mind… everybody’s got a front door to their agency… But after you click a couple of lines into that, it gets complex, and it’s very difficult for citizens to navigate… how do you have a front door that is AI-enabled, where you can ask questions… you can be trying to renew your driver’s license… or applying for social service. AI helps orchestrate that across those back-end systems.”

It’s Going to Be an AI World:

“It’s going to be an AI world, and AI will be a part of these systems, and so we want to start helping our customers think about their own maturity model as they move in that direction. And then, of course, we have to provide our skills and training around that, both directly to customers, but also in the way that we’re building the partner ecosystem and enabling it.”

Don’t Just Pave the Cow Path — Radically Transform:

“They’re finding that it’s opening space for other things… that old phrase of paving the cow pass… ‘this is our process, well, let’s just AI enable the exact same process.’ Well, how do you start rethinking, oh, we don’t actually need to do all those steps anymore… It is creating that space… let’s talk less about products, let’s talk about the mission of the customer… let’s go talk to whether you’re in Department of Social Services or Health and Human Services… and be able to think about the outcomes that we could get to differently using the platform in a different way.”