ServiceNow didn't set out to be an identity authority for AI agents. The mechanics of orchestration made it one anyway. That's the pattern worth naming.
Every multi-agent workflow has an authentication problem. When AI agents hand off tasks to each other — a triage agent passing context to a configuration database agent, which passes an instruction to a remediation agent touching a production system — each handoff requires the receiving agent to verify the identity of the sender, and both agents to authenticate to whatever downstream systems they're touching. In a human workflow, authentication rides on the human's session. In an agentic workflow, there's no human session. The agents need their own identities, their own credentials, their own tokens. And those tokens need to be minted, scoped, and revoked at machine speed, without a human in the approval loop.
Before March 2026, this was the gap that every enterprise building agentic workflows was papering over. Credentials were provisioned manually, stored in vaults the agents couldn't access natively, or — in the cases that made security teams quietly uncomfortable — hardcoded into workflow configurations. The authentication layer for multi-agent workflows was the problem everyone was deferring.
ServiceNow's AI Agent Orchestrator didn't defer it.
The Move
The March 2026 launch of AI Agent Orchestrator added several capabilities to the Now Platform: a visual graph interface for designing multi-agent workflows, runtime monitoring of agent execution states, and — the part that matters most for this argument — a native credential vault with session token issuance for inter-agent authentication. Agents running inside a ServiceNow workflow can now authenticate to each other and to downstream systems using tokens minted and managed by the Now Platform itself, without requiring external credential management infrastructure.
ServiceNow's launch documentation described this as enabling agents to "operate securely across enterprise systems without manual credential provisioning." The engineering blog framed it as a solution to authentication latency in multi-agent pipelines. Neither description is wrong. Both stop at the feature and skip what the feature implies.
The Puzzle
The consensus read on this launch is roughly: ServiceNow added AI agent management capabilities to remain competitive as enterprise workflows become increasingly agentic. Accurate as far as it goes. Also the least interesting thing you can say about it.
The more structurally significant read: ServiceNow didn't set out to become an identity authority for AI agents. It built a credential vault because its orchestration layer couldn't function without one. The identity capability is a structural byproduct of the orchestration ambition, not a product decision. And that distinction matters enormously for how you think about where this ends up.
The question the consensus read doesn't ask: what does it mean for an enterprise's security posture when the platform controlling workflow sequencing also controls the credentials those workflows use? That's not rhetorical. It's the question IT and security teams at ServiceNow's enterprise customers are going to spend the next two years trying to answer.
Why the Orchestration Layer Becomes the Identity Layer
Start with the mechanics. An AI agent operating inside an enterprise workflow needs to authenticate to do almost anything useful: read from a database, write to a ticketing system, call an API, hand off a task to another agent. Authentication, in this context, is fundamentally about answering two questions: what is this entity, and what is it allowed to do right now?
The orchestration layer is the only component in the system that already has complete answers to both questions. It knows which agents are running, in what sequence, with what inputs, against what target systems, at what privilege level. It's the authority on the workflow graph — on what's supposed to happen and in what order. That makes it the natural place to manage credentials, because credential management is just the enforcement mechanism for the permission structure the orchestration layer is already maintaining.
That's the gravitational pull worth naming. The orchestration layer doesn't accumulate identity authority because someone decided it should. It accumulates identity authority because it's already the authority on workflow permission, and credential management is the authentication-layer expression of that same permission structure. The two functions are not separate problems that happen to live in the same platform. They're the same problem at different layers of the stack.
ServiceNow's credential vault is the logical consequence of this. Once you've built an orchestration layer with full visibility into the agent graph, you have two architectural choices: build credential management natively, or build an integration layer that hands off to an external credential store. The integration approach introduces latency, adds failure modes, and creates a dependency on an external system the orchestration layer can't fully control. For a platform competing on workflow reliability and execution speed, the native build is the obvious choice; the alternative introduces more failure modes than it solves.
So ServiceNow built it natively. And in doing so, it became the de facto identity authority for every AI agent running inside a Now Platform workflow.
My read is that the product team understood this implication clearly. The session token architecture — specifically the model of minting short-lived tokens scoped to individual workflow steps rather than issuing persistent credentials — reflects a design philosophy more consistent with a security-first identity architecture than with a workflow feature bolted on to check a box. Short-lived, scoped tokens are how you build an identity system you can audit. They're not how you build a credential store you're trying to minimize.
The Pattern Has Run Before
There's a useful historical parallel here, and it's not the one you might expect.
In the mid-1990s, Microsoft shipped Active Directory as a directory service for Windows NT domain management. The pitch was straightforward: enterprises running Windows networks needed a way to manage users, computers, and group policies across a domain. Active Directory was the answer. Microsoft didn't announce it as an identity product. It announced it as a directory service.
What happened over the following decade was that Active Directory became the identity backbone of enterprise computing. Microsoft didn't set out to own enterprise identity; the domain controller was already the authority on what resources a machine was allowed to access, and identity authority followed from that position. Once you've built the system that decides what's allowed to happen on the network, you've built the identity system.
The parallel to ServiceNow is structural, not superficial. ServiceNow is not building a directory service. But the dynamic is the same: the platform controlling the permission structure for workflow execution is the natural authority on the identity of the entities executing those workflows. Active Directory became the enterprise identity layer because it was already the enterprise access control layer. ServiceNow's credential vault is becoming the agent identity layer because it's already the agent workflow control layer.
Active Directory had roughly a decade to consolidate before serious challengers emerged. ServiceNow is operating in a market where Microsoft, Salesforce, and AWS are all building their own agent orchestration layers with their own credential management architectures, and the consolidation window is measured in quarters, not years.
Orchestration Gravity
The structural tendency for the platform controlling workflow sequencing to accumulate identity authority as a functional byproduct, not a deliberate product strategy.
Orchestration gravity operates through a simple mechanism. The orchestration layer is the only component with full visibility into the agent graph: which agents exist, what permissions they need, what systems they touch, in what sequence. That visibility creates a natural center of gravity for credential management, because credential management requires exactly the same information. The platform that knows the workflow graph is the platform that can most efficiently manage the credentials the workflow requires.
ServiceNow didn't decide to expand into identity. It built a sufficiently capable orchestration layer, and the identity authority followed. The credential vault is the authentication-layer residue of that ambition. The identity authority accretes to the orchestration layer the way sediment accretes to a riverbed — the structure of the system makes it inevitable regardless of planning.
ServiceNow is not the only company this applies to. Salesforce's Agentforce platform is building credential management capabilities into its agent orchestration layer. AWS Bedrock Agents has its own session management architecture. Microsoft's Copilot Studio is integrating agent identity management into its orchestration tooling. Every major enterprise platform building an agent orchestration layer is, by the logic of orchestration gravity, building an identity authority — whether or not that's how they're describing it.
The companies that understand this dynamic will treat their credential vault architectures as strategic infrastructure and invest accordingly. The companies that don't will treat them as workflow features and underinvest — until a security incident or a governance audit forces the question.
The Friction
The thesis has real friction, and naming it precisely is what earns the prediction.
The most immediate problem is the Entra ID tension. The majority of enterprises where ServiceNow runs have Microsoft Entra ID as their primary identity authority. Entra ID manages human identities, device identities, and increasingly, service principal identities for applications. ServiceNow's credential vault is now operating in the same environment as Entra ID, managing a new category of identity — AI agent identities — that Entra ID doesn't yet handle natively at the workflow level.
This creates a structural question that ServiceNow's customers haven't fully answered: is the Now Platform's credential vault subordinate to Entra ID (meaning agent credentials are ultimately governed by the same identity plane as everything else), or is it parallel to Entra ID (meaning enterprises now have two identity authorities, each governing a different category of entity)? The subordinate model limits ServiceNow's leverage but is easier for security teams to accept. The parallel model gives ServiceNow more control but creates governance complexity that security teams will resist.
ServiceNow's current architecture appears to support both models — agents can authenticate using credentials that are themselves governed by Entra ID, or they can use credentials minted natively by the Now Platform. The flexibility is sensible from a product standpoint. It also means the governance question is deferred rather than resolved, and deferred governance questions have a way of becoming audit findings.
The second friction is the accountability gap. When an AI agent authenticates through ServiceNow's credential vault and takes an action it shouldn't — writes to the wrong system, escalates its own permissions, executes a remediation script against the wrong host — who owns the accountability? The enterprise? ServiceNow? The agent developer? This is a contractual and regulatory question the current architecture doesn't answer, and it's the question that will determine how aggressively enterprise legal and compliance teams push back on the credential vault model. Regulatory pressure around AI agent accountability is building across multiple jurisdictions, and the enterprises most exposed to that pressure — financial services, healthcare, federal agencies — are exactly the enterprises where ServiceNow has its deepest footprint.
The third friction is the one hardest to quantify: enterprise security teams didn't choose ServiceNow as their identity authority. They chose it as their workflow platform. The credential vault expands ServiceNow's footprint into a governance domain that security teams consider their own. Some will accept this as a natural extension of the platform. Others will treat it as scope creep and push for external credential management integrations that keep identity governance outside ServiceNow's control.
The counterargument to all three frictions is the same one that usually wins in enterprise software: the path of least resistance. If ServiceNow's native credential vault works reliably, reduces the operational overhead of managing agent credentials, and the alternative is building and maintaining an integration layer between the orchestration platform and an external credential store, most enterprise operators will take the native solution. Governance concerns don't disappear, but they tend to get addressed after deployment rather than before it.
That's not a comfortable dynamic for security teams, but the economics favor it. ServiceNow's platform revenue is tied to workflow adoption, and workflow adoption accelerates when the authentication problem is solved natively. The incentive structure pushes toward the native build, and the operational convenience of the native build pushes enterprises toward accepting it. The governance question gets deferred until the deployment is too embedded to reverse.
The Prediction
By Q4 2027, ServiceNow will have launched a formal Agent Identity Governance product tier — a separately licensed capability providing audit logging, credential lifecycle management, and compliance reporting for agent identities managed through the Now Platform. The governance tier will be priced above the base orchestration license, and it will be positioned as the answer to the accountability gap the credential vault architecture currently leaves open.
ServiceNow's margin structure pushes it toward monetizing the governance layer rather than bundling it. The credential vault itself is infrastructure — it has to be included in the platform to make orchestration work. But the audit and compliance tooling that enterprise security teams need to accept the credential vault as a legitimate identity authority is a separate value proposition, one that ServiceNow can price accordingly. The pattern is consistent with how ServiceNow has monetized every prior expansion of its platform footprint: the core capability ships as infrastructure, the governance and reporting layer ships as a premium tier.
If that prediction is wrong, the most likely reason is that Microsoft ships a native integration allowing enterprises to govern agent identities through Entra ID rather than through a ServiceNow-specific governance tier. That would cap ServiceNow's leverage at the orchestration layer and prevent the credential vault from becoming a durable monetization surface. Microsoft has both the incentive and the installed base to make that move, and Entra ID's incumbent position in the enterprises where ServiceNow runs is the single most credible threat to the thesis.
Check ServiceNow's product announcements and pricing pages in Q4 2027. A governance tier means the thesis held. Agent identity governance bundled into the base platform, or handled through a Microsoft integration, means it didn't.
The week after Memorial Day, most enterprise technology conversations are about what got decided before the long weekend and what got deferred until after it. ServiceNow's March launch is the kind of thing that got noted and filed — a workflow feature, a competitive response, a box checked. The credential vault didn't generate the coverage that a new product category would have.
That's the tell. The moves that matter structurally are often the ones that look like infrastructure. Active Directory looked like a directory service. AWS IAM looked like an access management utility. ServiceNow's credential vault looks like a workflow feature. The identity authority doesn't announce itself as an identity authority. It announces itself as the thing that makes the orchestration work.
Orchestration gravity doesn't require a strategy. It requires only a workflow platform capable enough that the credential management problem has to be solved natively. ServiceNow solved it. The identity authority followed.