With a history of catering to consumers, OpenAI showed on Tuesday that it also has an enterprise strategy by revealing a multiyear deal with ServiceNow. At the same time, ServiceNow is expanding beyond IT services, while making OpenAI a preferred choice.
Through the partnership, ServiceNow will embed OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 model into its platform to power autonomous AI agents across verticals such as IT, HR, and customer service. The two vendors will develop real time AI voice technology for customer service agents and HR employees. In addition, ServiceNow will use OpenAI’s computer use model to automate systems and desktop-based tasks.
The relationship between the two vendors began in 2023 when ServiceNow integrated Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service into its Now platform.
The expanded partnership highlights OpenAI’s strategy in the enterprise IT market, while helping ServiceNow make its non-IT workflows more intelligent and automated. It also enables the IT self-service vendor to use OpenAI’s voice models in customer service workflows.
An Enterprise Play
For OpenAI, this is just one part of its emerging enterprise play. The model provider has spent the last few months partnering with major vendors, including Cerebras, Broadcom, AWS, Oracle, and SoftBank.
Through these partnerships, OpenAI embeds its technology within enterprises without having to sell directly to them.
“The way they win in the enterprise is largely going to be ‘design in’ wins,” said David Nicholson, an analyst at Futurum Group.
That concept is the approach of having one vendor’s technology built into another company’s product. For example, the technology powering Safari (Apple’s web browser) is from Google. Similarly, when ServiceNow includes OpenAI’s models in its workflows and deploys them to its customers, OpenAI benefits every time ServiceNow deploys new technology, and a customer buys that product. ServiceNow’s expanded partnership with OpenAI puts the model provider continually in front of enterprises and could help it stay relevant in the AI market, especially amid speculation that 2026 could be the year the generative AI vendor loses some traction, Nicholson said.
“This is another strong indication that OpenAI is hedging its bets and not depending upon only its brand to go forward,” he said. “They realize that in the world of IT today, partnerships, ecosystems, platforms, all of those things interacting together, that’s how you become successful.”
ServiceNow and Enterprises
The partnership could also draw in enterprises that have been hesitant to try OpenAI on their own. Enterprise IT vendors like ServiceNow provide businesses with a safety net to try OpenAI technology through a trusted platform.
For ServiceNow, the expanded partnership means its platform becomes more intelligent and more automated without having to build frontier models. While the vendor has historically focused on IT services, it has been moving into non-IT domains such as HR and customer service.
ServiceNow’s expanding focus was buttressed when it acquired AI and enterprise search vendor Moveworks last March.
Moreover, those non-IT domains highlight the importance of voice, said Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner.
“The other part of this partnership is that they believe that OpenAI’s voice models will be very important for their business workflows, particularly their customer service workflows,” Chandrasekaran said. So, some of OpenAI’s speech models will likely make their way into ServiceNow’s workflows soon.
He added that while other IT service providers are model-agnostic, ServiceNow seems to think it can deliver true speech-to-speech by working with OpenAI. This means that, instead of the cascading effect of current speech-to-speech technology, in which speech is first converted to text and then back to speech, ServiceNow wants a direct speech-to-speech technology.
Some Challenges
However, one unknown is whether OpenAI will lead the voice AI market the next three to four years, especially with other speech providers such as Elevenlabs making innovations, Chandrasekaran said.
Another challenge is that OpenAI must deliver and fulfil its end of the agreement.
“The danger would be if OpenAI fails to deliver a solid partner support system,” Nicholson said. “There’s real work that has to be done. And I’m hoping that they’re getting people who have experience with this.”
He added that if OpenAI has to hire experienced professionals to execute on this strategy, then it should, because the vendor currently lacks a proven track record of supporting partnerships over time.
