Who gets to control the AI agents?

Welcome to Runtime! Today: ServiceNow outlines an IT-centric plan for rolling AI agents out across enterprise tech, Broadcom puts the screws to VMware customers holding on to old licenses, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.

(Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Runtime each week.)

Turf wars

LAS VEGAS — The one thing that every technology platform shift has in common is a collection of vendors possessed by an evangelical zeal that life will never be the same once their followers see the light. That conviction comes from a true belief in the changing power of technology mixed with the never-ending quest for revenue growth and the understanding that they have a once-in-a-generation chance to reset the vendor power rankings.

Right now, we're in the late beginning of the sermon on agentic AI, which promises to help companies cut costs while improving overall productivity by automating vital but tedious parts of their business processes, such as writing code, answering basic questions from customers, or closing the books on the quarter. This week ServiceNow laid out its case this week to be the shepherd, outlining a vision that puts the IT department firmly in control.

• "If you think about autonomous agentic AI, the control tower for how that runs in a corporation will come out of IT; the technical community, the chief digital information officer," ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told Runtime in an interview this week at Knowledge 2025.
• Accordingly, the company introduced a product called AI Control Tower, which is "a centralized command center to govern, manage, secure, and realize value from any ServiceNow and third‑party AI agent, model, and workflow on a single unified platform," it said in a press release.
• It also introduced dozens of new agents designed to work with its core IT management software products, including IT service management, operations management, and asset management.
• Those agents were designed to handle "the menial work" that falls upon IT departments, such as closing out support tickets or reducing the number of people that need to be involved in responding to an incident, said Pablo Stern, executive vice president and general manager of Technology Workflow Products, which includes those core products.

ServiceNow is obviously not the only company preaching the gospel of agentic AI; it's hard to remember a potential platform shift so quickly embraced by established vendors worried about losing ground. They're all scrambling to convince their current customers to make them their central hub for agentic AI development, but ServiceNow wants to use its IT chops to assure customers it can cover their CRM and HR needs as well.

• Perhaps the biggest announcement during Knowledge 2025 was ServiceNow CRM, which it has been working on for several years but is now a clear shot across Salesforce's bow.
• "These individual products that were great for that point problem are not great at solving an end-to-end experience," said Blake McConnell, senior vice president of industry products, who argued that AI agents of any stripe will need to work across the entire company through a platform like ServiceNow's.
• "The sales director doesn't know enough about technology to run the agentic AI strategy for a corporation," McDermott said. "The fastest-growing business in ServiceNow is CRM, that's why we declared and put a flag in the ground that we decided to take it all."

It's all part of a broader debate over whether agents are fancy knowledge workers or automation software, with Salesforce and Workday in the former camp and ServiceNow in the latter. Given that few people expect AI agents to make a sizable impact on IT strategies and budgets until next year, it's hard to say how customers feel, especially given how few of them have seen returns on their early investments.

• ServiceNow rolled out several new features this week designed to make it easier for companies to manage agents like they manage software applications, introducing new orchestration technology in partnership with AWS and new additions to its Workflow Data Fabric that the company said would help customers pull data from outside ServiceNow's platform.
• "We fully understand that with 1000s of AI agents running around the enterprise, you want to be able to have a single place where you manage all of that, where you understand the health of it, where you understand the value, where you really make sure that you control what's going on, and you can see the usage," said Dorit Zilbershot, vice president for product management, in an interview.
• But there's a downside to centralization: Whichever vendor convinces customers to put their software at the heart of their agentic strategy could enjoy an advantage that makes older concerns about vendor lock-in look quaint.

Speaking of lock-in

Broadcom recently sent cease-and-desist letters to VMware users that opted to remain on the perpetual licenses that Broadcom discontinued shortly after closing its deal to buy the company in 2023, according to Ars Technica. The letters informed customers that they should stop using and "deinstall" any VMware updates they've received since that change in policy, which was designed to get VMware users to pay for new support contracts that soared in price after Broadcom's takeover.

Those customers were supposed to be allowed to continue using VMware's software as it existed prior to the change as long as they acknowledged that they're on their own for support. However, it looks like "Broadcom is sending these letters to companies soon after their support contracts have expired, regardless of whether they continue to use (or not use) VMware" according to Ars.

Legal threats often prompt companies to pay up whether or not they have any obligation to do so in hopes of making the headache go away, and Broadcom is also threatening to audit how those companies are using VMware, which can be an even bigger headache. As one commenter on Reddit put it, according to Channel Futures: "The best time to start to switch to [an alternative] was months ago, but the next best time to start is today.”

Enterprise moves

Fidji Simo is the new CEO of Applications at OpenAI, reporting directly to CEO Sam Altman, who remains in overall control of the company and directly in control of its Research and Compute divisions.

Tim McIntire is the new chief technology officer of Hyland, joining the enterprise content management company from Teradata.

John Ederer is the new chief financial officer of Teradata, following similar roles at Model N and K2 Software.

Bucky Moore is the new enterprise partner at Lightspeed, joining the firm after seven years at Kleiner Perkins.

The Runtime roundup

Cloudflare beat Wall Street's estimates for first-quarter revenue yet slightly missed earnings expectations, but the day traders were satisfied enough to send its stock up more than 8% in after-hours trading.

Microsoft announced that it will support Google's Agent2Agent technology for connecting AI agents, which is based in part on Anthropic's MCP standard.

AWS will have to delay the planned construction of three new data centers in Ireland after local concerns about the impact on the electrical grid.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!