ServiceNow announced the general availability of Arc on 21 October at Nvidia GTC in Berlin, according to its announcement. Arc is included at no additional cost across three EmployeeWorks tiers, StreetInsider reported. ServiceNow said in its announcement that Arc is generally available and operates under policies set by its Super Intelligence Control Tower and enforced through Nvidia OpenShell.
Key points
- Arc is available on Mac, with Windows support expected within weeks.
- Foundation, Advanced and Prime EmployeeWorks subscriptions include Arc at no additional cost.
- ServiceNow says its Control Tower sets agent policies that Nvidia OpenShell enforces during execution.
- Integration of AI Passport with Nvidia’s hardware enforcement is expected in a future release.
Arc reaches Mac and EmployeeWorks subscribers
ServiceNow and Nvidia first outlined Arc in May, before its general availability on 21 October, ZDNet reported. Mac support is available at launch, while Windows support is expected within weeks. The launch turns the earlier agent concept into a product that employees can run on a supported desktop.
Arc is designed to keep working across email, Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow workflows rather than respond to a single request. According to StreetInsider, ServiceNow includes it at no additional cost with the Foundation, Advanced and Prime versions of EmployeeWorks. That pricing applies to those subscriptions, rather than making Arc a standalone free product.
ServiceNow and Nvidia say Arc can pick out pending work from an employee’s inbox and backlog, plan tasks and act across enterprise systems. They also say it can build an integration when one is needed. Those are descriptions of the product’s intended capabilities, rather than measures of time saved or work completed in a customer deployment.
Arc is designed to run on Nvidia RTX Spark devices and can work locally on an employee’s desktop or within OpenShell on its own device, ZDNet reported. The companies say routine tasks can use local processing, with more complex work passed to frontier models when necessary. They say the agent builds memory and skills as it works.
ServiceNow policies run through Nvidia OpenShell
ServiceNow says its Super Intelligence Control Tower defines the rules governing what Arc can do. Nvidia OpenShell applies those rules while the agent runs. The Control Tower is ServiceNow’s framework for monitoring agent activity, checking access and security risks, and measuring performance. AI Affairs previously reported Nvidia’s launch of OpenShell as an architecture for governing agents on enterprise systems.
The companies say IT teams can set policies in the Control Tower for OpenShell to enforce at runtime. Those controls cover which systems an agent may reach, which APIs it may call and which data it may read. For an agent that can continue working across applications, the restrictions govern individual actions as well as access to the agent itself.
Jon Sigler, ServiceNow’s executive vice president and general manager of AI Platform, described Arc as governable by IT through the Control Tower and OpenShell. Justin Boitano, Nvidia’s vice president of Enterprise, said OpenShell would carry ServiceNow’s governance into the runtime. Both executives’ comments were included in the company material reported by StreetInsider.
AI Passport awaits BlueField integration
ServiceNow also plans to connect its AI Passport system to Nvidia OpenShell and Nvidia Sentry on BlueField data processing units. ServiceNow says a passport carries an agent’s permissions and business rules, including the organisation’s risk tolerance and the external services the agent may use. The planned connection would let Nvidia’s software and hardware enforcement layers approve or block actions against those rules.
ServiceNow and Nvidia say revocation of a passport could propagate through the software and hardware layers in approximately one second. StreetInsider reported that the AI Passport integration with OpenShell and BlueField is expected in a future release and is not yet available. The one-second figure therefore describes the companies’ proposed enforcement system, not a capability included with Arc at launch.
Under the mechanism described by the companies, OpenShell would contain the task an agent was trying to execute when its passport was revoked in a sandbox for later review. Other authorised agent tasks could continue without a restart, ZDNet reported.
