ServiceNow Launches Arc, a Personal AI Agent That Pursues Tasks on Its Own

ServiceNow made Arc generally available on Oct. 21 and calls it the first personal AI agent built for everyday work that IT can govern through its Super Intelligence Control Tower and Nvidia’s OpenShell.

The limit that matters to a buyer is enforcement. OpenShell can block what Arc does at runtime, but the credential that would let Nvidia’s software and chips read an agent’s permissions is promised only for a future release. Until then, IT governs Arc through policies it sets, not through a passport that travels with the agent.

What does Arc do?

A user hands Arc an objective, and Arc sets its own plan, works across enterprise systems and corrects course until the job is finished, which can take minutes or days. It also hunts for work, pulling pending approvals and follow-ups out of an inbox, meetings and chats.

When a tool Arc needs is missing, Arc can build the connection, and ServiceNow designed Arc to run whatever it builds inside the same OpenShell boundary, so the new code cannot reach further than the organization allows. That is why the limits matter. Arc can run on an employee’s desktop or on a computer set aside for it inside OpenShell.

Who sets the limits?

IT writes the policies in the Control Tower, and OpenShell enforces them as Arc works, down to the systems it reaches, the software interfaces it calls and the data it reads. What IT writes there decides how far Arc can reach.

Justin Boitano, Nvidia’s vice president of Enterprise, put the aim plainly: policy “has to be enforced everywhere an agent runs.”

What is still to come?

AI Passport is an attested record the Control Tower is designed to issue to each agent and each other AI asset it governs. It carries the business rules, such as risk tolerance and which outside services an agent may use, so Nvidia’s enforcement layers can approve or block an action quickly. OpenShell and Nvidia’s BlueField data processing units are meant to read it.

ServiceNow expects the passport, with enforcement in both, in a future release and gave no date. The revocation it describes, stopping an agent across software and chips in about one second, depends on that release, so buyers cannot yet test it.

What does it cost?

Arc comes at no extra cost with the Foundation, Advanced and Prime versions of ServiceNow’s EmployeeWorks. Arc runs on Mac, and Windows support is expected within weeks.

Arc is built to handle everyday work with local models on Nvidia RTX Spark hardware and to turn to frontier models for harder tasks, which ServiceNow says should lower inference costs. ServiceNow did not say how many customers run Arc or how large that saving is.

The test for a company handing Arc real work: can IT stop a single action, such as a write to a production system, while the agent keeps going, and which layer enforces it?