Designed to handle work across email, Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow workflows and other productivity applications, Arc allows employees to assign objectives without providing detailed instructions. The agent determines how to complete a task, carries out the necessary steps, reviews its results and makes adjustments as needed. Depending on the assignment, it can continue working independently for minutes or days.
Arc also identifies outstanding responsibilities by examining information from employee inboxes, meetings, conversations and task backlogs. These can include pending approvals, assigned work and follow-ups. ServiceNow says the agent develops memory and additional capabilities through continued use, allowing it to improve its performance over time.
The system can operate directly on an employee's computer or within a protected Nvidia OpenShell environment. It uses local AI models running on Nvidia RTX Spark hardware for routine operations, while more demanding assignments can be handled by advanced cloud-based models. According to ServiceNow, this arrangement helps reduce processing expenses while limiting how much information must leave the device.
Arc can also create connections between applications when existing integrations are unavailable. Any integrations it develops operate within OpenShell's security restrictions, preventing them from accessing systems or resources beyond an organization's approved boundaries.
A major component of the announcement is the security framework surrounding the agent. ServiceNow's Super Intelligence Control Tower allows IT administrators to establish rules governing which applications, APIs and information an AI agent can access. Nvidia OpenShell applies those restrictions while the agent operates, rather than relying solely on permissions established before execution.
"Arc is the first personal AI agent built for everyday work and governable by IT through the Super Intelligence Control Tower and NVIDIA OpenShell," said Jon Sigler, executive vice president and general manager of AI Platform at ServiceNow.
ServiceNow and Nvidia are also extending their collaboration through AI Passport, a system intended to verify the identity, permissions and operating restrictions of AI agents and other governed resources, including MCP servers. Each passport contains organizational policies that determine which services and actions an agent is authorized to use.
The framework is designed to let administrators restrict specific operations without necessarily interrupting an agent's remaining assignments. For example, an organization could prevent an agent from modifying a production system while allowing it to continue other permitted activities.
Nvidia plans to support these controls through both software and hardware. OpenShell will provide enforcement within the agent's execution environment, while Nvidia Sentry running on BlueField data processing units will add protections at the hardware level.
When an administrator revokes an agent's AI Passport, the planned system can prevent further unauthorized execution and isolate the affected activity for review. ServiceNow says the revocation can take effect across the software and hardware layers in approximately one second, without disrupting unrelated workloads running on the same infrastructure.
Justin Boitano, Nvidia's vice president of Enterprise, emphasized the importance of applying security restrictions directly where autonomous systems perform their work.
"With NVIDIA OpenShell, ServiceNow can extend the governance it defines in the Super Intelligence Control Tower down into the runtime itself — the layer where agents actually take action," Boitano said.
However, the full AI Passport enforcement system is not yet available. ServiceNow expects the integration with Nvidia OpenShell and BlueField hardware to arrive in a future release, meaning the announced hardware-backed protections are separate from Arc's current availability.
ServiceNow reports that its platform processes more than 100 billion workflows annually, providing an existing enterprise environment for deploying Arc and its associated governance capabilities. The release gives EmployeeWorks customers access to an autonomous assistant now, while the companies continue developing the additional security infrastructure intended to manage AI agents across software and hardware systems.
This analysis is based on reporting from ServiceNow & ZDNET.
Image courtesy of ServiceNow.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
