IBM and ServiceNow have announced a strategic collaboration to help enterprise customers bring decades-old legacy systems into the age of artificial intelligence. The joint initiative aims to address one of the biggest obstacles to widespread AI adoption: the deeply interconnected, aging infrastructure that many large organizations still rely on. By combining IBM's deep experience with mainframes, legacy applications, and AI automation, with ServiceNow's cloud-native workflow and agent management platform, the companies hope to offer a clear path to modernization without requiring a complete rip-and-replace.
"Most enterprises have the ambition to deploy agentic AI, but lack the foundation to run it at scale," said John Aisien, senior vice president and general manager of central product management, security, and risk at ServiceNow. "IBM brings the tooling to modernize the systems and extend ServiceNow's data capabilities. ServiceNow provides the platform to put that data to work across every workflow in the business."
Three core services for legacy AI readiness
The collaboration will deliver three primary services, each targeting a specific pain point in the journey from legacy infrastructure to AI-enabled operations. All three are slated for availability in the second half of 2026.
Application modernization
The first service focuses on scanning and refactoring legacy applications using IBM Bob (a code transformation tool), Enterprise Application runtime for Java, and IBM watsonx.data. This allows enterprises to bring existing applications into the AI era without starting from scratch. The approach reduces risk and preserves business logic while making applications more accessible to AI models and automation workflows.
Autonomous infrastructure operations
The second service integrates Red Hat Ansible, IBM Bob, Instana (for observability), Hashicorp Terraform, and Hashicorp Vault into ServiceNow IT workflows. This combination enables automated detection, remediation, and resolution of infrastructure issues before they impact business operations. By embedding autonomous operations into IT service management, enterprises can reduce downtime and free up IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
Data governance
The third service extends ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric with IBM watsonx.data to unlock capabilities such as Data Quality, Observability, and Master Data Management. The ServiceNow Data Catalog will help mutual customers track and manage their AI-ready data, ensuring that the data feeding AI models is accurate, secure, and compliant. This is critical given the regulatory and operational demands of deploying AI in heavily regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and government.
Decades of partnership
IBM and ServiceNow have a long-standing relationship that spans cloud computing, automation, security, IT service management, and observability. This new collaboration builds on that foundation, leveraging IBM's consulting and systems integration expertise alongside ServiceNow's platform leadership. The companies have previously worked together on projects for Fortune 500 clients, and the new services are designed to scale the benefits of AI across the entire enterprise technology stack.
The timing is notable as enterprises rush to adopt generative AI and agentic AI, but many find their existing infrastructure—mainframes, legacy middleware, custom applications—cannot support the data volumes, latency, and integration needs of modern AI systems. By focusing on modernization rather than replacement, IBM and ServiceNow aim to offer a cost-effective, low-risk entry point for organizations that cannot afford to rip out their core systems.
The services will be delivered through a combination of IBM Consulting, IBM Technology expert labs, and ServiceNow's professional services organization. Pricing will be determined based on the scope of modernization projects, but the companies emphasize that the modular approach allows clients to start small and scale as they prove value.
Industry analysts have welcomed the partnership, noting that it addresses a real market need. According to a recent Gartner survey, more than 60% of large enterprises consider legacy system integration as their top barrier to AI adoption. The IBM-ServiceNow offering directly targets that pain point by providing tools and methodologies that have been tested in real-world deployments.
In a demonstration of the technology, IBM and ServiceNow showed how a fictional global bank could use the autonomous infrastructure service to detect a failing storage node, automatically trigger a remediation workflow, and update the CMDB—all without human intervention. Similarly, the data governance service was shown to automatically classify sensitive customer data and apply appropriate access controls across multiple legacy databases.
The companies also highlighted the security benefits of the collaboration. By integrating Hashicorp Vault into ServiceNow workflows, secrets and credentials can be managed centrally, reducing the risk of exposure during AI model training and inference. Red Hat Ansible automation ensures that security patches and compliance checks are applied consistently across heterogeneous environments.
Looking ahead, IBM and ServiceNow plan to continue co-innovating on agentic AI use cases, including automated incident response, intelligent service desk, and predictive maintenance. The goal is to create a self-healing enterprise where AI agents handle routine tasks and anomalies, freeing human workers for higher-value decision-making.
The partnership is a significant step toward making AI practical for the vast majority of enterprises that still run on COBOL, RPG, and other legacy technologies. By providing a bridge between the old and the new, IBM and ServiceNow hope to unlock the value trapped in decades of code and data, and accelerate the AI transformation that so many organizations need to stay competitive.
Source:Network World News