This week, two of enterprise technology’s most powerful players made significant moves on AI agents. Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork. ServiceNow unveiled Autonomous Workforce and EmployeeWorks. Both announcements are real, both are significant — and both reveal something interesting about where the industry thinks it’s going.
Based on what they announced this week, I don’t think they’re being ambitious enough.
What Microsoft Did
Copilot Cowork shifts Microsoft’s AI ambition from generative to agentic. Until now, Copilot has been good at producing — drafting emails, summarising documents, generating slides. Useful, but fundamentally assistive. You still had to do the work.
Copilot Cowork is different. You describe the outcome. The AI creates a plan and executes it across your M365 environment — autonomously, across multiple applications, with you monitoring rather than doing.
That’s a meaningful line to cross. Microsoft is calling it “delegation.”
It’s currently in the Frontier programme — enterprise beta, not GA. The rollout will be careful. That’s very much by design.
Microsoft’s carefulness isn’t irrational. Their core enterprise value proposition is the security boundary. They’re trusted because they move deliberately, because they’ve earned the right to sit inside the compliance perimeter of some of the world’s most regulated organisations. Stability over pace is a defensible position — as long as their enterprise customers can afford the same.
That assumption is getting harder to hold. Agentic AI is not evolving on a slow enterprise adoption curve. Results are real, timelines are compressing, and competitors — both inside and outside the Microsoft ecosystem — are moving faster. Copilot Cowork is a meaningful step, but it’s structurally a one-shot: you define the task, the agent executes it, and the engagement ends. There’s no iteration loop, no mechanism for the agent to reflect on outcomes and sharpen its approach over time. For enterprise customers who can still afford patience, that’s fine. The question is how long that describes most of them.
What ServiceNow Did
ServiceNow’s announcement is, in some ways, more ambitious in its framing. They’re not calling these “AI assistants” or “copilots.” They’re calling them AI specialists — entities that own a job, end to end, the way a new team member would.
The stress test they cite is compelling: when Moveworks joined ServiceNow, their IT helpdesk load doubled overnight. AI absorbed 90% of L1 tickets without missing an SLA. They didn’t just survive the surge — they productised it.
That’s a real result, not a demo. And the language around it is unusually direct for a vendor announcement. “AI that finally clocks in.” “They own a job, not just a task.”
ServiceNow’s advantage is structural. They already own the workflow layer across HR, IT, procurement and finance in a huge chunk of enterprise. They’re not trying to build a new beachhead — they’re deepening something they already have. Adding intelligence to a layer that already touches every employee in every transaction.
That’s a strong position. The risk is that it’s also a constraining one.
ServiceNow’s frame is: make existing work smarter. Automate the ticket. Accelerate the process. Remove the friction from the workflow that’s already there. It’s a compelling efficiency argument, and the ROI is measurable. But a specific process is a narrow goal — and a narrow goal leaves no room for the agent to evolve, to find paths that look different from what you defined at the start. Like Microsoft, it’s a conservative deployment model. And it carries the same underlying assumption: that their enterprise customers have the luxury of thinking incrementally.
The Gap Neither Is Talking About
Both announcements are fundamentally about automation — replacing human effort inside existing processes with AI effort. That’s valuable. It’s also the conservative version of this opportunity.
What neither addresses is what happens when you give an agent a goal instead of a process.
A useful illustration: Oliver Henry gave an AI agent called Larry a single brief — grow his app’s TikTok presence. Not a content calendar. Not a process. An outcome. Larry executed Henry’s initial ideas, then started generating strategies Henry hadn’t considered — and they outperformed anything he would have done himself. Half a million views in five days, converting into paying subscribers.
The key was that Larry wasn’t constrained to Henry’s methods. Given a goal rather than a process, it found better work to do.
Apply that to enterprise support functions. HR, finance, legal, procurement — these exist in their current form as adaptations to human cognitive limits. Those constraints are shifting. If you hand an agent a goal rather than a workflow, you create conditions for it to find paths that look nothing like the current process. That’s a different kind of value than automation delivers.
What Microsoft and ServiceNow announced this week doesn’t go there — at least not publicly. The goal-oriented frame, where the agent challenges the process rather than executing it, isn’t part of the story yet.
Why It Matters Now
Microsoft and ServiceNow are setting the visible frontier of what enterprise AI looks like. That frontier will shape how executives think, how budgets get allocated, and how IT strategies get written for the next 18 months.
Both vendors are, rationally, optimising for stability. They’re large, their customers are large, and the cost of getting it wrong inside a regulated enterprise is high. Conservative deployment — narrow goals, one-shot execution — is a reasonable position for an organisation with that much to protect.
The risk isn’t that they’re wrong about their own constraints. It’s that they’re building platforms that impose those constraints on their customers too, without leaving a path to evolve inside the walls. As agentic AI matures faster than these platforms can absorb — delivering broader goals, iterating on outcomes, compounding over time — enterprise customers who want to keep pace will find themselves with one option: go outside the ecosystem.
That’s the disconnect. Not a competitive threat to Microsoft or ServiceNow, at least not yet. A strategic trap for their customers — built with the best of intentions.
The smart move is to ask both questions simultaneously: how do we make today’s work more efficient, and what does work look like if we give agents room to evolve it? The second question is harder. It’s also the one your platform may not be designed to answer.
Anders L. Munck is an IT executive and founder of IT Leadership Services, working with organisations navigating complexity and transformation.