Nisarg Shah is VP of IT Operations Management at ServiceNow, responsible for AIOps and Service Graph 

 

 

Before I became a Vice President at ServiceNow—before I started managing the software products that help the Fortune 500 manage their own technology—I was fascinated by the Apollo lunar landing missions. Perhaps it was my childhood interest in everything about aeronautics and space—whether rockets, the components of a Boeing 747 or an Airbus 380. Or maybe it was the sheer number of components NASA had to build, test, and trust to work together before anyone could rely on them on the unforgiving surface of another world.

 

I recently learned that to take that famous "giant leap," my engineer hero, Neil Armstrong, had to get himself and two hundred Earth pounds of gear up and down from the LEM to the surface; step by step, rung by rung.  Those small steps made all the difference. The unsung hero of the mission was the egress system, or simply put:  _ the ladder. _

 

“No engineer trusts a step that hasn't been tested.”

 

I'm proud to announce our results in the Fall 2026 G2 Grid report rankings. Across IT Service Management, AIOps platforms, IT Asset Management, and Strategic Portfolio Management, your published reviews show that you believe we have the industry's most trusted ladder to handle the weight of your business as you prepare for your own leap into autonomous IT. Our No. 1 status means a lot to us because it is earned from reviews by IT practitioners like you who use ServiceNow every day to carry your own IT burdens and accomplish your mission.

 

 

Doing technology well today is complicated. AI is a challenging inflection point. We know AI will change everything, but no one can say exactly how. Amid rising expectations, our customers still carry a tremendous weight every day. Incident response in the morning, a budget conversation by lunch, an architecture review by the end of the week. Autonomous IT won't replace humans. The promises Autonomous IT will fulfill — are already fulfilling — are simply systems that need far less handholding, so the people running the overall technology can take on more responsibility with less anxiety, fewer surprises, and more confidence in their decisions.

 

That's the tension every one of us is navigating right now: leadership expects the giant leap into AI, but no engineer trusts a step that hasn't been tested rung by rung first. Armstrong didn't step off the LEM on faith. Every rung of that ladder had already been proven under real weight before he trusted it with his own. Autonomous IT works the same way. Each capability you put in place gets tested and earns your trust before the next one has to carry more weight, so the leap your board is waiting for turns out to be made of steps you've already verified are safe to stand on.

 

Four rungs to Autonomous IT. Four #1 rankings.

 

Rung one: ITSM.

 

Every incident, every request, every approval that runs through ServiceNow becomes part of a labeled history of good decisions: a record an AI agent can act on using informed judgment instead of a guess. You don't have to re-litigate a decision from scratch every time a ticket looks unfamiliar.

 

Practitioners who build that history can hand off narrow, well-defined tasks with less second-guessing. The rung underneath AI gets sturdier because it uses the data and best practices you’ve defined.

 

 

In the Fall 2026 G2 Grid Report for IT Service Management Tools, ServiceNow IT Service Management leads the quadrant. If this is where your team stands in your IT maturity journey, you're not behind. This is the hardest rung to build, and it carries a lot of weight.

 

Rung two: ITOM and AIOps.

 

A boot on rung one shows your teams can resolve issues well. Every incident closed cleanly, every request routed to the right person, every approval logged and reusable. But a resolved incident is still an incident. Something broke before anyone acted.

 

Rung two moves the moment of action earlier. Discovery and Service Mapping keep a live picture of what you run and how it connects, the same map your ITSM processes already lean on, so your team can see what a problem will touch before it spreads. Event Management takes the flood of alerts from your monitoring tools and correlates them against that map, so instead of three hundred separate alarms, your team sees the one issue actually putting a service at risk. Health Log Analytics goes a step further, catching the kind of quiet deviation that never trips a monitoring threshold at all, while it's still small enough to fix quietly.

 

That's the maturity step that separates resolving issues from preventing them, and it's exactly where the practitioners reviewing us on G2 say we earn their trust most.

 

In the Fall 2026 G2 Grid Report for AIOps Platforms, ServiceNow holds the top spot. That ranking comes from practitioners who've used point solutions and chose to trust ServiceNow instead.

 

Rung three: IT Asset Management.

 

NASA's budget peaked three years before Apollo 11 ever launched, and it kept shrinking every year after that. Congress funded the landing. It didn't fund what was supposed to come next: the follow-on missions, the programs nobody could point to on a chart yet. AI adoption is infrastructure spend too, whether or not anyone tracks it that way yet. Every model, every AI agent, every AI-enabled tool your teams adopt shows up on someone's balance sheet.

 

ITAM is the rung that makes that spend visible before it becomes a surprise. Once it's visible, your team stops defending a line item after the fact and starts planning the next rung around concrete numbers.

 

 

In the Fall 2026 G2 Grid Report for IT Asset Management Software, ServiceNow holds the top spot. Most ITAM tools specialize: one for software licenses, another for hardware, a third for cloud spend, which means reconciling three different pictures of the same estate before you can trust any of them. The practitioners behind that ranking are largely the ones who moved off that patchwork onto a system that already sits on the same CMDB running their ITSM and ITOM work, so the numbers don't need reconciling in the first place.

 

Rung four: Strategic Portfolio Management and Enterprise Architecture.

 

Every organization does this work differently. It happens in spreadsheets, in quarterly planning meetings, in a patchwork of point solutions that never quite talk to each other. Someone owns the app inventory in one tool. Someone else runs the investment committee off slides. The map and the money live in different rooms, updated on different days, agreed on by different people.

 

Enterprise Architecture is the map: what applications the business has and how they connect. Strategic Portfolio Management is what an organization does with that map: where it invests, retires, or modernizes. When those two run on the same data instead of being reconciled by hand every quarter, each rung carries its weight more predictably, and the people managing it have a clearer case to bring to leadership.

 

 

ServiceNow tops the Fall 2026 G2 Grid Report for Strategic Portfolio Management. It's the rung too many organizations shore up last, but that should take on earlier. When Strategic Portfolio Management is in place, you’re standing on the rung that finally lets decisions reflect the map and removes “best guessing” from your strategy.

 

The ladder is tested. The leap is yours.

 

Here's a detail that stuck with me. The ladder on the lunar module was built to stop short of the ground, a safety margin in case of a hard landing. Armstrong's touchdown was so gentle that the landing gear barely compressed, so the actual gap ended up bigger than engineers planned. He climbed back up to the bottom rung once, mid-descent, carrying that same two hundred pounds of gear, just to measure how far the drop really was. Then he carried it the rest of the way down himself.

 

Every rung on that ladder had been tested under real weight, but the last step still wasn't automatic. Someone still had to carry the weight down it.

 

G2's rankings are the record of what practitioners like you have already tested, rung by rung. Your judgment doesn't get lighter because of that work. It gets to cover more ground, with less anxiety and fewer surprises, while the decisions that still need a person keep getting carried by one.

 

We're glad to help you carry the weight of the next rung. You decide where the leap takes you.

 

Nisarg