Kong Becomes Founding Member of ServiceNow Control Tower Alliance

ServiceNow on October 28, 2026 announced the ServiceNow Control Tower Alliance, a partner ecosystem spanning AI, cloud infrastructure, security, governance, value measurement, and token metering, with Kong among founding members that also include Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, HiddenLayer, NVIDIA, Okta, OpenAI, Stripe, WitnessAI, and Zenity.

The alliance is built around the ServiceNow Super Intelligence Control Tower, which ServiceNow describes as a centralized control plane to discover, secure, govern, observe, and measure enterprise AI. Members will work with ServiceNow to help customers adopt trusted enterprise AI safely at scale, and their solutions will be discovered, observed, and governed through the Control Tower, according to the announcement. The program will coexist alongside the existing ServiceNow Store and Workflow Data Network Partner Passport programs.

Amit Zavery, ServiceNow’s president, chief product officer and chief operating officer, said in the announcement that AI agents have multiplied in number and capacity to the point where no single solution, however powerful, can see or protect everything on its own. He said AI governance requires an ecosystem of partners willing to innovate together on an open platform, and that the alliance is meant to give customers the visibility, control, and confidence to transform with AI.

Three Engagement Modes for Partners

ServiceNow said alliance partners work with it in three ways. Under the build-together track, partners collaborate with ServiceNow on solutions that run on the Super Intelligence Control Tower, building on the platform enterprises already use to govern AI rather than offering standalone tools customers must integrate themselves. Under deliver-with-governance, curated, pre-integrated solutions must pass ServiceNow’s qualification and certification process, with shared standards for agent identity and safety guardrails. Under sell-and-lead-together, select partners integrate their solutions with the Control Tower to create offerings that ServiceNow sells and supports globally.

For customers, ServiceNow said the alliance provides a curated set of AI solutions that have passed its qualification, certification, and integration testing before being listed, allowing adoption with governance in place from the start.

Kong’s Founding-Member Role

Kong, which describes itself as the AI Connectivity Company, separately announced its founding membership on October 28, 2026, saying it will work alongside ServiceNow and the other founding members to help bring security and governance to the models, tools, and agents that AI applications depend on.

In Kong’s announcement, CEO and co-founder Augusto Marietti said: “AI governance depends on enforcing what agents can access and do. Together, ServiceNow and Kong can turn enterprise AI policies into control points across APIs, models, and tools, helping customers put AI agents to work with confidence.”

Kong said its participation follows the alliance’s three modes: collaborating with ServiceNow on solutions that run on the Super Intelligence Control Tower, submitting its solutions to ServiceNow’s qualification and certification process, and creating joint, deeply integrated offerings with ServiceNow. In ServiceNow’s release, Marietti said Kong will help extend the platform’s governance into real-time enforcement across the APIs, models, and tools that AI agents depend on.

Kong describes its Kong Konnect platform as giving enterprises consistent enforcement of security and access policies across the APIs, models, and tools their agents use, with the freedom to change models, providers, and environments without rebuilding governance. Within the alliance, Kong said it brings that enforcement to LLM, MCP, and agent-to-agent traffic through Kong AI Gateway, translating governance policies into real-time control over how AI connects to the business.

Control Tower Product Functions

A ServiceNow product page describes the Super Intelligence Control Tower’s functions across discovery, security, governance, observability, and value measurement. The discovery function automatically inventories AI agents, models, and MCP servers from first or third parties and ties them to the customer’s configuration management database. Security functions track AI identity and access, block prompt injections, and include a kill switch that stops an AI agent. Governance functions provide lifecycle workflows and out-of-the-box content packs for the EU AI Act, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and the California AI Transparency Act. Observability functions monitor agent performance through metrics and log traces, while measurement functions track adoption rates, realized value, and return on investment.

The page also describes AI Passport, a signed document issued to every native or third-party AI agent that confirms its identity and defines what it is allowed to do, scoped to the customer’s business context. According to ServiceNow, the ServiceNow AI Platform enforces the document at runtime and blocks any action outside its scope.

Statements From Other Founding Members

ServiceNow’s announcement included statements from other founding members. DJ Sampath, senior vice president and general manager of AI software and platform at Cisco, said connecting Cisco AI Defense with ServiceNow gives customers AI asset visibility and security findings and ultimately drives remediation. HiddenLayer CEO and co-founder Christopher Sestito said HiddenLayer brings purpose-built AI security to the partnership while ServiceNow brings the enterprise platform and workflow orchestration. Pat Lee, vice president of strategic partnerships at NVIDIA, said ServiceNow gives agents the workflows and business context to get work done while NVIDIA OpenShell enforces the boundaries at runtime.

Okta chief product officer Ely Kahn said the alliance extends Okta’s ongoing work with ServiceNow, which combines ServiceNow’s containment decision layer with Okta’s kill switch capability to block new token requests from agents acting beyond their intended scope. He said the companies share a vision of advancing the open standards needed to make a cross-platform kill switch possible.

Scott Woody, CEO and founder of Metronome, a Stripe product, said the company is joining the alliance to help businesses put usage- and outcome-based pricing models into practice with reliable billing, real-time visibility into usage, and controls on spending. WitnessAI chief product officer Dan Graves said integrating WitnessAI’s language models, which he described as designed to understand behavioral intent, with the Control Tower brings new levels of AI policy control, usage analytics, and cost controls. Zenity CEO Ben Kliger said Zenity brings protection and control across the AI agent lifecycle and that the Super Intelligence Control Tower extends that security across the enterprise by embedding it into the workflows customers already rely on.