Managing artificial intelligence within an enterprise environment presents a significant visibility challenge. While organizations can track AI assets, ownership, and business dependencies, identifying whether those models contain malicious code or are susceptible to data leakage remains difficult. Security tools often operate in isolation, failing to provide the necessary context regarding which business services are impacted or who is responsible for remediation.

To address this, Cisco has joined the ServiceNow Control Tower Alliance as a founding member. This collaboration integrates Cisco AI Defense with the ServiceNow Super Intelligence Control Tower, creating a unified framework for discovering, securing, and governing AI deployments across distributed infrastructure.

Bridging Security and Governance

The ServiceNow Control Tower Alliance aims to standardize how companies adopt AI at scale. By participating as a founding member, Cisco ensures that its security solutions meet rigorous qualification, certification, and integration testing standards. This partnership allows organizations to leverage the Super Intelligence Control Tower as a central hub for AI governance, while Cisco AI Defense provides the specialized security depth required to protect these assets.

Cisco’s contribution is informed by its extensive research into the adversarial threat landscape. As a member of the NIST AI Safety Institute and a contributor to the OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications, Cisco brings a deep understanding of evolving AI-specific threats to the alliance’s shared safety guardrails.

Operational Integration

The partnership builds upon an expanded collaboration between the two companies that began in April 2025. Currently, two primary integrations are available on the ServiceNow Store to facilitate immediate deployment:

  • Asset Discovery: Cisco AI Defense automatically populates the Control Tower inventory with discovered AI assets.
  • Exposure Management: Security detections identified by Cisco are pushed directly into ServiceNow AI Security Exposure Management, allowing teams to assign ownership and track the status of necessary fixes.

In this architecture, Cisco AI Defense functions as the security engine, providing continuous insight and protection, while ServiceNow serves as the system of action for governance and remediation. This division of labor ensures that security teams can respond to threats with the context of business impact, rather than managing alerts in a vacuum.

Future Implications for AI Adoption

As AI agents, models, and datasets continue to proliferate across multi-cloud environments, the complexity of maintaining a secure posture will only increase. The Control Tower Alliance provides a structured approach to this growth, ensuring that security and governance are embedded from the start of the AI lifecycle. Organizations currently using ServiceNow to govern their AI initiatives can access these integrations today to begin aligning their security operations with the alliance’s standards.