Kong becomes a founding member of ServiceNow Control Tower Alliance – Unite.AI

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

The alliance is based on 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 securely and at scale, and their solutions will be discovered, observed and governed through the Control Tower, according to the announcement. The program will coexist alongside existing ServiceNow Store and Workflow Data Network Partner Passport programs.

Amit Zavery, president, chief product officer and chief operating officer at ServiceNow, said in the announcement that AI agents have multiplied in number and capabilities to the point that no single solution, no matter how 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 intended to give customers the visibility, control and trust needed to transform with AI.

Three ways of engaging partners

ServiceNow says alliance partners work with it in three ways. As part of the build-together journey, partners are working with ServiceNow on solutions running on the Super Intelligence Control Tower, building on the platform companies already use to govern AI rather than offering standalone tools that customers must integrate themselves. As part of governance delivery, curated, pre-integrated solutions must pass ServiceNow’s qualification and certification process, with shared standards for agent identity and security barriers. As part of sell-and-lead-together, select partners integrate their solutions with 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 qualification, certification and integration testing before being listed, enabling adoption with governance in place from the start.

Role as a founding member of Kong

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

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 corporate AI policies into control points through APIs, templates, and tools, helping customers confidently put AI agents to work.”

Kong said its participation follows the alliance’s three modalities: partnering with ServiceNow on solutions running on the Super Intelligence Control Tower, subjecting its solutions to ServiceNow’s qualification and certification process, and creating joint, deeply integrated offerings with ServiceNow. In the ServiceNow release, Marietti said Kong will help extend platform governance to real-time application through the APIs, models and tools that AI agents depend on.

Kong describes its Kong Konnect platform as a solution that offers enterprises consistent enforcement of security and access policies across the APIs, templates and tools used by their agents, with the freedom to change models, vendors and environments without rebuilding governance. Within the alliance, Kong said it will bring that application 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.

Product features Control tower

A ServiceNow product page describes the features of the Super Intelligence Control Tower in terms of discovery, security, governance, observability, and value measurement. The discovery feature automatically inventories third-party AI agents, models, and MCP servers and connects them to the customer’s configuration management database. Security features track AI identity and access, block prompt injections, and include a kill switch that shuts down an AI agent. Governance functions provide lifecycle workflows and ready-to-use content packages 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, earned value, and return on investment.

The page also describes AI Passport, a signed document issued to each native or third-party AI agent that confirms their identity and defines what they are allowed to do, within 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 visibility into AI assets and security outcomes and ultimately drives resolution. Christopher Sestito, CEO and co-founder of HiddenLayer, said HiddenLayer brings purpose-built AI-powered 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 the job done while NVIDIA OpenShell enforces boundaries at runtime.

Ely Kahn, Okta’s chief product officer, 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 the 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 joins the alliance to help businesses implement usage- and performance-based pricing models with reliable billing, real-time visibility into usage and spend controls. Dan Graves, WitnessAI’s Chief Product Officer, said integrating WitnessAI’s language models, which he described as designed to understand behavioral intentions, with Control Tower offers new levels of AI policy control, usage analysis and cost control. Zenity CEO Ben Kliger said Zenity offers protection and control throughout the lifecycle of AI agents, and that the Super Intelligence Control Tower extends that security enterprise-wide by embedding it into the workflows customers already rely on.