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The number of software tollgates is expanding. ServiceNow on Monday joined firms such as HubSpot and Workday in detailing plans to charge customers that use AI agents to tap data in its apps. During its financial analyst day in Las Vegas, the company unveiled “Action Fabric”, a new layer—effectively a tollgate—that AI agents will have to go through to interact with data in their ServiceNow apps. COO Amit Zavery said the company will measure how often customers access the Action Fabric, “meter” that usage, and charge customers for it. The charge is essentially a tax on customers using outside AI agents to interact with their data in ServiceNow’s apps, JPMorgan analyst Mark Murphy said in a note to investors. The move is likely to fuel a growing debate about whether software tollgates will help or hinder software firms’ competitiveness long term. Last month, for instance, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman warned that incumbent software firms that “try to protect what they have” could get into trouble, adding that worries about AI’s impact on software had been overblown. Software executives, however, see tollgates as offering potential for revenue growth. Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri, for instance, has said charging customers for using AI agents offered “a lot of upside” financially for Workday. ServiceNow echoed that sentiment. “This is a tremendous [market] opportunity for our company,” said ServiceNow’s executive vice president of its AI platform, Jon Sigler, on Monday of the Action Fabric. Sigler said ServiceNow has a new connector that makes it easy for Claude Cowork to connect to the Agent Fabric so Claude can take actions and build apps within ServiceNow. “What’s going to end up happening is we’re going to have this universal action layer, where all of these systems are calling directly into our Action Fabric,” he said in his pitch to Wall Street analysts and investors about the product. A ServiceNow spokesperson said customers would be charged based on how many actions the AI agents take via the Action Fabric. A person familiar with Action Fabric added that customers can still access their data with outside AI agents through standard application program interfaces, but that Action Fabric lets the AI agents access more data and take more actions in ServiceNow apps. In another example of new ways companies are dealing with the changes brought by AI tools, DataDog has limited how often customers can use its model context protocol server that allows them to use its apps with AI agents from other companies. It allows AI agents to make up to 5,000 daily requests or 50,000 monthly requests to use its tools, a spokesperson said. Then there’s the SAP approach. The $200 billion German software company for storing enterprise sales data is taking a harsher stance towards outside AI agents. As Kevin and I reported Monday, SAP has a new policy that suggests it will ban customers from using external AI agents to access data they store in SAP apps without the company’s official endorsement. Whether customers will tolerate software firms’ restrictions and tolls for accessing apps they already pay for is an open question, especially as shifts toward usage-based pricing models from firms such as Anthropic begin to strain AI budgets.
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