AI will transform the role of the platform owner

To better understand the future of work, ServiceNow paired up for the third year in a row with research partner Pearson to produce the 2025 Workforce Skills Forecast. This study assesses how AI agents and related technologies such as generative AI (GenAI) will impact workers and organizations in the next five years.

[NOTE: Experienced human writers and editors used AI to help research and draft this article.]

ServiceNow and Pearson used machine learning to mine labor market data in 10 countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the UAE, the UK, and the U.S.). The resulting analysis maps the changing relationship between people and AI in the workplace and predicts that AI will change the mix of skills required for people and organizations to thrive.

Long-term impacts on platform owners:

1. Shift from configuration to orchestration: As agentic AI becomes more capable of self-configuration and optimization, platform owners will need to develop expertise in defining objectives, establishing boundaries, and managing agent interactions, rather than hands-on implementation. This represents a fundamental shift in skills and responsibilities—moving from technical configuration to strategic agent management.

2. Transformation of governance models: Agentic AI will fundamentally transform platform governance models. As AI agents begin making decisions with increasing autonomy, platform owners must develop new governance frameworks that maintain appropriate human oversight while allowing AI systems the freedom to operate effectively.

By 2030, the impact of AI and other advanced technologies on the platform owner role will be high.

Despite the impact of AI on the role, an additional 32,200 platform owners are projected to be needed in the U.S. to satisfy demand to enable emerging technologies across industries over the next five years, according to our research.

Platform owners drive the vision and execution of digital ecosystems, wielding both technical and strategic authority. They architect standards, orchestrate development teams, and establish governance guardrails while prioritizing features that deliver value.

Operating at the intersection of business demands and technical possibilities, platform owners make high-stakes decisions about integrations, technologies, and growth paths. They're equal parts visionary and pragmatist—championing platform capabilities across the organization while constantly measuring performance and adapting to shifting market demands. Ultimately, they're responsible for ensuring their platform remains relevant, resilient, and ready to scale in an increasingly interconnected digital landscape.

According to ServiceNow University, the average annual salary for a platform owner who specializes in the ServiceNow AI Platform is $105,000.

Key skills/mindsets required for a platform owner include:

• Strategic vision: Ability to align platform capabilities with long-term business objectives while anticipating market shifts and technological disruptions
• Technical breadth: Understanding of architecture principles, APIs, data flows, and integration patterns without necessarily requiring deep coding expertise
• Stakeholder management: Skill in navigating competing priorities across departments, translating technical concepts for nontechnical audiences, and building consensus
• Decision framework design: Creating systematic approaches to evaluate trade-offs between customization, standardization, security, performance, and development velocity
• Ecosystem thinking: Recognizing how platform changes ripple across dependent systems and planning for extensibility, scalability, and partner integrations
• Metrics definition: Establishing meaningful KPIs that balance technical performance with business outcomes to drive continuous platform improvement
• Governance establishment: Developing policies, standards, and access controls that enable innovation while ensuring compliance and security requirements
• Resource orchestration: Effectively allocating budget, talent, and technical assets across competing platform initiatives to maximize overall value delivery

AI has already begun to change the role of platform owner by reshaping the tasks, qualifications, and expectations defining the field. Although AI will enhance platform owners’ productivity by automating repetitive tasks, it will also alter the tasks that workers need to succeed.

According to our research with Pearson, 32% of U.S.-based platform owners’ jobs will be transformed by AI over the next five years. Almost half of that transformation will come from agentic AI, while the rest will be driven by other forms of AI, such as GenAI and machine learning.

The impact of this transformation will be equivalent to 12.7 hours saved per week per person by 2030—5.9 hours saved due to agentic AI and 6.8 hours saved due to other types of AI.

Fifteen percent of total tasks associated with platform owners will be impacted by agentic AI. Yet only 13% of those will be fully automated, meaning humans will not be needed to complete them. The rest will be augmented, speeding up the work and allowing people to do much more than they could on their own without AI.

Time savings from AI will halve the time platform owners currently spend just managing individual and team projects to ensure timelines are met. Freeing them from such administrative tasks will allow them to focus on higher-level work and goals.

As agentic AI becomes increasingly prevalent in the workforce, platform owners can take the following measures to thrive and remain relevant.

• Become agent orchestrators: Shift focus from managing systems to defining agent objectives, constraints, and interaction patterns. Develop expertise in agent prompt engineering and behavior monitoring while designing governance frameworks that balance autonomy with alignment to organizational goals.
• Build human-AI collaboration models: Create workflows where human expertise and AI capabilities complement each other. Identify which tasks benefit from agent autonomy versus human judgment, then establish clear handoff protocols and feedback loops to continuously improve collaborative outcomes.
• Invest in meta-systems design: Focus on creating environments where agents can safely experiment, learn, and optimize, rather than prescribing exact processes. Develop observability tools that provide visibility into agent decision-making, and establish guardrails for autonomous operation.
• Cultivate strategic domain expertise: Shift from technical implementation to deeper business and domain knowledge. Become the translator between organizational needs and agent capabilities, using industry expertise to guide AI systems toward high-value activities.
• Champion ethical AI governance: Lead the development of responsible AI frameworks that address bias, transparency, and accountability. Establish protocols for regular auditing of agent behaviors, and create mechanisms for human intervention when agents operate outside parameters.
• Embrace continuous learning: Commit to ongoing education about emerging AI capabilities and limitations. Experiment with new agent technologies in controlled environments, and develop a practical understanding of how different agent architectures solve business problems.

Honing these skills and adopting a mindset of continuous learning, platform owners (and, more broadly, all tech workers) can maintain relevance and thrive alongside agentic AI. Remember, agentic AI is a tool, not a replacement for human ingenuity. By focusing on adaptability and leveraging uniquely human traits, platform owners can position themselves as indispensable collaborators in an AI-driven future.

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