Project Arc: NVIDIA and ServiceNow Launch Self-Evolving Desktop AI Agent
3 min readServiceNow and NVIDIA used the opening keynote of ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 to put a long-running autonomous AI agent directly on every enterprise desktop. The product, Project Arc, runs on the employee’s machine, reads its file system, drives its terminals and applications, and chains together multistep work without anyone wiring up a pre-built workflow.
Jensen Huang joined Bill McDermott on stage to frame the launch as the next phase of enterprise AI. Rather than another chatbot or browser-tab copilot, Project Arc is pitched as a coworker that can take a goal, plan the steps, and execute against real systems. It targets developers, IT teams, and administrators first, where multistep operational work and tool sprawl have been hardest to automate.
The technical stack is the news underneath the headline. Project Arc is built on NVIDIA OpenShell, an Apache 2.0 open source secure runtime for autonomous agents that NVIDIA has been developing for the past six months. OpenShell sandboxes each agent and exposes only the files, processes, and APIs that policy allows, which is the precondition for letting an agent touch a real workstation. NVIDIA Nemotron open models supply the reasoning, with Nemotron 3 Super currently ranked first among open source models on the EnterpriseOps-Gym benchmark.
ServiceNow contributes the governance layer. The agent is wired into ServiceNow Action Fabric so every action flows through the Now Platform, and AI Control Tower logs the files read, commands run, and APIs called. Security leaders get an audit trail per agent and the ability to revoke or constrain permissions in real time. Action Fabric also gives Arc native access to the Configuration Management Database, so its plans are informed by how work already moves through the organization.
The competitive context matters. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all been pushing computer-use and browser agents at consumers and developers, but enterprises have held back because nothing audited what those agents actually did. Pairing a secure runtime from NVIDIA with workflow-level governance from ServiceNow is an explicit answer to that gap, and it positions the two companies as a default stack for sanctioned agentic AI at work.
Project Arc is available in early preview now, and the AI Control Tower integration with NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory is generally available. NVIDIA also released NOWAI-Bench, including the EnterpriseOps-Gym and EVA-Bench evaluation suites, as an open source project so other vendors can measure their own agents against the same enterprise tasks. Expect the next round of competitive claims from Salesforce, Microsoft, and the frontier labs to be benchmarked here.