ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 drew thousands of practitioners, executives, and partners to Las Vegas for a week of product announcements, strategy sessions, and the kind of direct conversations that rarely happen over email. For Zaelab, it was one of the most productive Knowledge events we have attended.

Across sessions, keynotes, and side conversations, we saw a big shift in how organizations approach AI. The conversations this year were about what to build first, what data needs to be in order before AI can do anything useful, and which workflows are worth automating versus which ones need to be redesigned entirely. Alongside that, a newer topic gained serious traction — what it actually means to run marketing, sales, commerce, and service on a single platform rather than stitching four separate tools together.

From Operations to Revenue: The Front Office Conversations

ServiceNow has spent years earning trust in IT, HR, and operations. What Knowledge 2026 made visible is that the platform is moving into territory that sales, marketing, and customer success leaders are now watching closely.

CRM, CPQ, and customer experience workflows are now central to ServiceNow's investment direction. For organizations that have already standardized on the platform for back-office functions, this creates a path to extend that investment into the revenue-generating side of the business without introducing a new system.

The front office is where configuration, pricing, and buying experiences intersect. When those workflows run inside the same platform as service and fulfillment, the customer moves through one process rather than getting handed between systems. We have written about how CPQ, viewed through a customer experience lens, becomes a revenue multiplier, and Knowledge 2026 showed that ServiceNow is now building the platform architecture to close that loop.

"Knowledge was an incredible event packed with exciting product announcements, sharp conversations, and a clear roadmap for how businesses can use AI to drive efficiency and elevate experiences. It was inspiring to see how ServiceNow is evolving to power the front office, helping organizations deliver a truly connected customer experience."

Kris Clason, Director, Client Partner at Zaelab

Composable CPQ and Commerce: Why the Architecture Question Kept Coming Up

One theme came up repeatedly across sessions and side conversations: composable CPQ. As enterprises look to modernize configure-price-quote and commerce experiences, demand for flexible, API-first architectures is accelerating.

The pattern we heard from organizations at Knowledge was familiar. Configuration logic sits in one place, pricing in another, and the self-service commerce layer operates somewhere else entirely. Each system functions on its own, but the buying process does not hold together. Customers want to configure, price, and purchase in one motion. Companies want that same motion to feed directly into fulfillment and service without someone manually bridging the gap.

Composable CPQ, combined with commerce, addresses that directly. When the configuration engine is decoupled from the front-end presentation layer, organizations can deliver buying experiences that handle real B2B complexity without looking or feeling like an internal tool. This is where AI-ready, end-to-end workflows for B2B commerce automation come into play.

Zaelab's depth in composable CPQ, combined with our ServiceNow practice, put us at the center of these conversations at Knowledge. We work across both the configuration architecture and the platform integration layer, which is where most of the complexity in these programs lives.

Unified Customer Experience For Revenue Growth

One of the most substantive sessions at Knowledge 2026 came from Ben Ivers of Tenon, covering how AI can be used to segment and reach customers by drawing on data already held inside ServiceNow.

The problem he described is one most enterprise marketing teams run into: the data exists, but it lives inside operational systems that marketing cannot query without a significant lift from IT or data engineering. Tenon's approach brings that capability natively into ServiceNow, so that campaign timing, audience segmentation, and message sequencing are driven by actual customer behavior and account history rather than static lists built once a quarter.

Zaelab and Tenon have a formal partnership to unify marketing, sales, and service on ServiceNow.. When marketing runs on the same data model as sales and service, campaigns stop being separate programs and start reflecting what is happening in the customer relationship. We worked through this directly with the Tenon team at Knowledge, looking at how to cut platform complexity, speed up campaign execution, and improve customer communication with a unified data and messaging layer. 

Zaelab at Knowledge 2026

We started the Knowledge week earlier than the main conference floor opened. On Monday, May 4, Zaelab brought together executives and ServiceNow leaders at Paiute Golf Resort. Four hours on the course with no agenda built more familiarity than most scheduled meetings manage in a week. 

That evening, the CRM and Industry Customer Happy Hour brought customers and partners together before the main sessions had even started, setting the right tone for the days that followed. On Tuesday, the Women of CRM Breakfast gave senior women leading CRM transformation a dedicated space for candid dialogue on AI adoption and revenue operations.

Throughout the week, Zaelab welcomed partners and industry leaders at the Penthouse Suite at the Venetian — a private space for focused conversations away from the noise of the conference floor. More than 50 visitors came through, including executives, ServiceNow leaders, and partners from ServiceNow, Tenon, Plat4mation, Fullcast, and commercetools. The suite also hosted the CPQ Transformation Lunch on Wednesday — a focused roundtable on modernizing quote-to-cash where the small-group format kept the conversation specific and the follow-ups concrete.

"Zaelab being there as a larger team allowed each of us to focus on our respective areas while bringing in leaders to ensure executive alignment with ServiceNow."

Zander Harris, Senior Account Executive, Zaelab

The RevOps Executive Dinner on Tuesday gave CRM and revenue leaders a dedicated evening to go deeper on what modernizing quote-to-cash and scaling GTM operations on ServiceNow looks like. Thursday's Badges Off Happy Hour at Yardbird was the perfect spot to warm up before the big concert night, with a full house of industry leaders locking in the connections they had built throughout the week.

What Starts in Las Vegas Doesn't Stay There

The organizations we met with are asking sharper questions than they were a year ago. Not "should we bring AI into our strategy" but "what does our data architecture need to look like before AI can do anything reliable." Not "should we modernize CPQ" but "how do we build a composable architecture that can support a buying experience that competes with what our customers use as consumers." Those are the conversations Zaelab's CRM GTM focus and composable CPQ practice are built for — and a number of them are already moving forward.

"Knowledge 2026 was a week of conversations, stronger partnerships, and one clear signal: the best is still ahead."

Rachna Chandrashekar, Director, CRM Practice Leader, Zaelab

If you were at Knowledge 2026 and want to continue a conversation, or missed it and want to hear what we took away — get in touch.