Aligne AI vs ServiceNow AI Control Tower

Aligne is a London AI governance and GRC firm that sells both advisory work and its own software. Its legal entity, Aligne Technologies Ltd, was incorporated in England on 7 April 2014. Aligne says it started as an enterprise GRC advisory firm for tier-1 banks, insurers and asset managers, and that it has teams in the UK, the UAE (Dubai) and India. Much of its history is IBM work: it says it ran a 20,000-user IBM OpenPages rollout for a UK retail bank in 2016, and IBM's partner directory lists it as an IBM Gold Business Partner that resells and implements OpenPages and watsonx.governance. Aligne's site dates the launch of Altrum, which it calls "Continuous AI Control", to 2026. IBM's partner directory and IBM's product blog call the product AltrumX, and the IBM post describes it in production use for longer than that. It has five parts: an AI Inventory that records AI systems, including shadow AI, with owners, risk ratings and model providers; an assessment agent that rates risk and recommends controls; guardrails that check prompts and responses for personal data, custom data rules, prompt injection, harmful content and restricted topics, and then block, mask or log them; an AI Gateway that routes model and MCP tool calls with virtual keys, budgets, rate limits and request logs; and reporting that exports posture, guardrail activity, logs and cost. Altrum is delivered as SaaS, and customers keep their own model provider credentials. Aligne also sells advisory work: shadow AI discovery, AI risk and vendor assessments, framework design, monitoring and board training. It also does GRC consulting, implementation and managed support. **AI compliance coverage** Aligne says Altrum maps to the NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, the EU AI Act and OWASP, and lets teams set rules from FCA and PRA expectations and from UAE and Saudi regulation. It does not publish how deeply each framework is mapped. Altrum sends evidence to IBM OpenPages (two-way, Aligne says), ServiceNow and Archer, and adds runtime controls to IBM watsonx.governance. In an IBM product blog post from October 2026, co-written by Aligne and IBM staff, an unnamed maritime SaaS customer moved to governed production AI in under a week. The post says 9% of that customer's AI interactions were flagged, 99% of them for personal data. Aligne lists ISO certifications on its site but publishes no certificates and doesn't name a certification body. It mentions no SOC 2 report. **Who it's for** Banks, insurers and other regulated firms, especially those already using IBM OpenPages or watsonx.governance, that want consulting and runtime AI controls from one supplier. The site shows logos for HSBC, Aviva, Nationwide, MUFG, Nomura, Moody's, bp and Emirates NBD but doesn't say which of them use Altrum rather than Aligne's GRC services. No prices are published.

ServiceNow AI Control Tower is a centralized AI governance platform built on the ServiceNow AI Platform (CMDB and CSDM 5.0), enabling enterprises to discover, inventory, and govern AI assets across their entire ecosystem—including internally built, third-party, and agent-driven AI. The product provides automated AI asset discovery, risk and compliance management aligned to NIST AI RMF and EU AI Act, lifecycle management, third-party AI risk assessment, and integration with ServiceNow's Integrated Risk Management (IRM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) modules. ServiceNow has signed the EU AI Code of Practice.