ServiceNow is betting big on generative artificial intelligence to drastically change the software it sells and the people who sell it.
“We’re infusing AI all over the place internally,” says Chief Customer Officer Chris Bedi, who says the company has put more than 25 generative AI use cases into production. “We have to transform our company just like every company on the planet.”
To get the business up to speed, ServiceNow mandated that every department needed to develop an AI roadmap. Pilots were conducted last year and generative AI has since been infused into every workplace function ranging from software engineering, HR, customer service, marketing, sales, and financing. Bedi says everyone at ServiceNow is using generative AI today and 84% of the company’s workforce is using the technology daily.
When asked to quantify the scale of impact for each of these use cases, Bedi says, “if they were unimportant, we’d kill them.” But he shares some ballpark numbers: Around eight to ten are considered high impact, five are medium, and the rest are lower impact.
ServiceNow, which sells cloud-based software that helps businesses manage their workflows, says the AI investments are already paying off with meaningful gains to ease workloads. After just four months, generative AI was doing the work equivalent to 50 full-time employees on an annualized basis. For software engineers, their performance improvement ranged from 5% to 8%. Employees experienced a 10% net reduction of the work coming into the customer support call center.
That’s a lot of change to manage quickly. Bedi says it is on leadership to set the tone from the top. “This is not replacing your job,” he says. “This helps you do a job better and reduces a lot of manual toil you have to do. Quite frankly, you can do a more interesting job.”
And even Bedi’s own role at ServiceNow has evolved amid the AI boom. Since September 2015, he had held the role of chief digital information officer, serving as customer zero for ServiceNow's various products. But as Bedi began to spend increasing amounts of time with chief information officers and helping them work with AI, he took on the new role in May.
“We decided to let me spend 100% of my time with customers to make sure they are getting the most out of the platform,” says Bedi, who handed over the CDIO reins to Kellie Romack, ServiceNow's SVP of digital technology.
The ascendance of AI helped ServiceNow leap into the Fortune 500 for the first time in 2023. Last month, the company announced a bunch of new generative AI capabilities, including the integration of two generative AI assistants, ServiceNow Now Assist and Microsoft Copilot, that would allow users in Microsoft Teams to ask workplace questions to Now Assist.
But ServiceNow has also asked Wall Street for patience before it sees a lift to the top line from the new generative AI products. Even after launching a bunch of new generative AI tools, ServiceNow stuck with a prior 2026 sales outlook of $15 billion in subscription revenue.
Bedi believes that when we look back on this moment in time, some of the generative AI use cases that businesses pursued will look comically simple. “If you zoom out and fast forward 12 to 18 months, it’s going to become unthinkable for people not to have gen AI infused in their work,” Bedi says.
Offloading work to the machines can help companies like ServiceNow manage costs, but Bedi says it is just as important to measure the sentiment of ServiceNow’s employees. When the company rolled out generative AI summarization tools to help make customer service agents more efficient, the company asked: Is this useful for you? Around 70% said yes.
“And so to me, that's a really good sign,” says Bedi, adding that when new technologies are rolled out, employees can be resistant. “With gen AI, people are actually running to it.”
John Kell
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