In late 2025, MIT captured headlines claiming that “95% of organizations are getting zero return” from GenAI (source: MIT Sloan, State of AI in Business 2025). In my experience working with ServiceNow customers and Customer Success teams, the issue isn’t that value isn’t being created—it’s that organizations struggle to see, measure, and communicate the value that is occurring.
These challenges aren’t new—AI simply amplifies long‑standing value realization obstacles:
- Small wins are overlooked.
- Math is misunderstood or mistrusted.
- Process improvements feel disconnected from business outcomes.
1. Finding the small wins: Measuring at the right altitude
In my experience, it’s common for the E2E process to be measured versus the individual parts that make up the E2E process. This is an important callout, especially for early-stage AI deployments. Let’s use this workflow illustration as an example:
For this example, let’s focus on the IT service area and pick a commonly measured outcome: IT Incident MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution). For illustration purposes, let’s assume an average MTTR of 6 hours, or 360 minutes.
Let’s further assume that you implement the Now Assist GenAI capability specific to Resolution Note Summarization and see a 3-minute reduction in that phase. The source of the benefit being the summarization scale delivered by Now Assist, thus reducing the reading & writing required by the IT Agent.
When we measure the 3 minute reduction against the E2E 6-hour MTTR, the impact is negligible (<1%, 3 mins / 360 mins). But if we measure within the context of the ‘Close’ phase where we captured improvement, it’s a 5.6% improvement (360 mins x 15% = 54 mins. 3 min reduction / 54 mins). That’s meaningful. There’s often focus on the front-end of a workflow specific to deflection and reducing triage effort. Those are excellent areas to capture AI-based improvements. The read/write benefits can also surface in the resolution & close phases, so I often stress the importance of looking at each phase independently when looking for value. Applying that strategy helps to spotlight early‑stage AI wins that build trust and momentum.
In my experience, the small wins in AI can easily be overlooked. By celebrating the incremental victories, especially with new technology, it becomes a catalyst to accelerate adoption. It helps in early stages of change cycles for people to ‘see’ the incremental improvement. This servers as a catalyst to build belief, which creates critical mass, and helps raise strategic visibility & business impact. Once teams start recognizing these incremental wins, the next challenge emerges: getting people to trust the math behind them.
2. Building trust in the math: Making value believable
Even when small improvements exist, they only matter if people trust how they’re calculated. As our CEO Bill McDermott says often, “Trust is gained in drops, and lost in buckets,” and it is the “ultimate currency”. I was once told by an executive that 1 + 1 does not equal 2. Instead, 1 – 1 + 2 equals 2. Their point, albeit sarcastic, was that my math did not match how they did the math. The net, the math matters—and believing the math matters more.
It was a valuable lesson that I share here: it’s critically important to believe in the math to help create trust in your organization. My point, transparency in the math is critical.
Let’s stick with our hypothetical 3-minute time savings from the Resolution Note Generation Gen AI use-case.
The goal isn’t perfection—it’s transparency. When stakeholders understand each variable and can adjust assumptions with you, trust grows—and so does alignment. Some examples we consider specific to the Resolution Notes Generation outcome include:
- What % of incidents were touched by the capability?
- How many generated resolution notes were accepted and applied by the agent?
- How many Assists are consumed for each resolution note generated?
- What is the average hourly rate of the agents using the capability?
Below is a sample calculation for how ServiceNow approaches this use-case when discussing with a customer:
The point here is not to sell you on the math for this use-case, but it’s to illustrate the importance of understanding the variables that go into each calculation. Investing the time to understand the variables so adjustments can be made with key stakeholders is critical towards helping people ‘see’ and understand the rationale in the benefit being described. This is a critical step to build trust and can be a contributing factor towards helping leadership understand how the outcomes support strategic business measures.
3. Linking process improvements to business measures: Speaking the language of the C-Suite
Even when people trust the math, value doesn’t stick unless it connects to what business leaders care about. What if I told you a 3-minute time savings from accelerating resolution note generation reduced operational drag by $1.25M. Impactful?
At first glance, a 3‑minute reduction seems trivial—but the minutes add up and can easily go unnoticed.
Let’s look at an example company with $1B in Revenue & 50,000 annual IT incidents.
|
Annual Revenue / Incidents |
$1,000,000,000 / 50,000 = $20,000 per incident |
|
Revenue per Incident Minute |
$20,000 / 360 mins = $55.56 per minute |
|
Value of 3 Minutes Saved |
$55.56 x 3 = $166.68 per incident |
|
Annual Value of Time Saved |
$166.68 x 50,000 incidents = $8,334,000 |
|
Operational Margin Applied |
$8,334,000 x 15% = $1,250,100 |
|
Final Outcome |
Estimated $1.25M reduction in operational drag |
The goal is not to sell you on the $1.25M in estimated benefit. Value is in the ‘eye of the beholder’. But it is intended to show how an operational, process-driven outcome can connect to a strategic business measure. Building trust is critical before moving to monetize impact. This is intended to serve as an illustration of the bottoms-up connection that is often overlooked, and an example for how the ‘small wins’ in process improvements can directly tie to a business message that executives are looking for from their AI investments.
AI value isn’t missing—it’s often hiding in the increments. The organizations that learn to recognize and magnify those increments will lead the next era of operational excellence. With the right structure, the wins may already be there and just need to be uncovered—ServiceNow helps you find and scale them. If this is a topic that you would like to discuss further, please reach out to your primary ServiceNow point of contact.
