What AI Changes About a ServiceNow Delivery Team

[Chris Pearson]

How many developers does it take to build a custom app on SN? A few years ago I’d have answered with a staffing plan. An architect or tech lead, three or four developers, a BA, somebody on testing, maybe a PM to keep them all in line, and a calendar full of stand-ups.

At Naitiv we’re working out a different answer. A small number of senior people, each paired with an AI coding agent (we use Claude Code), producing the volume of work that used to need a full team. The agent writes a lot of the code. The senior person decides what gets written, reads what comes back, and owns what ships.

That sounds like a cost story. Mostly it’s a judgment story.

Here’s what surprised me. The bottleneck moved. It used to sit in producing code. Now it sits in deciding about code. Every hour the agent saves on writing a script include, somebody has to spend part of it asking whether that script include should exist at all. Is there an OOB capability that already does this? Is this a configuration dressed up as code? Will it survive the next upgrade? Maybe this thing should have been a UI Policy instead of a client script. Should this be a Flow or lengthy code?

Those are architect questions. They always have been. The difference now is speed. A junior developer used to absorb some of the cost of a bad decision just by being slow to implement it, which gave somebody time to notice and architects time to think, ponder, consider alternative designs. An AI agent implements a bad decision before you’ve finished your morning coffee.

So what does “senior” mean on a team built this way?

You read code faster than you write it, and you actually read it.

You know the platform well enough to spot generated code that’s fighting it.

You can write a requirement precisely enough that a machine can’t misread it. (Harder than it sounds.)

You’ll say “No…but…” to the agent exactly the way you’d say it to a stakeholder.

None of that is new. Things just tend to move quicker now. You have to stay on your toes. I've been on projects where the customer has a person who was almost as good and fast at writing code as AI is. On that project I had to do the same things. My time was spent teaching them that there was such a thing as 'the ServiceNow way'. When you have a hammer and it's a really good hammer, everything looks like a nail. But that's not the ServiceNow way, is it?

Let's get into this a bit and I'll pull back the curtain over the next few posts about how I do this in this new world we all live in now.