As organizations embark on their AI journey, the path to effective AI adoption is paved with challenges like identifying the right use cases, measuring impact, and ensuring governance. ServiceNow’s Process Mining solution can be a powerful ally. In this post, we’ll explore how Process Mining supports organizations across a number of critical steps in their AI journey, from identifying tools for AI agents to streamlining governance with the AI Control Tower.
Identifying tools for our AI Agents
There is a lot of concern about AI Agents taking human jobs, but hey these little AI Agents have families to feed too. How do we find jobs (tools) for them. Process Mining can help. It’s important to remember these autonomous AI Agents need tools to achieve their use cases. These tools could be skills, classic machine learning techniques like task or document intelligence, sub flows using spokes to update or retrieve information in other applications, scripts, automations, catalog items, or knowledge articles. Process Mining can help identify where we have opportunities to create new tools.
How?
We can use Process Mining to isolate all of the work that is taking longer than 2 minutes and less than 15 or 30 minutes to move from an In Progress to a Resolved or Closed state. The logic there is that if it’s taking less than 2 minutes to make that journey you’ve likely already automated it, but if the work is taking longer than 2 and less than 15 minutes, you haven’t already automated it yet, but a human isn’t doing a lot of complex problem solving. There has to be some new AI Agent tool opportunities in that subset of the work.
Subset of process data that met the 2 to 15 minute criteria. Isolating the data this way helps quickly identify tools for AI agents but also helps quantify the productivity impact once the agents are deployed.
Here Is some even better news, you can start using this Process Mining technique today in your production instance with the Process Mining Evaluation project. This video shows you how.
ServiceNow provides 1000s of out of the box AI Agents, but for those situations that are unique to your organization this technique is great way to make sure your AI Agents are always equipped with the tools they need to get the job done.
Understanding the impact of AI Agents on the process
Deploying AI agents is only half the battle; understanding their impact on the process is equally important. Process Mining can play a key role as we deploy our AI Agents by giving us visibility into any unexpected adverse effects the agent may be causing so we can make the necessary adjustments, as well as helping us understand any positive affects it is having on the business outcomes. This is the data we need to justify future investments and scaling adoption.
Using the Process Mining comparison functionality, we can look at how our process was running prior to deploying an AI Agent and then after deploying an AI Agent.
Side by side view of a process prior to deploying an AI agent and after deploying the AI Agent.
You can find a live demonstration of this comparison capability here.
Continuous improvement for our agentic systems
As organizations scale AI agents across functions such as IT, Customer Support, HR, Finance, and Sales, the complexity of managing, monitoring, and optimizing these systems increases significantly. There will be a shift from our more deterministic workflows where an AI Agent may just be assisting a human at a certain step to more agentic systems where the entire use case could be accomplished by a team of AI agents. These multiagent systems are often called nondeterministic and the more agents you add the more nondeterministic things become.
Process Mining becomes a powerful solution to help us get the visibility we need to continuously improve these agentic systems.
Process map providing visibility into how the AI Agents are moving through the different tasks to complete use cases
We can start to answer questions like:
- Where do bottlenecks occur in the agentic flow? Are AI agents getting stuck?
- Where are unnecessary processing loops introducing latency and reducing efficiency?
- What are the root causes of slow-performing tools — e.g., sluggish search, RAG latency, or poor retrieval quality?
- At what point in the process are escalations to humans occurring — and why?
- Is the end-to-end process conforming to the design and expectations established during implementation?
If we are using Process Mining to identify improvement opportunities in our processes today, why should that change when AI Agents are operating them.
Our own Now on Now team delivered a great session on this topic and how ServiceNow is executing on this at our Knowledge 25 conference. This is Process Mining Master Class worth watching.
Streamlining AI Governance with the AI Control Tower
Everything about AI is rapidly evolving. And organizations are balancing their desire and need to reap the benefits of its power but to do it in a responsible way. ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower is an enterprise-wide solution that helps ensure consistent governance and compliance across all AI systems, mitigation of any risks, fast response to regulatory inquiries and the ability to measure AI’s value.
The AI Control Tower provides the workflows and the structure that AI governance teams need.
These workflows help us move new AI systems through the steps to get deployed in a responsible manner.
Example of the AI Lifecycle process
Of course, we want ethical and responsible management of the AI lifecycle, but we’ll want to move through this process as efficiently as possible to start seeing the value. Process Mining can be used to give us visibility into where we can further streamline this process.
Process map providing visibility into how AI systems are progressing through the lifecycle
The AI Control Tower also provides AI Case and Issue Management workflows that Process Mining can be applied on top of as well.
Now ask yourself these questions:
Where are you on your AI journey?
Just starting out? Process Mining can help.
Already have a few AI Agents deployed? Process Mining can help.
Building towards multi-agent systems? Process Mining can help.
No matter where you are on your AI journey Process Mining is going to be there every step of the way to help you better navigate and move forward more efficiently, effectively and with greater confidence then you would without the game-changing (and necessary) visibility the solution provides.
Want to learn more about getting started with ServiceNow Process Mining? Start here
Here is some additional content that you might want to check out next:
- Want to get hands-on experience in a lab environment? Try this Now Learning course
- Want to get hands-on experience in your own instance? Try the Evaluation Project
- How to use the Process Mining Evaluation Project in your instance
- What workflows (ITSM, CSM, HR, etc) is Process Mining available for? (Spoiler, ALL OF THEM)
- How to create your first Process Mining project
- Planning your ServiceNow Process Mining program
- How to use Process Mining to identify process improvement opportunities
- Process Mining FAQ
- Process Mining Academy
- Am I ready for Process Mining?
- Benefits of running Process Mining in a production environment
- Why behind the KPI: How Process Mining complements Performance Analytics
- Process Mining for external process data
- Automated Findings
