Can AI truly transform your operations without understanding how your business actually works? And can process intelligence deliver real value without AI to act on what it discovers?
The answer to both is no—and that's exactly why these two capabilities are so powerful together in ServiceNow Process Mining.
Process intelligence and AI share a fundamentally interdependent relationship. Think of it as a symbiotic cycle: process intelligence gives AI the context and data foundation it needs, while AI acts as the engine that powers advanced analysis and automation. Neither reaches its full potential alone.
What ServiceNow AI Brings to Process Intelligence
- AI is embedded throughout the process intelligence lifecycle, transforming raw operational data into actionable insights and automated actions.
- Pattern recognition at scale: AI and machine learning algorithms analyze vast amounts of data from your enterprise systems—ERP, CRM, ITSM, and more—to identify bottlenecks, variations, and inefficiencies that would take humans months to spot manually.
- Automated process discovery: Process mining and task mining use AI-driven techniques to automatically map end-to-end workflows by capturing digital footprints and user activities. The result? Accurate, real-time analysis that eliminate slow, subjective manual process discovery.
- Intelligent automation: Deep learning and agentic AI provide prescriptive insights, nudging for the "next best actions" and identifying high-value automation opportunities.
What ServiceNow Process Intelligence Brings to AI
- Process intelligence serves as the critical "enablement layer" that gives AI the context, structure, and reliable data it needs to operate effectively—and avoid causing harm.
- The data foundation: Without deep, data-informed understanding of your actual processes, AI models are just guessing. Process intelligence ensures AI works with a complete and accurate blueprint of operations.
- Targeted application: Process intelligence highlights exactly where AI and automation can deliver maximum impact and ROI. This prevents a common pitfall: automating an inefficient process and simply shifting the bottleneck downstream.
- Regular monitoring: Process intelligence tools monitor AI and automation performance, tracking KPIs and ensuring compliance. This feedback loop builds trust and allows AI to adapt and improve over time.
- Scalability: Process intelligence ensures AI deployments can scale across your entire organization by providing a standardized, data-driven approach to process management—a major challenge for many AI initiatives.
The Bottom Line
Process intelligence provides the "what"—an understanding of how processes actually work in reality. AI provides the "how" and "why"—the advanced analytics and automation capabilities to act on those insights. The two are mutually reliant for successful digital transformation and operational excellence.
Putting This Into Practice: 5 Ways to Leverage the Partnership
| Ways to leverage | Description | Resources |
| 1. Discover use cases for existing AI agents | Already have AI capabilities? Process intelligence reveals where they can add the most value across your workflows. |
Blogpost and video to learn more.
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| 2. Assess agent effectiveness | Mine your agent execution logs to understand how they're performing, where they succeed, and where they need refinement. | Blogpost and video to learn more. |
| 3. Monitor AI assets and maintain governance captured in AI Control Tower | Keep your AI initiatives compliant and effective with continuous process monitoring and governance frameworks. | Watch recording at minute 16 and 32 |
| 4. Use AI to improve your processes | Close the loop: let AI analyze your process data and recommend optimizations, then measure the impact with process intelligence. |
Improvement Opportunities are already provided in the Process Mining baseline. Learn how to configure them and create new ones (Recording).
Capabilities in Zurich including Task Mining. Blogpost & video.
Basics on top capabilities (Video). |
| 5. Use process context for effective prompting commands for agent creation | Use process intelligence to define the context, inputs, outputs, and steps your AI agents need. Your SMEs know the business logic—process mining captures it systematically so agents can execute it reliably. | NowAssist Build Agents (Video) |
