Accelerating market innovation with smarter employee experiences

Bayer is one of the world’s leading life sciences businesses, dedicated to improving health and nutrition for everyone.

The global life sciences company is transforming how it works to bring lifesaving products to market faster and serve customers better. Yet siloed systems, complex technology, and inconsistent processes across its Global Business Services (GBS) functions were creating real headaches—employees were wasting valuable time searching for information and waiting for support. To fix this problem, Bayer built Me@Bayer on the ServiceNow AI Platform—a one-stop shop where employees can quickly get answers and support for HR, IT, finance, and more.

HR automation transforms core business services

When employees can quickly find HR information and get support, the entire company benefits. At Bayer, saving just a few minutes each day by making routine tasks easier—multiplied across tens of thousands of employees—delivers significant results for both the business and customers. So, Bayer embarked on a transformation journey with ServiceNow:

• To start, Bayer’s HR team chose ServiceNow to replace a complex landscape of legacy systems across countries and regions, with a single global destination to find HR information, request help, and complete tasks.
• Bayer then decided to reduce previous customization and improve the employee experience further by creating AskHR (accessed through Me@Bayer), giving employees worldwide access to the knowledge and services they need.

“ServiceNow creates one intuitive engagement layer that protects users from the complexity that sits behind,” explains Jan Tönnißen, Vice President, Platform Lead for AI at Bayer. “They don’t need to figure out who to contact and how. ServiceNow keeps it simple, guiding employees to the information they need to self-serve, or to the teams they need to talk to for more personal support.” 

Faster access to information increases employee satisfaction

With AskHR (ServiceNow HR Service Delivery), users are automatically directed to the information or service they need, eliminating the maze of phone lines, email boxes, and outdated systems that previously frustrated employees.

Today, Bayer’s AskHR portal manages more than 250,000 requests annually, with 75-76% of requests self-submitted by employees (as of Q3 2025). This has had a significant impact on productivity, employee experience, and helps Bayer serve its customers faster.

The 5,000 knowledge articles in the portal are rated 88% for quality, while employee satisfaction scores exceed 90%. Meanwhile, Bayer’s HR teams now work from a single dashboard where they can track performance and results—something that was impossible before.

“Everything is in one place on the ServiceNow AI Platform, and our teams are using the technology far more effectively,” William Warren, Head of HR Effectiveness, says. “Our virtual agent has reduced the number of requests by directing employees to where they can find information.”

The system has also simplified employee onboarding and offboarding which previously required multiple teams coordinating across different platforms.

“Getting everything together for new hires could take a couple of weeks. ServiceNow brings these processes together in one place, which saves time for everyone involved and means new colleagues can be welcomed and productive from day one,” says William. “With offboarding, we now save money simply by ensuring that laptops are returned by departing employees and repurposed back into the business.”

Bayer solves HR case backlog with GenAI

The generative AI capabilities of Now Assist help Bayer’s HR team solve employee issues faster by automatically summarizing cases and chat conversations. This gives HR agents the information they need without manual work, letting them focus on helping employees. The team now creates over 350 AI-generated case summaries weekly.

Bayer plans to expand its use of Now Assist with Virtual Agent to give employees faster answers through self-service. The organization is also using AI to create better knowledge articles that are even more accurate and relevant to employee needs.

“The speed at which ServiceNow is developing new solutions and options, especially around AI, is particularly exciting, and we’re seeing impressive early results,” says William. “ServiceNow is helping us to work together as one team, which for a large and complex business like ours is absolutely vital—and growing our use of AI can only add additional benefits for all of us.”