Freeing up time to focus more on clients

Just a decade ago, Deloitte Canada was considered a small member firm within the global Deloitte Consulting network. It has since grown to a team of 14,000, with its culture emphasizing that great service comes from happy employees.

The firm’s rapid growth came with challenges. Employees emailed or called colleagues in IT, finance, HR, or risk with questions. Cameron McCormick, Director of Technology Enablement for Deloitte Canada, estimates that it cost the firm millions annually in lost productivity.

To simplify request handling, Deloitte Canada adopted the ServiceNow AI Platform. By implementing ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM), the firm eliminated more than 18 legacy IT tools and automated routine tasks across IT, finance, HR, and risk management. With the addition of ServiceNow AI Agents, including out-of-the-box generative AI capabilities powered by Now Assist, Deloitte Canada can answer employees’ questions faster, enhancing productivity and employee satisfaction.

“ServiceNow’s AI capabilities allow us to do more to enhance the employee experience, which ultimately allows us to deliver better client services,” says McCormick.

Increasing productivity by using the ServiceNow Impact squad and AI Accelerators

With ITSM, IT and business teams gained a central hub for managing incidents and inquiries with Service Operations Workspace. Employees can easily track their requests and receive timely updates. This centralized method enhances responsiveness and consistency, facilitating analysis and reporting, so that teams can understand types of requests and response times.

When McCormick heard about AI agents, he rushed to introduce generative AI through simple but impactful use cases. “We were blown away by Now Assist,” says McCormick. “It works even better than advertised.”

Now Assist for ITSM can summarize incidents based on chat transcripts between virtual agents and employees, helping IT staff quickly understand the context of an incident and work towards a resolution. Once the incident is resolved, Now Assist for ITSM can auto-generate resolution notes based on the steps taken by the IT agent. This automation increased the IT staff’s productivity by over 20% while helping to standardize resolution notes that can be easily referenced by IT staff in the future.

By partnering with ServiceNow's Impact team, Deloitte Canada has transformed their approach to implementing new technologies and can establish strong best practices for long-term success. "We collaborate with our Impact team for significant initiatives, like HR Service Delivery (HRSD) implementations, by holding an Impact session to establish a solid foundation," says McCormick. Impact accelerators and sessions have enabled Deloitte Canada to initiate projects effectively, avoiding suboptimal solutions and costly rework. By tapping into ServiceNow's expertise, McCormick has significantly reduced technical debt from prior implementations, which supports a faster and more efficient future.

Helping employees find answers in seconds with AI

McCormick introduced generative AI firm-wide with Virtual Agent and AI Search powered by Now Assist. Employees can now quickly find information in seconds using conversational language, without needing to know specific terms for a sick leave form or acronyms used by the finance team. The generative AI-powered search understands the question context and pulls up the correct answer quickly.

McCormick was particularly impressed by how ServiceNow accurately finds the right information from any type of source file, not just knowledge articles written in a standard, AI-friendly format. If teams see an influx of questions, they can upload a new knowledge article about the topic in PDF, PowerPoint, or another format and make it searchable in minutes.

Employees are now solving issues on their own in seconds. The ease and speed of resolving questions has pushed internal customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores to 94. With employees spending less time waiting for answers, they can focus on delivering excellent client service.

Employees aren’t the only ones benefiting from time savings. IT and business teams are spending less time on common questions and focusing on more complex issues. The HR team, for example, freed up time for seven people who previously managed basic requests, like “how do I update my personal information?” or “where can I find the employee handbook?” They can now tackle more complex HR tasks, leading to faster onboarding and improved response.

“ServiceNow gives us powerful AI tools that significantly improve employee experiences,” says McCormick. Currently, ITSM handles more than 500 catalog items for IT and business teams, managing around 200,000 tickets per year. Around 53% of that volume is currently self-service, assisted by AI Search and Virtual Agent. McCormick sees that number continuing to grow as adoption rates go up. “We’re still spreading the word about the self-service portal. Every time we demo it, people are amazed at how much they can do with ServiceNow.”

Looking to agentic AI for future automation

With its user-friendly operations, McCormick and his team are working much faster to set up features, make changes, and deliver the functionality that teams need. “ServiceNow makes managing AI incredibly fast and easy,” says McCormick. “We can set up AI-powered search within minutes.”

Personalizing very highly confidential data, such as internal finance or HR information, will be the next big step in making sensitive knowledge searchable only for approved teams. McCormick is also excited about using ServiceNow to connect multiple AI agents, data sources, and workflows to automate more complex processes, such as recognizing the need for a new catalog item and creating them automatically. By staying closely aligned with ServiceNow product teams and tapping into the latest innovations, they’re positioning themselves to be among the first to unlock the full potential of agentic AI.

“Time is money, but more importantly to us, time is client service,” says McCormick. “Every minute our practitioners try to get their own questions answered is a minute they could spend with clients. ServiceNow AI Platform gives us the tools we need to improve how we work and live up to our firm’s reputation as one that does more for clients.”