Building trust with responsible artificial intelligence
The global EY organization has helped companies navigate through countless technological advances over its 100 years in business. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest innovation that promises to transform how businesses operate — and the global company is busy partnering with organizations to harness the technology’s power.
As one of the world’s largest providers of professional services, the global EY organization has translated its reputation for reliability into a people-first strategy for responsible AI. People need to trust what AI is doing, whether it is helping them answer complex questions or supporting them as they look to diagnose and fix network errors. According to the company, the secret relies on putting people at the center of any AI strategy.
“At the end of the day, we are a people business,” says Brian Eble, Principal, Enterprise Technology in Core Business Services Technology Group. “It is the knowledge and the assurance from our 400,000 employees that make the global organization special. That’s why human intelligence needs to be embedded throughout AI processes.”
Keeping 400,000 employees focused on service instead of spending unnecessary time on routine IT and HR issues
The global EY organization has long trusted ServiceNow for its shared belief in putting technology to work for people, beginning its partnership with ServiceNow when it had fewer than 200,000 employees. As the company grew, so did its use of ServiceNow.
Today, more than 16,000 technology professionals at the company use the ServiceNow AI Platform. ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) provide the technology team a single view into the organization’s complex IT environment. As a result, the services delivered keep employees focused on helping businesses instead of wrestling with questions about installing apps or resetting passwords. The HR team also manages compliance, benefits and time-off requests for all 400,000 employees through HR Service Delivery (HRSD).
Anything the global EY organization learns from using ServiceNow, it passes on. As “customer zero” for ServiceNow, the organization perfects implementations in house and brings those insights to other organizations. Recently, the global organization adopted ServiceNow AI Agents to further the benefits the company — and eventually others — can realize by simplifying everyday IT and HR requests from employees.
“Our long history with ServiceNow has made us more comfortable to branch out into generative AI and agentic AI. With ServiceNow, we have the confidence that it is going to work,” says Anasuya Ray, Senior Manager, ServiceNow Implementation Lead.
Saving millions annually by using AI to generate clear, reliable resolution notes that enable service desk agents to respond faster, saving five minutes for every ticket
The service desk handles more than a million tickets annually, delivering support in 21 languages across 30 service desks. Using ServiceNow AI capabilities, the organization created an AI agent that helps service desk agents find and summarize ticket information much faster, saving an estimated 160,000 hours of annual effort, or US$5.7 million total annual savings.
“Even if we just save just a few minutes per interaction, when you multiply the gains by 400,000 employees, the impact is huge,” says Eble.
The new AI agent now handles 12,000 actions per day. Using Now Assist’s generative AI (GenAI) capabilities, it creates resolution notes for the service desk agent to approve before closing the ticket. This saves five minutes for every ticket, allowing service desk agents to quickly move on to the next challenge while providing standardized, detailed reporting that IT can use to spot patterns and problems.
Out of the estimated 103,000 resolution notes generated in the month after implementing the AI agent, 70% of the resolution notes were accepted without changes. This adds up to an estimated 66,000 hours saved per year — an annual value of US$2.3 million.
When escalating a particularly difficult problem to an IT service desk agent, incident summarization provides a clear overview of what happened and what steps have been taken so far, while chat summarization provides an overview of virtual chat exchanges. Service desk agents can quickly jump into solving the problem, saving up to 10 minutes that they might have spent sifting through previously hard-to-decipher notes, scanning chat or asking employees to repeat the information.
Together, summarization is estimated to save around 100,000 hours of time for the service desk — more than US$3 million in annual value — but the global EY organization is more impressed by the difference it makes for employees.
“Employees aren’t held captive through the whole customer support process where they’re spending hours on a phone call or sharing their screen,” says Eble. “Time to resolve is definitely faster, but for our employees, what they really care about is that they can get back to focusing on helping other companies.”
Convenient, always available self-service with AI agents makes it easy for employees to get IT answers to stay focused and productive
After finding success with service desk agents, the global EY organization expanded AI accessibility to all employees with an AI agent available through the portal. When employees have simple questions, such as how to reset a password, they can now self-serve. The AI agent also understands intent so employees can find exactly what they need in less time.
One of the most important resources is the knowledge base. Stakeholders cleaned up and standardized the existing knowledge base articles. Then, they used AI to generate new knowledge base articles quickly and consistently. The process saves around 30 minutes of writing time per article, providing more resources and better responses faster.
“We went from 1.4 tickets per service desk agent each day five years ago to 0.3 tickets today thanks to the investments in AI, self-service and automation,” says Ray. “It’s allowed us to handle growth while maintaining excellent service and outcomes for employees.”
Staying on the leading edge of AI to simplify even more routine employee processes such as answering basic HR questions or tallying, submitting and routing expense reports
The benefits of AI aren’t limited to IT. Human Resources is working on similar AI self-service tools to respond to employee questions about benefits, time off and other topics. Other teams have started using AI to summarize search results, populate forms with information extracted from documents and assign cases based on priority needs. With AI-guided workflows enhancing the employee experience, teams can focus on strategic initiatives rather than administrative duties.
The global EY organization is most excited about the next stage and adopting more agentic AI, which has the potential to process more workflows with multiple autonomous AI agents. For instance, systems won’t just tell employees how to submit an expense report but could add up receipts and submit a report for approval with minimal human intervention. Working with ServiceNow, the aim is to stay on the leading edge of the fast-evolving world of agentic AI.
“The ServiceNow AI Platform enables us to adapt quickly, respond to people faster and measure what is happening around the world,” says Eble. “We are always asking ourselves what we can do to make our employees’ lives simpler, easier and better. With ServiceNow AI agents, we’re positioning ourselves to support employees and businesses into the future.”