How Genpact built its AI platform: internal first, client-ready second
For a company that delivers AI transformation, the most important proof point isn’t a client success story. It’s the company itself.
Genpact advises some of the world’s largest enterprises on how to modernize, automate, and redesign the way they work using advanced technologies. When it committed to an AI-first internal strategy, its investments needed to produce something the organization could stand behind publicly. A showcase, not just a system.
What Genpact built instead was something it didn’t entirely plan.
The original mandate was practical: build a center of excellence to manage ServiceNow development internally, give both professional developers and business users access to modern tools, including ServiceNow App Engine for low-code and no-code application development, and reduce the friction between business problems and working solutions.
It started with the infrastructure that makes citizen development safe rather than chaotic: a governance framework, a delivery tower, curated access to both ServiceNow’s own AI models and approved third-party LLMs, and a review process that makes sure applications reaching production have been reviewed and are built responsibly, in line with Genpact’s responsible AI guidelines.
Generative AI unlocks new levels of developer productivity
Within the platform, there was a shift in who does the building. Pankaj Goyal, who runs the ServiceNow Center of Excellence, describes it in simple terms: anyone at Genpact could now become a citizen developer. Today, 850 of them are. Not engineers, not technically trained developers, but business experts who understand problems well enough to solve them themselves.
The process is straightforward, but the results are not. Using ServiceNow Otto, an employee with a business process problem writes a description in natural language. The platform converts that description into an application skeleton: playbooks, process flows, code components, catalog items. The developer, or more precisely, the person who understands the business, then refines it. What once required weeks of back-and-forth with IT, scoping documents, and sprint planning now produces a working prototype by the end of the week.
Genpact is developing two new applications every month, built on App Engine. Twenty-five use cases have been delivered—case summarization, incident resolution notes, translation services, chatbot engagements—across a workforce of 140,000+ people in many countries. Munish Dargan, Global Enterprise IT Leader, describes the pace as the new baseline: “We’re launching two new applications every month,” he says, “and with AI agents now fully deployed, we expect to double that output using the same resources.”
The governance dimension is easy to miss but essential to the story. Citizen development without governance produces shadow IT. What Genpact built is the opposite: a framework where business experts can build, but every application moves through review before it reaches production. The speed comes from removing barriers to creation. The safety comes from maintaining standards at the production layer. The two aren’t in conflict, but designed to coexist.
Vidya Rao, the company's Chief Technology & Transformation Officer, describes the trajectory: “There is still some coding or scripting required to complete applications. When we eliminate that, we can potentially reduce development timelines from a few weeks to a few days. When that happens, the proliferation in the use of ServiceNow AI Agents will be huge.”
This roadmap is already in motion. What makes the Genpact story unusual isn’t the speed of development or even the scale of citizen deployment. It’s what it did with it.
The internal platform Genpact built to solve its own problems became the platform it now demonstrates to clients. Its ServiceNow practice, expertise, governance framework, and the citizen developer community are available to its sales teams as proof of what’s possible. A professional services firm that innovates internally using technology and then shows customers how it’s done it is offering operational evidence of what can be achieved.
Vidya puts it directly: “We’re making all our internal ServiceNow AI Platform expertise and solutions available for our sales teams to market to our customers for them to enjoy the same benefits from ServiceNow as we do.”
Application development capabilities for all
Eight-hundred-and-fifty people are building software at Genpact who didn’t think of themselves as builders. The bottleneck in enterprise technology has never really been development speed, it’s been development access; the idea that only engineers get to solve problems with code. Genpact removed that assumption and built a governance model for a new way of working.
Two applications a month, with more coming. The people who understand the problems are building the solutions. That’s the proof of concept Genpact was looking for.