Replacing fragmented support tools with an enterprise platform

Hitachi Energy is on a mission to inspire the next era of sustainable energy, making electricity more accessible to all and empowering societies to thrive. Hitachi Energy is a global technology leader focused on driving the energy transition, as part of True One Hitachi. To help deliver, the company is focusing on agility, simplicity, and efficiency. Now Assist is helping achieve this for Hitachi Energy’s IT, HR, and Finance functions.

When it came to Hitachi Energy’s IT support processes, it needed to replace its complex, customized systems with standardized IT processes that would work for its employees. With strategic guidance from ServiceNow Impact, it built a solution on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

By implementing ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and Integrated Risk Management, Hitachi Energy created a more responsive IT environment while maintaining business continuity. It later added IT Operations Management (ITOM), which improved how it managed IT assets and services.

AI-powered support reduces workloads and accelerates IT support 

ServiceNow provided Hitachi Energy with Now Assist for ITSM, a fast, flexible platform that became one of its internal AI tools.

Working with Accenture, the business set out a strategy to transform the experience for around 50,000 employees, with Now Assist Virtual Agent streamlining Hitachi Energy’s support operations desk for the IT, HR, and Finance functions and reducing workloads for employees.

From Accenture’s perspective, the partnership approach was also decisive for success. Luca Garreffa, GenAI Delivery Lead at Accenture, summarizes: “The project was not a classic supplier mandate, but real teamwork. From the beginning we defined targets, priorities, and challenges together—and that made the difference.”

“There was a very strong case for using AI to support and scale IT self-service,” adds Oliver. “Low use of process automation was affecting productivity and slowed down incident handling and resolution. Now Assist for ITSM was an exciting opportunity to bring that to Hitachi Energy.”

Hitachi Energy rolled out Now Assist for Virtual Agent and Now Assist for AI Search in a three-month pilot focusing on end-user and agent facing use cases such as incident summarization and resolution notes generation for incidents. “The pilot completed on time, and we achieved user satisfaction ratings of over 88%,” Oliver notes. “That success confirmed our commitment to the program and its expansion to other use cases.”

Employees find answers faster with AI Search

Hitachi Energy continued to work with both Accenture and ServiceNow to expand the implementation, rolling out Now Assist AI Search to 50,000 end users. The company replaced four separate service portals with one unified Employee Portal for IT, HR and Finance support operations, giving everyone access to AI-powered search capabilities.

“We added an AI layer between end users and the service desk,” Oliver explains. “It allowed us to achieve an excellent level of ticket deflection and optimize the size of our service desk operations team.”

Building on this success, Hitachi Energy added Now Assist for Virtual Agent to the support portal. This combined AI Search with conversational chat capabilities, including automatic translation into 17 languages.

Hitachi Energy also brought Now Assist for Virtual Agent directly into Microsoft Teams—a decision Oliver credits with dramatically increasing employee adoption.

“This was a crucial milestone, as Teams is the main communication channel for end users at Hitachi Energy,” he says. “It allowed us to harness real value and users to fully embark on this transformation journey.”

Delivering savings while empowering end users

The new Now Assist-based ecosystem is already delivering results for Hitachi Energy. Employees can search for answers with the knowledge article summarization capability in the Employee Center Portal, while Now Assist for Virtual Agent in the portal and in MS Teams solve many questions without human Service Desk intervention.

“We utilize Now Assist’s summarization capabilities to condense responses rather than making agents scroll through results,” Oliver explains. “And Now Assist for Virtual Agent empowers end users to access answers directly, without being transferred to a live agent.”

The financial impact is clear. Hitachi Energy expects to save $3.2 million across IT and HR functions, with total savings of $7.7 million over three years.

The response from end users is also positive:

• 88% find the virtual agents helpful and easy to use when searching for knowledge
• 68% report savings in search times
• 79% of users find the summarization capabilities helpful
• 64% say that search results are more accurate and relevant.

“By automating manual tasks and surfacing real-time insights with Now Assist, we’re also freeing up agents to focus on higher-value work,” Oliver adds. “That leads to further reductions in resolution time and more improvements to service quality.”

The keys to success

For Oliver, three factors were important contributors to the project’s early impact. Only when databases are up to date, consistent, and well maintained can AI work at its best. “AI is only as good as the data it’s based on,” he emphasizes.

Equally important is change management; employees need to understand new tools and processes fully before implementing them. Hitachi Energy therefore invested early in communication, training and adoption promotion—especially at the service desk where there had been some initial scepticism.

Then, instead of tackling hundreds of use cases at once, Hitachi Energy chose a few that quickly showed value, before building them out step by step. Having early successes then made wider acceptance much easier.

Looking ahead: Agentic AI will automate key processes with human oversight

Hitachi Energy now plans to expand AI-supported use cases in HR and Finance, and experiment with autonomous AI agents. The goal is a hybrid model in which humans and AI work together seamlessly. “We’re using an Agentic AI workflow that automates the categorization, prioritization of incoming service desk incidents,” Oliver explains. “The aim is to further increase standardization and efficiency and reduce the need for post-incident audits.” It is also launching Now Assist for HR Service Delivery to simplify how employees access HR support.

Longer-term plans include new Now Assist-powered workflows and ServiceNow AI Agents. Hitachi Energy will use Now Assist Skill Kit to bring AI into key IT service management tasks, while AI Agent Studio will help tackle more complex workflows that require multiple steps. 

“We’re targeting full end-to-end role-based workflow automation, with human oversight,” Oliver says. “The use cases will continue to grow as time progresses, and we’ll carry on working with Accenture to meet our unique and specific goals using Now Assist.”