Kevin Baxter, Group Chief Information Officer, faced a high-stakes decision when he joined KPMG UK.
At the time, the firm was navigating a convergence of pressures. Several of its largest managed service contracts, which provide service desk, application, and infrastructure support, were about to expire. KPMG was also closing data centers, moving to the cloud, and merging the UK and Switzerland firms into a European group.
For Kevin, it was an opportunity to reimagine how KPMG delivers internal services. Should KPMG UK renew its current IT service model, or redesign it for the future?
"When you get to the end of a big managed service agreement and you face signing a new one, that's your one time," he says. "That's your time to go and get it right."
Creating a business case for AI-powered service delivery
KPMG UK operates as part of a $4.4 billion combined group across the UK and Switzerland, with 27,000 people, including billable consultants whose hours translate directly into revenue.
Yet getting IT support often meant consultants had to step out of their workflows, navigate a portal, submit a ticket, and wait while requests moved through multiple teams. Every interruption pulled them away from client work and added cost for the business.
The scale of the challenge made the business case impossible to ignore. Around 8,000 incidents were handled every month, meaning even modest gains in automation and ticket deflection could deliver significant savings. Any new operating model would also need to stand up financially when KPMG renegotiated its managed service contracts.
Kevin concluded that the technology strategy had to come before the sourcing strategy. KPMG first needed to prove it could automate and streamline service delivery, then use those results to reshape how it bought managed services.
A ServiceNow IT Service Management value assessment provided the evidence, identifying how AI could transform incident management and reduce the volume of routine support requests.
The assessment confirmed what Kevin had suspected. AI could streamline service delivery, improve the employee experience, and reshape the economics of managed services. ServiceNow was the platform to make it happen.
The team defined an AI-first service model before they deployed a single agent
As Product Owner for ServiceNow at KPMG, Dipika Mistry led the effort to turn that strategy into reality. The team wasn't simply deploying new technology. It was bringing together employees across the newly combined UK and Switzerland business, rethinking established service processes, and building AI skills it didn't yet have.
"The process was what we focused on," says Dipika. "Not the technology of AI."
Turning those designs into working AI required new skills. Developers with no prior AI experience completed an immersive week-long AI sprint, learning prompt engineering, refining AI agents through testing, and making architectural decisions alongside ServiceNow experts. By the end of the week, they had working agents ready for testing.
Deployment was deliberately low-risk. Rather than replacing existing processes overnight, KPMG ran the old and new approaches in parallel, allowing employees to choose the AI-powered experience or stick with the familiar workflow.
“We didn’t ask people to take a leap of faith,” says Kevin. “They could compare the two approaches and decide which worked best. That helped build confidence in the new experience.”
From AI newcomers to enterprise deployment
In just 85 working days, from April 30 to September 1, KPMG had 22 AI use cases live in production, all built by an internal team that had started with no prior AI experience.
The results were immediate. By deploying AI agents to resolve high-volume support requests, KPMG saved millions of pounds on its new managed service agreements while delivering faster, more consistent IT support. The new operating model also extended support to 24/7 and created a multilingual foundation for future growth.
For employees, getting help is now as simple as sending a message in Microsoft Teams. Rather than navigating the ServiceNow portal, completing forms or waiting on hold, they chat directly with a ServiceNow AI Agent that already understands who they are, where they’re based and the health of their device. Many routine issues are resolved instantly, with no human intervention and minimal disruption to the working day.
The strongest validation came from an unexpected source. During a routine group operations meeting, the service assurance lead—unprompted—remarked that Now Assist was already improving ticket data quality and resolution notes, helping the team make progress on service improvement objectives it had struggled to achieve for some time.
“That really caught my attention,” says Dipika. “We hadn’t shared what we were building with that team yet, so hearing them describe the improvements independently told us we were having a much broader impact than we’d realized.”
Behind the scenes, ServiceNow Impact was embedded throughout the journey, applying a use case prioritization framework to sequence the highest-return opportunities, establishing the governance cadence that enabled KPMG to scale independently, and helping the team work through architectural challenges.
"They didn't just say, ‘it's your problem’," says Dipika. "The ServiceNow team sat with us and helped us architect a design that would work. That is true collaboration."
Six months after embarking on this transition, KPMG UK went to its outsource vendors with evidence of what had already changed. Those vendor negotiations reflected a fundamentally different demand profile, allowing KPMG to purchase managed services based on a much higher level of automation.
IT stopped being overhead and became the proof of concept KPMG takes to clients
This wasn't just an internal IT transformation.
KPMG is a ServiceNow Global Elite partner, and the inaugural Global Core Business Services Partner of the Year. The firm advises and implements ServiceNow solutions for clients across industries, helping organizations improve operations with AI and low-code technologies. When Kevin set out to redesign KPMG UK's internal service model, the project also became a live, enterprise-scale proof of concept for the work KPMG delivers to clients.
"Our ambition is to set the gold standard for how a modern professional services firm operates," says Kevin. "AI-first. A workplace designed for tomorrow, not yesterday. A platform that doesn't just serve our people, it showcases what we do for our clients. That's Client Zero. That's KPMG."
Today, KPMG goes to market with firsthand experience implementing AI at enterprise scale. It isn't just advising clients about AI. KPMG has done the work itself, learned from it, and refined its approach along the way. Its internal transformation became the proof.
What worked in IT is now the blueprint for the whole enterprise
The productivity gains to date have been concentrated on the service desk—the teams who handle and resolve incidents. The broader employee experience transformation for KPMG's 27,000 people across the UK and Switzerland is Phase 2, now underway. The roadmap now extends toward an AI control tower and Kevin's vision for a formless, AI-first workplace across 2026 and beyond.
"We've shown what's possible with ServiceNow in IT," says Dipika. "Now it's about taking those same principles and applying them across the board."
For Kevin, the lesson from the transformation is simple.
"Start with a target outcome. Work backwards. Prove it fast. Earn the right to think bigger."