Scaling exceptional service through AI
Today’s world is increasingly characterized by self-service: instant access to information, guidance, and answers available on our devices. Yet at work, support is hard to obtain—help often means navigating multiple portals, unclear instructions, and lengthy wait times to resolve simple issues. Closing that gap between consumer ease and enterprise complexity is our goal.
Our vision is straightforward: AI woven into one unified support experience so people can find, fix, and finish tasks in minutes instead of hours. AI shouldn’t be another place to go; it should be the fabric of how work gets done. It understands intent in conversational language, grounds responses in trusted knowledge, and acts autonomously. Support shifts from tickets and triage to outcomes.
At ServiceNow, that expectation of instant, trusted, and consumer‑grade assistance became our inspiration for intelligent self-service. We set out to improve every workflow—anticipating needs, surfacing answers automatically, and empowering people to resolve issues in seconds.
We strategically targeted AI investment across three critical areas to improve our self-service success:
- AI-ready content
- Conversational search
- Agentic workflows
This is how we reimagine customer and employee support at ServiceNow: a continuum that moves from reactive case handling to proactive, preventive, and ultimately predictive experiences.
Building an AI-ready content foundation
Clean content is knowledge that is structured, current, and unambiguous—free from duplicate entries, legacy jargon, or walls of text that confuse both humans and AI. We pursued AI‑ready content because the same attributes that help a language model reason—clear context, consistent metadata, concise language—also help a person self‑serve in seconds. We created standardization for AI-ready content by rolling out article templates, rich categorization and meta‑tagging, continuous quality reviews, feedback ratings, and tight governance. This improved the results surfaced by AI Search, user engagements, and AI agent workflows. Additionally, Content IQ continuously evaluates each article’s AI usability and human readability, flags duplicates and contradictions, and recommends targeted fixes, making content easier to find and use.
Conversational search that clarifies and executes
Traditional keyword search forced people to guess system terms and sift through pages of links. Now, anyone can type natural language, and the AI Search does the detective work. Conversational AI interprets intent, consults our AI-ready knowledge catalog, and either surfaces the exact answer or triggers the fix automatically through agentic workflows. By upgrading keyword matching to intent‑driven, knowledge‑grounded conversations, we move from information discovery to actual problem resolution.
Agentic workflows deliver hospitality-grade support
We’re embedding AI into the fabric of work so resolution feels effortless and human: AI agents deliver omni-channel, proactive service; they use sentiment and telemetry to guide tone, choose next-best actions, and decide when to escalate; and they provide a concierge-level experience by completing tasks end-to-end—filling forms, orchestrating workflows, and confirming outcomes—with humans in the loop for decisions that matter. Trust is built through policy guardrails and role-based permissions, with every step auditable and explainable. Confidence scores and risk thresholds are visible, and privacy-by-design ensures safe automation while keeping experts in control.
AI delivers transformational customer self-service
Our strategic AI investment has delivered remarkable business outcomes across the entire customer and employee journey:
Content and Knowledge Excellence: We've achieved an 88% acceleration in Knowledge Base publishing time while powering 12 million AI agent-supported searches and conversations annually across 2.5 million employee and 9.2 million customer interactions. Using Knowledge Management and our comprehensive content governance framework ensures AI-ready, validated knowledge that serves as the foundation for intelligent self-service experiences.
Operational Efficiency: Through self-service, we've saved $148 million while avoiding 1.9 million cases in Q4 FY24 alone. Today, 76% of IT requests are self-served without requiring live help, and our AI agents have delivered a 3x improvement in case deflection, fundamentally transforming our operational model.
User Experience Transformation: AI agents now support 72% of customer self-service requests through multi-turn conversational experiences that include clarifying questions and personalized learning paths. Users benefit from seamless transitions from information discovery to automated resolution, creating truly intelligent and responsive support experiences.
Our support teams now focus on complex cases requiring creativity and critical thinking, while agentic AI handles routine support through automated workflows and intelligent assistance. We've achieved true productivity gains—giving time back to both customers and employees to focus on what matters most.