Scaling AI responsibly, deliberately, and built to last

As the world’s largest marketer of kiwifruit, Zespri International (Zespri) distributes 6 billion kiwifruits annually across 50 countries, serving 4,300 growers and retail customers worldwide.

With a vision to become the world’s healthiest fruit brand by 2035, Zespri set out to modernize digital operations by using AI to improve service quality, lower costs, and transform how its people work.

“We are growing our AI capabilities the exact same way we grow our fruit,” says Dave Scullin, Chief Digital Officer, Zespri International, “Responsibly, deliberately, and with processes that are built to last.”

AI cuts triage times by 90%, admin burden down by 40%

When Zespri looked at streamlining its digital operations, it faced a classic enterprise challenge: how to do more without increasing costs. Supporting 950 employees with an incredibly lean team created a critical bottleneck: incident triage was slow and inconsistent, with incomplete tickets constantly routed back to requestors. IT analysts buried themselves in manual tasks—writing case summaries and closure notes—rather than investigating root causes.

By embedding ServiceNow Otto and AI Agents into the incident management lifecycle, Zespri transformed its service management into an AI-assisted restoration engine.

With the ServiceNow Otto AI assistant, employees share the incident details via chat. The conversational intake captures incident details instantly. For support teams, ServiceNow Otto also automatically surfaces relevant knowledge articles, analyzes historical incident patterns, and generates case summaries and closure notes in seconds.

The impact was profound:

• 90% drop in the time required to assign and triage incidents
• 40% reduction in time spent on administrative writing tasks, freeing up critical hours for diagnosis
• 25% faster resolution for targeted incidents 

“Using ServiceNow AI Agents to autonomously categorize and route incidents to the right resolver group, our teams can now focus on moments that matter,” says Tim Lloyd, Head of Digital Operations at Zespri. 

Central AI governance mitigates risks and enforces compliance

Scaling AI across multiple AI vendors (including SAP, Microsoft, and Databricks) while navigating regional cybersecurity and data privacy regulations demanded real governance. With Zespri’s previous approach using spreadsheets to track AI deployments, the process to assess legal risk, privacy constraints, and business impact was slow, reactive, and siloed.

As Zespri’s AI strategy prioritizes risk and security, the business will roll out ServiceNow AI Control Tower to change that.

Using prebuilt risk assessment and guardrails, Zespri will be able to monitor security posture for every AI agent and enforce compliance dynamically—restricting specific models in banned countries, measuring performance, and quantifying AI value.

“Connecting our AI strategy and workflows with ServiceNow AI Control Tower is immensely powerful from both a compliance and a productivity perspective,” explains Dave. “It will allow us to control, secure, and measure AI deployments across the globe. With improved visibility, we expect to cut the time required to certify a new AI tool by 80%.”

Zero Copy Connectors accelerate SAP access approval in minutes not days

Provisioning access to Zespri's SAP ERP systems used to take days—a severe drag on productivity. The problem: no live integration between approval workflows and SAP, forcing manual batches and multiple system handoffs.

Using ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric’s Zero Copy Connectors, Zespri can now seamlessly connect 22 live SAP systems to all ServiceNow workflows without data replication or overnight batch loads.

“With live SAP data in every ServiceNow workflow, access reviews and provisioning that once required days now automatically complete in minutes—100% touch-free,” Tim says.

One front door for HR services

The success of IT modernizations inspired Zespri to rebuild its People Digital Strategy from the group up. Historically, core HR processes were highly fragmented across six shared mailboxes, with work managed through email chains and manual handoffs.

By consolidating those mailboxes into ServiceNow HR Service Delivery (HRSD) and Employee Center Pro, Zespri eliminated the complexity for case management. For instance, generating a single employee offer letter, which previously required 11 system interactions across various mailboxes can now be done from one place. Managers also have clear visibility into case volumes and approval bottlenecks via dashboard.

Employees can easily self-service common HR inquiries, find company policies, and HR processes from Employee Center Pro.  They can also ask ServiceNow Otto questions in other channels of work like Microsoft Teams rather than emailing HR.

“The automation has certainly paid off—faster turnaround time, lower costs per interaction, and employees getting accurate, up-to-date information,” says Nicky Bruning, HR System Lead.

Zespri’s software licensing was similarly fragmented. Different vendors, different terms, no unified view. ServiceNow Software Asset Management now provides single-source analysis on usage, licensing status, costs, and user entitlements for every vendor—eliminating blind spots and overages.

AI strategy built in one platform

Zespri is looking to enhance reporting on automation gains as the business evolves with the ServiceNow AI Platform. Expanding AI governance and AI capabilities to other business areas is also on the roadmap.

“We have larger goals and intent around the platform, ServiceNow is fast becoming our ERP for things outside of the ERP,” Tim concludes.

“ServiceNow connects our strategy with AI, data, and workflows on a single platform, enabling us to deliver more with less,” adds Dave. “And most importantly, we provide better services that our people deserve.”