In today's fast-paced digital landscape, efficient IT support is crucial for maintaining employee productivity and driving business success. At ServiceNow, providing exceptional IT support is crucial to our operations, so much so that we've made it a strategic priority to deliver the best possible solution.

As a company with over 33,000 employees, including contract workers, managing an environment of 950+ business applications across 34K end-user devices is complex. Our digital technology team faced a significant challenge: providing seamless IT support to every employee.

With a ratio of approximately 1K employees to every IT agent, the pressure to deliver fast and effective solutions is immense.

The challenge: The silent productivity drain

IT incidents, even seemingly minor ones, can have a significant impact on employee productivity.

Studies show that on average, employees lose 22 minutes each day due to IT disruptions. That adds up to nearly two weeks of lost work time per year—time wasted on troubleshooting frozen screens, dealing with printer issues, and waiting for resolutions.

Now imagine how these disruptions impact our IT support teams—every time an employee is losing time to IT disruptions, someone in our IT department is spending time reacting to these problems and working to resolve them. The frustration of a human IT agent juggling multiple tools to resolve a single incident.

They might be switching between monitoring dashboards, ticketing systems, and manually correlating logs. By the time they piece together the puzzle, valuable time has been lost, and the employee is left frustrated.

Traditional service desk models often struggle to keep pace with the demands of a growing and complex organization. Agents are often overwhelmed by a tsunami of tickets, forcing them to choose between speed and quality. This leads to:

•         Switching tab chaos: Agents spend more time navigating systems than solving problems, jumping between incident records, change requests, knowledge bases, and monitoring systems.

•         Manual triage bottlenecks: Agents manually sort tickets, guess priorities, and route issues, leading to delays and potential misprioritization of critical system outages.

•         High MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution): Long resolution times lead to user dissatisfaction and missed SLAs.

Our solution: AI-powered transformation

We’re transforming IT support operations through a unified, AI-powered platform that directly tackles the most pressing challenges facing today’s engineers and DevOps teams: the constant need to toggle between monitoring dashboards, manual and error-prone log correlation, and the complexity of managing modern, distributed systems.

At the core of our approach is a powerful AI engine that consolidates observability data—spanning logs, metrics, traces, and application performance—into a single, unified view.

This eliminates the inefficiencies of context switching across disparate tools and helps teams focus on resolution rather than reconciliation. Instead of piecing together fragmented data from multiple sources, users get a complete, correlated picture of system behavior in real time.

Automation kicks in immediately with Predictive Intelligence, which detects and groups similar incidents to accelerate triage. Our generative AI assistant, Now Assist, augments this by enabling natural language queries, generating contextual suggestions, and guiding users through resolution workflows without friction or delay.

It simplifies complex environments by automating routine tasks and serving up the most relevant information and next-best actions—based not just on what’s happening now, but on what’s happened before.

AI Agents go further, launching playbooks and providing proactive recommendations based on patterns from historical data and real-time telemetry.

By correlating logs with infrastructure signals, application metrics, and performance anomalies, the platform delivers a holistic, explainable understanding of issues—turning noise into insight and drastically reducing mean time to resolution from hours to minutes.

This transformation unfolds through four evolutionary phases: automation, Predictive Intelligence, GenAI, and Agentic AI.

Each phase builds upon the last to create a highly efficient, continually learning support ecosystem.

For us, this isn’t just a better way to manage incidents—it’s a strategic leap. We’re accelerating productivity, improving service delivery, and scaling AI adoption across our own platform, turning support from a reactive function into a proactive engine for innovation.

Our journey to realizing our Zero Service Desk vision

Our journey to the Zero Service Desk began long before the advent of AI-driven solutions. Initially, we leveraged our own ServiceNow platforms and products to streamline and enhance our IT support processes, focusing on reducing ticket volumes and improving resolution times.

This foundational work set the stage for our current phase, where AI acts as the first line of support.

The Zero Service Desk Vision is powered by our very own ServiceNow AI Platform, efficiently handling Level 1 (L1) issues and seamlessly escalating more complex cases to human agents.

This approach not only reclaims lost productivity but also enhances the employee experience by reducing downtime and improving service quality.

Apoorva Srivastava, who manages the service desk, emphasizes that this transformation allows employees to pursue more fulfilling roles, such as L2 or L3 support, or other customer-facing positions, thereby enhancing job satisfaction and career growth opportunities.

Takeaways

By integrating AI into IT support, ServiceNow is not only addressing the immediate challenges of high-ticket volumes and agent burnout but also paving the way for a more efficient and effective service desk model. This transformation is crucial for maintaining trust and satisfaction among employees and ensuring that IT support is a driver of business success.