5 game-changing lessons from AI award winners
In the past few years, organisations around the world have begun to embrace AI for its potential to transform business. Last year, ServiceNow launched its inaugural Enterprise AI Maturity Index to get a read on how organisations are using the technology in five key areas: leadership and strategy, workflow integration, talent and workforce, AI governance, and realising value in AI investment.
We identified a cohort of organisations leading the way in using AI to connect data, automation, and workflows. We call this group AI Pacesetters, and they continue to inspire others with their innovative approaches to AI.
This led to ServiceNow’s new AI Pacesetter Innovation Awards, which are designed to highlight customer innovations using ServiceNow® AI solutions. I’m excited to announce our 2025 AI Pacesetter Innovation Award winners:
- Americas: The Canada Life Assurance Company
- Europe, the Middle East, and Africa: Lloyds Banking Group
- Asia Pacific and Japan: Orica Australia Pty Ltd.
Let’s look at five lessons from these AI award winners, based on the five pillars of AI maturity.
1. Transformation requires strategy and leadership
Orica was the first customer in the Asia Pacific and Japan region to go live with ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) Pro Plus. Being first in anything requires strong leadership and a willingness to take risks. AI is part of the company’s core business strategy. As such, Orica was also an early adopter of our Now Assist AI capabilities to deflect IT service desk inquiries to chatbots and self-service.
“We made use of a ServiceNow accelerator program,” says Bradley Hunt, manager of DevOps and regional apps for Orica. “In six weeks, we rolled out incident summarisation, resolution note generation, and AI search—all powered by Now Assist. Two weeks later, we rolled out Virtual Agent Now Assist capabilities.”
As a result of these bold moves, the maker of explosives and blasting systems has realised a 94% deflection rate (up from 18%) using Now Assist in Virtual Agent.
2. AI can reshape how work is done at scale
Lloyds Banking Group knows that every minute of an employee’s time matters. As part of its groupwide transition to digital service delivery, the organisation deployed Now Assist for HR Service Delivery to transform how it provides HR services to employees.
This helped Lloyds deflect an estimated 90% of questions from employees to line managers, business partners, and HR representatives, providing personalised responses and giving substantial capacity back to employees to support customers.
Lloyds also created a single entry point, called Prosper, for HR knowledge and query management. The financial institution built Prosper on the ServiceNow Platform, coordinating more than 100 ServiceNow resources in approximately 5.5 months.
“Our aim is to enhance overall colleague experience by utilising advanced AI technology as a key to unlock business transformation,” says Claire Sherwin, HR senior executive at Lloyds.
3. Talent development fuels AI progress
Canada Life operates with a lean developer team, making efficiency and automation critical to the organisation’s success. Maintaining the company’s ITSM catalog was essential for employees but often cumbersome for clients.
The insurance company used ServiceNow Catalog Builder and Now Assist for Creator to develop a self-service management process that enables employees to automate services.
By investing in an AI solution for its employees, Canada Life is “anticipating 10,000-plus hours saved in catalog development costs, 34 hours saved for a single catalog item creation, and customer experiences that are stronger than ever,” says Grant Hamilton, IT director.
4. Sound data and AI governance are musts
Effective AI governance is crucial for any organisation, especially for those in highly regulated industries.
The insurance industry is a case in point. Canada Life organised an AI governance committee to ensure proper guardrails for its AI software development lifecycle. It also adopted a formal governance model to make certain all its AI-based designs and builds run through service-owner alignment as part of the quality assurance process.
Orica also relies on an internal AI governance committee to make sure it follows AI best practices. The company uses several ServiceNow solutions to run its global IT governance process, including:
- Strategic Portfolio Management to track initiatives from ideas to project delivery
- Configuration Management Database to manage AI-enabled applications
- Employee Center to provide an AI hub for employees to see approved AI apps, monitor AI projects, and request access and information about AI platforms
5. AI investments need to be measured
“Without value measurement, AI is just an interesting and expensive science experiment,” says Vijay Kotu, chief analytics officer at ServiceNow. All three of our AI Pacesetter Innovation Award winners know the importance of measuring their AI investments.
For Canada Life, “the catalog end-to-end development process is changing from months to days, with a much higher customer satisfaction and reduced cost of development,” Hamilton says.
Similarly, Orica is still calculating the business impact it’s gained from adopting AI. The company is using ServiceNow Platform Analytics and the ITSM Success Dashboard to track the value of Now Assist in real time. “This enables us to find high usage and value areas and pivot when needed, speeding up development and decreasing the time to get to return on investment,” Hunt says.
Lloyds is using its new solution to deflect up to 90% of HR-related cases. As a result, the bank has freed an estimated 1% of total employee time.
Congratulations to all three winners! We’re inspired by their AI innovations and the measurable value they’re realising.
Gain more insights in the Enterprise AI Maturity Index 2025.