How is ServiceNow using AI agents?

AI agents can help organisations speed up processes, boost productivity, and enhance customer experiences. At ServiceNow, we build and deploy these autonomous workers in every corner of our business.

ServiceNow AI Agents use workflows, scripts, and knowledge base articles to perform complex tasks across the organisation. In total, they support 400,000 workflows each year, freeing 3 million hours of capacity for our people and driving an estimated $0.5 billion annualised value.

“We're not just automating a handful of manual tasks and processes across a department or two,” says Kellie Romack, chief digital information officer at ServiceNow. “We're infusing AI agents everywhere to reimagine how we work and drive measurable value.”

Here are four ways ServiceNow is using AI agents to drive gains.

1. Improve customer service

Our customer service colleagues deploy AI agents to bridge the gap between our front and back offices. Let's walk through a day in the life of Meredith, one of our technical support engineers using AI agents to autonomously triage, route, and resolve support cases.

When Meredith logs on to the ServiceNow AI Platform, she gets an update about what the AI agents are working on, including complex cases that require her action. She sees a live view of the time-consuming, repetitive work AI agents are handling, such as retrieving troubleshooting data or generating a resolution plan. Meanwhile, Meredith can focus on building relationships with customers.

AI agents are now automating 37% of our customer support case workflows, transforming how fast customer service teams can respond to tickets. This is how we're building a seamless support organisation composed of both human and AI agents.

2. Enhance security measures

As the size and complexity of our operations has grown, so has the need to protect our IT assets. A large volume of security alerts and support tickets made it harder to prioritise the most critical threats.

Our IT and security teams responded quickly—shifting from reactive to proactive operations to continue protecting our company and customers while driving business growth.

Teams operate side by side on the ServiceNow AI Platform, powered by a single source of truth: Configuration Management Database. This shared context enables human and AI support agents to detect and respond to risks faster, at a greater scale. The benefits include:

• Faster cybersecurity operations: AI agents detect malicious activity, draft resolution notes, and generate post-impact analyses to help inform future investigations.
• Less manual work: AI handles repetitive tasks such as scheduling server patches, increasing productivity in this workflow by 53% and reducing the burden on the IT team.

Previously, when a user reported a phishing attempt, security analysts would have to write queries and search for similar incidents across the IT estate.

Now, AI agents automatically search for patterns of phishing activity and deliver clear statements to managers about the nature of the issue and details of the affected configuration items. Then the AI agents take action to resolve the issue. Support from AI agents has made our security risk assessments 66% more efficient.

3. Reduce manual IT workloads

Managing a portfolio of more than 950 business applications across thousands of end-user devices is complex. Our technology team faced the immense challenge of providing seamless IT support to every employee. They needed a fast, effective solution.

The traditional IT service desk setup requires teams to switch between dashboards, ticketing systems, and tools to manually correlate logs. This approach wasn't right for our rapidly scaling business. Instead, we adopted a platform-based service desk powered by autonomous IT, supporting more than 29,000 ServiceNow employees worldwide.

Our AI engine consolidates data—including logs, application performance metrics, and traces—into a single view. This enables AI agents to detect and triage issues, recommend next steps, and automatically execute resolutions to IT problems.

The results have been transformative: AI agents now handle 90% of employee IT support requests, with 96% resolution efficiency. This shift has allowed us to redeploy 85% of our human IT support agents to higher-value work, such as innovating ways to serve employees across HR, finance, and customer support.

The remaining 15% of human agents working on the service desk have been upskilled to manage AI agents, support the most complex cases, and provide VIP support. They use the ServiceNow AI Platform to see what fixes have been executed, monitor ongoing cases, and action tasks that require their input.

4. Accelerate software request fulfilment

Each year, ServiceNow's IT team handles thousands of software procurement requests. Without an automated system to supply licence keys, our employees would have faced productivity blockers. To avoid that bottleneck, the team deployed AI agents to help assign and reclaim software licences across the growing software portfolio.

When an employee requests new software, AI Agent Orchestrator coordinates a fleet of specialised AI agents to complete the task.

Thanks to multi-agent collaboration, people gain faster access to the software they need, and teams can recover unused licences to maximise financial resources. This helps ensure all employees have access to the right software for their role at the right time. And by automating repetitive handoffs, IT teams have capacity to focus on higher-value tasks, such as proactively researching new tools.

At ServiceNow, we're using AI to improve productivity and experience. The real value is in the time it gives our people to do what they do best—strategising, relationship building, and innovating—so they can grow their skills and our business.

Find out how ServiceNow can help you put AI agents to work for people.