Constant evolution is somewhat of a philosophy at CANCOM. The German company began life in 1992 reselling hardware from a university dorm. Today it’s one of the leading digital solutions providers in EMEA, covering everything from AI-powered customer support to field services and device management. Behind its transformation lies a relentless appetite for innovation, a best-of-breed IT strategy, and a customer-zero approach that instils trust.

Headquartered in Munich, CANCOM operates in roughly 80 locations across the DACH region and central Europe. It serves multiple industries, and its mission is to support the digital evolution of its customers. CANCOM has been a ServiceNow customer since 2018.

Building a cohesive and streamlined digital environment

CANCOM faced challenges due to siloed data across multiple systems, including ERP, CRM, and SharePoint, with limited integration between them. This fragmentation made it difficult to streamline operations and leverage data effectively. Always on the lookout for the best IT systems and capabilities, the company chose ServiceNow to unify its data, AI, and workflows. “The benefit of the ServiceNow AI Platform is that it is scalable, and we have the newest technology right in our hands,” says Ulrich Mayr, CIO, CANCOM.

CANCOM’s CEO, Rudiger Rath, amplifies how significant the deployment is. “As CEO, I’m so happy that we have invested in AI, in terms of talent and technology,” he says. “Because it’s not only the use case that is mission critical—someone has to build the use case and transfer it to technology.”

With ServiceNow Technology Provider Service Management, CANCOM has evolved the platform around its own business services, optimizing processes, improving collaboration, and enhancing overall operational efficiency. Serving as an experience layer, ServiceNow seamlessly connects customers and employees while integrating with other key systems, ensuring a unified and efficient digital ecosystem, and accelerating response times to customer requests.

“The ServiceNow AI Platform enables us to be more efficient and more productive,” says Simon Russin, Director Enterprise Applications, CANCOM. “That gives us more time for other tasks, like working with the team on customer opportunities.”

Achieving operational excellence through innovation

For CANCOM, delivering great products and services means adopting a customer-zero approach—learning new technologies in-house and evolving them in its own internal systems before taking them to customers. “This helps us gain trust internally, and with customers,” says Simon. “They benefit from the experience we gain.”

Its partnership with ServiceNow rests on three pillars: reselling, consulting, and innovation. As a reselling partner, CANCOM delivers ServiceNow solutions to customers. As a consulting partner, it provides expert guidance on implementation, business process optimization, and strategy. Finally, CANCOM enhances the platform by developing value-added services that extend ServiceNow’s capabilities, driving greater efficiency and innovation for businesses.

With all CANCOM employees and customers already integrated into the platform and widely using its features, the company saw a clear business case for leveraging ServiceNow’s AI capabilities. CANCOM envisioned a personal assistant for every employee—one that could provide instant support and streamline daily tasks around the clock. This vision later evolved into a customer service solution designed to transform how customers access support, delivering the right information faster.

Using the generative AI capabilities of Now Assist, the company created CANCOM Assistant, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to interpret questions, gather insights from various data sources, and distil them into clear, concise responses. The company’s agile approach, using rapid feedback cycles, helped accelerate implementation.

“With the ServiceNow AI Platform, we can not only build our own product and solution with the CANCOM Assistant but achieve the goal more quickly, more efficiently, and make our knowledge and workflows more accessible,” says Ulrich.

Powering agentic AI to optimize processes and human experiences

Launched with a solely HR focus, the scope of the project soon changed as curiosity across the company grew. “It organically evolved to support all of our business units," says Ulrich. In true CANCOM style, that evolution was fast, with the adoption rate doubling inside a year.

Within days CANCOM Assistant’s analytics capabilities revealed the intent of employees’ questions, allowing the team to optimize it using the company’s ServiceNow knowledge base, SharePoint content, and other data sources. This ensured people had prompt access to the right information. “The CANCOM Assistant is much more than just predictive information—it’s more like agentic AI.” says Simon. “It learns by itself, evolves by itself, and gets access to all different data streams within our organization.” As a result, it has quickly scaled.

It’s also really important to get the security and governance aspects right with AI. “The AI agent has to run on an efficient and secure infrastructure,” says Rath. “And that’s a major point where we, as a system integrator, as a service provider, can deliver great services and great customer experience.”

“We deflect up to 80% of our tickets via the CANCOM Assistant through all our departments including IT, HR, finance, the supply chain—plus common questions about our portfolio for sales and services,” adds Ulrich.

Ever the innovator, CANCOM sees agentic AI as the next step in the evolution of artificial intelligence, and integral to optimizing its own processes and creating a better experience for its employees and customers.

CANCOM Assistant supports those customers with IT service management inquiries while enabling them to integrate their own corporate knowledge. Like CANCOM employees, they can access the CANCOM Assistant through the company’s ServiceNow portal, using integrations with chat interfaces like Microsoft Teams or Slack. It allows the connection of not only internal IT knowledge for CANCOM’s customers but also their specific enterprise knowledge. Feedback has been ‘overwhelming’, with key users celebrating that they ‘finally’ have access to a tool that’s able to understand what they need, in natural language, and present relevant answers, fast.

“The CANCOM Assistant enables our customers to be more efficient and more productive, benefiting from shorter resolution times for all types of requests and tickets,” says Ulrich. “Plus, we offer the CANCOM Assistant not only to our customers to enhance the use of our services and theirs, but also to their customers—so they can use it both internally and externally.”

“The great thing about ServiceNow is that it moves from just a product play to a platform play,” adds Rath. “We envision having AI in each corner of our business, end-to-end. And it’s so powerful to extend this to our customers—and theirs.”

Adding value for employees and customers into the future

CANCOM is following a phased approach to developing value-added services based on the ServiceNow AI Platform. Alongside CANCOM Assistant, in phase one, will be Asset Management—of hardware and software—and a Workplace-as-a-Service offering. This will enable customers to manage their assets through the easy-to-use self-portal, providing real-time visibility and control over devices, firmware, and other key information. In phase two, CANCOM will expand its services to include security, cloud, and network solutions, offering even more comprehensive support to meet customer needs.

It’s a future defined by the constant evolution that has brought CANCOM this far, with ServiceNow playing a central role moving forward.

“Using the agentic AI capabilities of the ServiceNow AI Platform, we can finally connect everything together. From the services we provide internally to the customer-facing products and offerings, everything is connected,” says Ulrich.