Across industries and continents, organizations are making bold bets on AI. But as the ServiceNow Enterprise AI Maturity Index 2026 makes clear, spending more on AI doesn't guarantee transformation.
AI spending surged 110% in a single year, according to the report, yet AI-enabled workflows remain the lowest scoring across all seven pillars of AI maturity. The gap between AI ambition and AI execution has never been wider.
That's exactly why the ServiceNow AI Pacesetter Innovation Awards exist.
Now in its second year, the awards celebrate ServiceNow customers that are doing more than buying AI; they're actively building it. These organizations have unified data, embedded governance, and scaled AI across enterprise workflows in ways that deliver measurable outcomes.
We're proud to announce our 2026 AI Pacesetter Innovation Award winners:
- Americas: Takeda Pharmaceuticals
- Europe, Middle East, and Africa: Hitachi Energy
- Asia Pacific: Standard Chartered
- Japan: NEC Corp.
Here are five ways these AI innovation leaders, grounded in the seven pillars of AI maturity that define what it means to be a true Pacesetter, beat the competition.
Takeda Pharmaceuticals didn't just deploy AI; it declared AI transformation a companywide mandate. In under 12 months, the global life sciences leader consumed 1.66 million AI assists across 15 Now Assist features spanning IT Service Management (ITSM), Customer Service Management, HR Service Delivery, and Creator.
Similarly, NEC strives to realize its vision of becoming an AI-native company. A direct CEO project engages each CxO to propel AI-powered corporate transformation. The company has successfully reduced operational workloads by 480,000 hours. It uses ServiceNow as one of the key platforms supporting this endeavor.
Under its client zero strategy, where NEC acts as its own first customer, the company is translating its internal practical know-how into the expansion of its digital experience business, thereby enhancing corporate value.
Our AI Pacesetters don't treat AI as an IT project. They treat it as a strategic priority—one that’s communicated widely, backed by implementation plans, and tied to defined outcomes at every level of the organization.
The Enterprise AI Maturity Index found that most organizations are still using AI to do existing work, just slightly faster. Only 9% have made meaningful progress in building autonomous, multistep workflows. This year's Pacesetter winners are the exceptions.
Hitachi Energy replaced four separate service systems with a single unified portal for its more than 50,000 employees, covering IT, HR, and finance. This resulted in a 25% reduction in service desk requests in the first week alone and 83,000 hours saved through automation and self-service.
Standard Chartered took a similarly ambitious approach. The Asia Pacific winner designed an agentic AI-driven onboarding solution built on the ServiceNow AI Platform. The bank used AI agents and Now Assist to automate and orchestrate the end-to-end onboarding journey across HR, ITSM, and other areas of the business. It achieved 6,700-plus HR hours saved annually, among other significant results.
Takeda's partnership with Cognizant embedded AI engineering expertise directly into the company's operating culture. It enabled multibusiness-unit deployment across ITSM, HR, customer service, risk, and security simultaneously, without requiring the internal team to build all capabilities from scratch.
This kind of intentional talent strategy, combining internal champions with external expertise, reflects the Pacesetter mindset.
The Enterprise AI Maturity Index also revealed that only 20% of organizations have implemented AI testing, auditing, and risk assessment. As AI agents take on more decision-making, the absence of clear governance frameworks amplifies the risk of getting it wrong. Pacesetters treat governance as a competitive advantage, not a compliance burden.
Standard Chartered operates under one of the most complex, multijurisdictional regulatory environments of any organization in this year's award set, navigating more than 60 country-level regulatory frameworks globally. AI governance is embedded into every agentic workflow by design, not as an afterthought.
NEC positions the use of AI as a vital driver for creating social value through safety, security, fairness, and efficiency. To help ensure employees can use AI safely and securely, the company has embedded features such as authentication, authorization, and guardrails directly into its AI utilization platform.
By visualizing these elements through an AI dashboard, NEC minimizes AI-related risks, including compliance violations and the leakage of confidential information.
"Without value measurement, AI is just an interesting and expensive science experiment," says Vijay Kotu, chief analytics officer at ServiceNow.
The Enterprise AI Maturity Index reinforces this point: Pacesetters achieve an average return on investment of 160% today, which is projected to reach 194% within two years.
Every Pacesetter winner this year understands that measurable outcomes separate transformation from mere AI theater.
Takeda tracked every assist, every capability call, and every agentic resolution across 15 Now Assist features. The company uses Platform Analytics to monitor AI adoption in real time, enabling it to identify high-value areas and accelerate deployment where it matters most.
Hitachi Energy has quantified 83,000 hours saved through automation and self-service. Agentic AI is in production for service desk fulfillers, supporting autonomous incident prioritization, categorization, next-action recommendations, and change request plan generation.
NEC's results are equally compelling. By improving self-resolution rates, automating knowledge generation, implementing automated responses, and restructuring end-to-end processes to be AI-native, NEC is maximizing its impact. This approach has resulted in more than 10,000 hours of annual labor savings in HR inquiry handling.
It serves as a prime example that even organizations in early activation phases can deliver outsized, measurable returns when AI is deployed with intention.
Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Hitachi Energy, Standard Chartered, and NEC Corp. are doing more than just experimenting with AI. They’re building the infrastructure, culture, and governance required to run AI at enterprise scale.
In the language of the Enterprise AI Maturity Index, they’re the proof that Pacesetters aren't just AI enabled; they're AI first.
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