As self-driving cars and large language models go mainstream, more and more tech companies are becoming household names. Even so, tech is struggling to keep pace with the very technologies it has introduced to the world.
By Evan Ramzipoor, Workflow contributor
The tech industry has played a highly visible role in the proliferation of transformative technologies such as generative AI (GenAI). As self-driving cars and large language models go mainstream, more and more tech companies are becoming household names. Even so, tech is struggling to keep pace with the very technologies it has introduced to the world.
Last July, ServiceNow released its inaugural Enterprise AI Maturity Index report. The goal of the study was to track how organizations are putting AI to work. At the time, organizations were just starting to develop strategies to deploy AI at scale. As a result, maturity was low across all industries—including technology, an industry voraciously pursuing AI use cases.
In partnership with NVIDIA, ServiceNow returned to the topic this year, surveying just under 4,500 executives worldwide—including 485 from technology companies—to understand how AI maturity has changed. Their answers power our second Enterprise AI Maturity Index, which measures each respondent’s progress on a 100-point scale.
To our surprise, we found that maturity scores this year are lower across the board compared to 2024 (dropping nine points for all respondents). Even more surprisingly, tech companies saw a drop too: The average maturity score for tech in our study also declined by 9 points, from 46 to 37. Though its maturity score did drop, tech performed best among all industries.
(Click here to read the full Technology AI Maturity Index report.)
What’s the explanation for this decline? AI is evolving faster than humans can adapt, according to ServiceNow Chief Digital Information Officer Kellie Romack. In many cases, technology firms simply have not figured out how to make the most of AI as the technology continues to develop at breakneck speed, she says.
However, there is plenty of room for optimism. AI is already improving the way tech companies get work done. For instance, Chris Bedi, ServiceNow’s chief customer officer, points out that AI is greatly increasing the speed at which companies innovate. “This is especially important for the technology industry, where speed to value is a competitive advantage,” he says.
Notably, just under one-third of the technology companies in our survey are Pacesetters, a cohort that has seen higher margin growth from AI than competitors and leads the pack across our five pillars of AI maturity: AI strategy and leadership, workflow integration, talent and skills, data governance, and realizing value from AI investment.
Overall, Pacesetters saw 47% higher bottom-line growth from AI than non-Pacesetters last year (12.8% and 8.7%, respectively). Almost twice as many Pacesetters reported increased productivity than their competitors. Compared to their counterparts, Pacesetters also reported improved experiences, faster innovation, and better risk management from AI adoption.
Here are five best practices that set Pacesetter tech companies apart from the rest:
IMPACT AI
AI Maturity in Technology
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Evan Ramzipoor is a writer based in California.