The Acceleration Economy analyst team spent last week at ServiceNow’s Knowledge24 event, engaging with company executives and leaders of its top ecosystem partners and hearing from customers about their use of the ServiceNow platform as well as how GenAI is advancing their business objectives. Below, our team — Kieron Allen, Tony Uphoff and me — offer 10 big takeaways from a wide range of strategic developments shared during the gathering.
1. Sweeping AI Functionality — And Demand
An expansive set of new AI/GenAI products was announced. There are far too many to highlight in a high-level summary; we’ll cite just two to give a flavor:
- New GenAI features for app development including service catalog item generation, app generation, and playbook generation that drastically cut the time required to build net-new apps. ServiceNow SVP of Platform Engineering Joe Davis demoed the ability to use photos as a new Now Assist input type. Starting with a photo of a workflow on a whiteboard, an image can be uploaded into Now Assist, which can convert it into a workflow. That’s a highly efficient alternative to the days or weeks needed to build a workflow from scratch.
- A new bring-your-own (BYO) GenAI model that lets customers use either ServiceNow’s own multimodal model, their own large language models (LLMs), or general-purpose LLMs to create tailored, efficient experiences.
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See the complete set of announcements for a more detailed picture.
In terms of the impact on ServiceNow’s business, the GenAI-enabled Now Assist is included in seven out of 10 of its largest new customer deals this year, the company said during its Financial Analyst Day presentation.
2. Platform of Platforms: Massive Complexity, Massive Opportunity
Building on its AI innovations, ServiceNow has what appears to be a nearly unlimited opportunity to win big customers while consolidating a proliferation of platforms. ServiceNow officials said the average employee shifts back and forth between 13 different apps per day, creating a huge productivity drain.
The global telecom giant BT Group is consolidating 125 service platforms onto ServiceNow, according to Hena Jalil, CIO, Business at BT. The ServiceNow platform has improved internal key performance indicators (KPIs) including time to resolve incidents but also positively impacted the experience of big customers. “Customers are telling us we’re making a massive difference,” Jalil says.
JP Morgan Chase is using ServiceNow to streamline and fine-tune an onboarding process for 80,000 employees per year. According to Jeanine Carlucci, Global Head of Employee Digital and Service Experience at JPMorgan Chase & Co., the process entails 525 tasks, 18 applications, and 64 policies, so there’s considerable opportunity to reimagine for simplicity while consolidating functions and applications.
ServiceNow Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott (pictured above in his keynote address) observed that customers have spent 25 years investing in point solutions that may have added departmental value — but not enterprise-level value — and many of those point solutions could be destined for retirement. “Many of them are irrelevant, dim points of light…They may just turn off the oxygen slowly, but if they’re not good platforms, they’re not going to last.”
3. Partners, Customers Prove Platform Scalability
Scalability of its core platform is a critical differentiator; there were numerous examples of ServiceNow implementations ranging into the hundreds of thousands of employees, including:
- Accenture, one of the company’s top partners, uses ServiceNow across 730,000 employees, Senior Managing Director Dave Kanter said in a one-on-one discussion.
- EY, another huge partner, uses ServiceNow across its 400,000 employees in HR service management and other use cases, according to Hank Prybylski, who is Global Vice Chair, Transformation, for the professional services firm.
- NVIDIA, number one on our top 12 AI Pioneers ranking, views ServiceNow as the “operating system” of its business, CEO Jensen Huang said. The company employs roughly 30,000 people.
4. Infrastructure Upgrades Enhance Scalability
In a keynote session demo, CTO Casey shared details on performance improvements to maximize scalability of the underlying ServiceNow platform, driven by a new database called Project RaptorDB, based on Postgres. Whereas customers could previously execute 35,000 transactions per minute, Raptor DB allows them to extend that above 90,000.
“You can get more work done at your instance, and it also means you have more headroom,” Casey said. “Especially for our bigger customers, you can feel confident with bigger, higher performance workloads on the system.”
5. Customer Connections Grow Stronger
ServiceNow’s connection to its customers was evident throughout Knowledge24. In show floor demos and workshops, customers experimented with ServiceNow technologies while use cases were showcased to inspire customers to get the most from the platform.
One of many examples that stood out for the measurable impact of ServiceNow technology: Marc Jones, Head of Digital Products, Global Procurement at HSBC, explained the bank has 230,000 employees and spends $11 billion in procurement. In that context, even small efficiencies yield huge savings. Case in point: The five-minute savings the bank is set to realize on each of the 300,000 purchase orders it processes annually, thanks to ServiceNow’s ShoppingHub.
Customers help steer the direction of the company, and McDermott cemented this commitment by announcing a new board of directors, made up of community representatives, for the Global ServiceNow User Group, or SNUG.
6. Functional Breadth Spans Customer Personas
One of the key barriers to productivity in the cloud era is digital sprawl. ServiceNow simplifies complex tech environments by providing a layer that sits on top of the various tools and data systems that companies rely on across functional areas.
ServiceNow’s Now Platform has been optimized to put AI to work in every corner of the enterprise. The multitude of AI and GenAI announcements made at Knowledge24 promise to drive AI into any workflow in any department, for any business or tech leader. This includes supporting customers in an operational technology (OT) context in the future, building on the company’s roots in IT.
ServiceNow execs went so far as to predict that two-thirds of all business personas will be “radically” changed by GenAI.
7. Coopetition in the AI Era
Cloud and AI leaders are collaborating to simplify their offerings and help customers prevent the need to choose between AI platforms. ServiceNow’s partnerships with Microsoft and IBM, both detailed at Knowledge24, are prime examples of this evolution.
We’ve previously detailed prime use cases and benefits of the Microsoft-Service Now AI partnership. In the case of IBM, the two companies are working together to incorporate watsonx.ai and IBM Granite foundation LLMs into its Now Assist GenAI experience for ServiceNow customers.
8. NVIDIA Alliance Looms Large
NVIDIA’s Huang demoed interactive, real-time avatars leveraging Now Assist, showcasing the potential to provide another communication option for Virtual Agent experiences to users who prefer visual interactions.
Noting that AI technology has scaled one million times over the last 10 years — to the point that we’re now manufacturing digital intelligence at scale — Huang said the important AI step for companies to take is “get on the train,” rather than watching it go by and trying to figure out why it’s moving so fast.
In addition, as noted above, Huang positions ServiceNow as a strategic business platform for his company.
9. Partnership Breadth
ServiceNow has made clear that the partner ecosystem is central to its success. That was on full display last week with expanded partnerships including those with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and IBM as detailed above. “We strongly believe that the next shift in generative AI will result from the collaboration of industry leaders putting AI to work for their customers,” said CJ Desai, President and CEO at ServiceNow.
Other partner relationships detailed at Knowledge24 included:
- Equinix. The two companies aim to deliver end-to-end visibility and intelligent insights across the enterprise IT stack, including data center infrastructure and applications.
- Fujitsu. The companies are creating a development hub in Japan to focus on building new applications for customers.
- Genesys. The partners will unify customer service teams through a single desktop, centralize routing across departments and channels, and deliver more personalized customer experiences.
Partner breadth and depth is delivering major financial impact: Partners drove 20% of sourced Annual Contract Value, or ACV, in Q1 of 2024, vs. 8.4% in Q1 2022, officials said. The company’s partner ecosystem now includes 2,700 partners, with several generating over $1 billion in revenue.
10. AI For Business Transformation
McDermott’s confidence in the direction ServiceNow is taking and its commitment to driving business transformation through AI was palpable.
“Are you ready to put AI to work for people?” he said in his first address to the Knowledge24 audience, before stating that “every business, in every industry across the world, every single business process, every single workflow, will be re-engineered with generative AI.”
McDermott regularly riffed on how the simplification that ServiceNow is enabling will yield success for customers: “How do we get to simple and put AI to work for people? ServiceNow is the AI platform for business transformation.”
Knowledge24 served as the ultimate showcase for the potential impact of business transformation. Stay tuned as Acceleration Economy tracks ServiceNow’s continued innovation and expansion, as well as its progress across the many product and partner initiatives rolled out at Knowledge24.
