Source: Fortune
Summary
Paul Fipps, president of global customer operations at ServiceNow, highlighted how AI is transforming employee experiences, with one customer, Standard Chartered, achieving 77% deflection in employee requests. Fipps emphasized that AI is being used horizontally across departments, not just in isolated functions. ServiceNow is now offering AI-enabled products across its entire portfolio. Fipps also warned about the challenges of AI governance, citing a bank in India that had 40 custom AI agents it could not deploy due to control concerns. The number of enterprise AI agents is expected to grow significantly by 2030, according to IDC.
Our Reading
The numbers tell one story.
ServiceNow’s AI strategy is expanding.
Standard Chartered sees 77% deflection.
AI agents are growing fast.
Governance is a sticking point.
The real win is not just efficiency, but reinvention.
Author: Evan Null
The companies ‘reimagining’ their businesses with AI are winning out
Embedding AI across the employee experience may be the productivity boost that companies are looking for. But if companies really want to handle thousands of customer and employee issues at scale, Fipps says it can take a bit of tinkering. Simply bolting AI into preexisting systems isn’t enough; companies need to buck the status quo and rethink how work gets done.
“These companies are redesigning their business processes. Now, in that, you have a choice,” the ServiceNow executive said.
“If I just automate or drive autonomous agents to drive the current processes I have, that’s a choice that might get some productivity bump,” he continued. “But the ones that are actually rethinking and reimagining the business processes, and then leveraging AI inside those processes—whether they are vertical or horizontal—I think are really making the difference.”
The companies that are truly winning the AI race are thinking about more than simply automating existing work. First, they’re asking themselves two questions, Fipps says: “How do I leverage the tech efficiently?” and “How do I leverage my workers to do new and innovative things?”
And productivity alone isn’t the end goal. Fipps says companies also need to think about what they’re going to do with the time and resources AI frees up. The real winners are focused on whether the tools are actually improving business outcomes, starting with the customer and working backwards to identify where the tech can make the biggest impact. And rather than pocketing the savings, these companies are using the productivity gains from AI to find new ways to drive growth.
AI governance is becoming a business bottleneck: ‘I can’t rely on humans to control these agents’
Fipps also stressed that governance should be top of mind as businesses steer their workplaces through this current tech transformation.
There’s a real challenge that AI agents will start to go against compliance, and erode customer trust—especially in regulated industries like those that ServiceNow sits in. Earlier this year an AI agent created by OpenAI escaped its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face’s infrastructure, and just yesterday, the Sam Altman-led company alerted more than 100 organizations of rogue AI agent activity.
To protect their businesses and reputation amongst customers, Fipps emphasized the importance of thoughtfully building oversight into AI strategy. “I see governance and trust driving speed,” he said. And companies are already struggling to keep the tech in check. The ServiceNow executive said that around four months ago, he was struck by a conversation he had with the CTO of a large bank in India. The business had around 40 custom agents at the ready, but none of them were being deployed. When Fipps asked why, the CTO pointed to the challenge of keeping the agents under human control.
“He finally said to me, ‘I haven’t released any of them because I can’t rely on humans to control these agents, and I’m a regulated bank in India. And so I actually have these 40 fantastic custom-built agents that I can’t release,’” Fipps recalled.
And he’s not alone, the executive forewarned. It’s estimated that the number of active enterprise agents will swell from 28.6 million in 2025 to 2.2 billion by 2030, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). It’ll take a lot of human hands to keep them in line.
