85% of ServiceNow India Resources are in R&amp;D &amp; Engineering, says President Paul Smith
Agentic AI is no longer just a buzzword—it’s a tangible force reshaping how enterprises approach productivity. According to Paul Smith, president of global customer and field operations at ServiceNow, the rise of agentic AI is generating not just curiosity or anticipation, but real, measurable impact across organisations. “There is hype, and yes, there’s FOMO (fear of missing out),” Smith admitted while speaking with AIM. Moreover, he noted that customers deploying agentic AI are seeing phenomenal results—reportedly achieving efficiency gains of 10%, 20%, 30%, even up to 40%. Smith took BT, the telecom giant partially owned by Airtel, as an example, and explained that by leveraging ServiceNow’s Now Assist platform, the company has managed to resolve customer service calls 55% faster. Internally, ServiceNow has gone all in on AI too. The company currently runs over 200 agentic use cases in production, generating $325 million in annual savings. A standout example comes from ServiceNow’s internal finance help desk. “Before AI, the average turnaround was four days,” Smith said. “With ServiceNow agents, it’s now down to eight seconds for most queries.” This massive time saving has allowed ServiceNow to redeploy its finance staff to more strategic roles, without resorting to job cuts. ServiceNow has four of the top five banks in India as customers. “I am working really hard to be able to say it is five of the top five,” Smith said. How is India Contributing to the Global Agentic AI Push for ServiceNow “One in five of all ServiceNow employees is based in India,” said Smith. “And 85% of the resources that we have in ServiceNow India are in R&D and engineering roles—especially really core engineering.” He went on to highlight that a significant number of these engineers are working on leading-edge research around AI, underlining India’s role in building the future of enterprise automation. This isn’t a recent shift either. Over the last three years, ServiceNow’s India engineering team has grown at an average annual rate of 25%, cementing its place as a crucial node in the company’s global innovation network. It’s the engineering talent in India that’s quietly laying the groundwork for much of that innovation. The ServiceNow Yokohama release, unveiled just weeks ago, is packed with AI-first innovations. These include a suite of pre-built agents, AI Agent Studio for custom development, and the Agent Control Tower. ServiceNow’s biannual platform releases, named after cities—from Aspen to Xanadu to Yokohama, and Zurich on the horizon—symbolise the company’s steady innovation. The speed of innovation is also accelerating. “We’re now doing monthly releases,” Smith revealed. “So there will be releases before Zurich, and will bring even more announcements.” Smith’s conversations with Sumeet Mathur, who leads the India business for ServiceNow, reinforce this trajectory. Smith said that there’s an enormous appetite among Indian firms to partner with ServiceNow, not just because of the tech, but because of the one platform, one architecture, and one data model. One Platform, One Data Model, One Architecture A central pillar of ServiceNow’s strategy and a key reason Smith joined the company is its single-platform architecture. “This was Fred Luddy’s (ServiceNow founder) vision 20 years ago,” Smith said. “You start by managing your tech assets, then move to employee experiences, and finally to customer outcomes.” The unified architecture is not just a differentiator but a driver of massive efficiency. A blog from ServiceNow claims that this approach has over three million hours, which includes employees and customers. Smith provided several examples to back this up. At Visa, the platform is being used to handle credit card dispute resolutions 30% faster. Siemens started with IT and HR workflows and is now applying ServiceNow to customer service and field operations. “This is the beauty of it being one platform,” he said. Smith said that the Agentic Control Tower is generating the most excitement among clients, especially in India. “Whether you’re LTIMindtree or one of the top banks in India, you’re going to have agents from us, from Infosys, TCS, or even built in-house. You need a way to control them—understand what each one can access, what decisions it can make. That’s the Control Tower.” He emphasised that ServiceNow, which has long been seen as a “control tower” for technology operations, is now evolving to be the control centre for AI deployments across the enterprise. Citing a UK-headquartered pharmaceutical company that ServiceNow is working with as an example, Smith said they have implemented AI across the business. This has led to a projected 20% boost in overall performance. The firm is using AI to automate routine back-office and shared service tasks, which allows them to reallocate staff to more critical areas, like frontline drug discovery. “If that reallocation helps them bring a drug to market three months faster, that’s not just a win for the company—it’s a win for patients and healthcare globally,” Smith said. Smith also pointed to a broader ambition—ServiceNow’s entrance into the customer relationship management (CRM) space. “Thirty years on from the launch of traditional CRM vendors, most companies still haven’t truly transformed their CRM,” he said. ServiceNow is working with one of the world’s largest automakers to solve this, including warranty issues from the dealer to the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to the supply chain. On the acquisition front, Smith shared insights into ServiceNow’s recent agreement to acquire Moveworks, an agentic AI-first company with a few hundred customers. “We have 8,400 customers. When our customers tell us they want this to come together, we listen,” Smith said. “Moveworks has re-platformed to be agentic-first. It brings incredible technology and a great team.” While the deal is still undergoing regulatory approvals, Smith expects it to close by summer and sees the merger as a logical and powerful combination.
The company currently runs over 200 agentic use cases in production, generating $325 million in annual savings.
The ServiceNow Yokohama release, unveiled just weeks ago, is packed pre-built agents and AI Agent Studio for custom development.
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["AI", "agentic AI", "Aim", "RAG", "R", "Go", "API", "ETL", "GAN", "ViT"]
Mohit writes about AI in simple, explainable, and often funny words. He's especially passionate about chatting with those building AI for Bharat, with the occasional detour into AGI.