Lead With An Innovation Mindset
It’s Time For You To Challenge The Status Quo
While ingenuity gives pacesetters an edge, not all companies are set up for out-of-the-box thinking.
“For years, we have been taught to follow the rules to achieve goals — to not challenge convention,” Brian Solis, head of global innovation at ServiceNow, said at Knowledge. “Companies are meant to operate efficiently and meant to scale. They fight against risk.”
But AI is challenging the very nature of what it means to be an organization, he continued. Pacesetters are recognizing this shift and building AI innovation centers to nurture creativity.
Thinking expansively led a major insurance business to improve IT productivity and accelerate the creation of its service catalog. Each item in such a catalog — like installing a software patch — usually has a multi-step workflow. Using ServiceNow tools, the company automated some of the most significant ones for the first time.
When companies don’t have the option to dedicate more people or investment to fix a problem or chase an opportunity, they can turn to AI to identify smarter ways to deliver services.
Brian Solis
Head of Global Innovation, ServiceNow
"Move away from a legacy mindset — of merely iterating on yesterday's technologies — to an AI-first one, which allows for true business transformation. Such a mindset allows leaders to dig deeply into the structure of their organizations and see, sometimes for the first time, the root causes of the obstacles they face."
Servicenow Perspective
56% of AI pacesetters strongly agree they are operating with an AI vision that is clear and shared,
compared with 30% of others.
If every organization on the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world’s largest public companies were pacesetters, each enterprise would enjoy a $56 million average boost in gross profit, according to ServiceNow calculations. And there would be a $113 billion increase in total gross profit across the board.
“Together, we have a great chance to shape the future, and incrementalism won’t do it,” McDermott said. “It’s time for change — to put AI to work for you.”
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Established technologies have tried-and-tested instructions that others can follow. Unfortunately, there’s no such user manual yet for AI, said Bradley Hunt, manager of DevOps and regional apps for Orica, a mining solutions provider and winner of an AI Pacesetter Innovation Award at Knowledge.
This is why it’s best to test drive AI in one department first and apply lessons learned across the enterprise. An automation platform can help organizations with this lateral scaling. Using the ServiceNow AI Platform, Orica implemented AI in IT first, with the Virtual Agent tool. AI is helping Orica deflect 94% of successful chats from the service desk and cutting average resolution time by a day and a half. Now Orica wants to roll out AI capabilities to legal, human resources and other departments.
Pacesetters like Orica realize that consolidating departments onto a common platform unites teams, collapses information silos and fuels innovation, Wright said. It decreases the costs of harnessing and accessing data and instead enables employees to focus on the actual tasks at hand.
It’ll Help You Spread AI Success To Other Departments
Take A Platform Approach
Bradley Hunt
Manager, DevOps and Regional
Apps, Orica
“Having a platform approach means we can leverage AI learnings at scale. We wanted to try out AI in IT, but knowing that it’s executed through the ServiceNow platform means we can reuse that information in smaller business areas when the time comes.”
Pacesetter Perspective
66% of AI pacesetters use an enterprise-wide platform with built-in AI capabilities,
compared with 46%
of others.
IT talent is in short supply worldwide, especially when it comes to the skills needed to deploy and manage the latest AI tools. For this reason, Orica nurtured home-grown talent first.
Yes, organizations require technical expertise to understand how to build models. But they also need creative thinkers who can use AI to solve customer problems. Increasingly, tools like Now Assist, which is part of the ServiceNow platform, are making it easier to build autonomous chatbots, request summaries and code without dev expertise.
"It was hard,” Hunt said of starting out in GenAI. “There isn’t a wide or deep set of GenAI experts. Luckily, using Now Assist makes it very easy to implement and configure without detailed knowledge.”
Expand Your Hiring Criteria Beyond Technical Ability
Focus On Talent
50% of pacesetters agree they have the right mix of talent to execute their AI strategy
compared with 29% of others.
When what AI can do — and what AI has the authority to do — keeps changing, where do business leaders even begin with governance?
It’s challenging enough when governance has to walk a tightrope between maintaining guardrails and promoting innovation. “We had to make sure governance was set up with a focus that’s still going to allow piloting and experimentation of AI,” Hunt said.
Clear risk management guidelines help employees understand what the rules are, said Rachael Sandel, chief information officer at Orica. In 2024, the company released its own AI guidelines that aligned with industry standards and company values.
Set Clear Rules, And Your Employees Will Thank You
Prioritize AI Governance
Rachael Sandel
Chief Information Officer, Orica
“Governance is really critical for us in trying to balance innovation with responsible, safe and ethical use of AI. Having these strong foundations to then scale AI development was really critical.”
Pacesetter Perspective
63% of pacesetters have created AI-specific policies and addressed needs in data governance and security,
compared with 46%
of others.
Agentic AI — a type of artificial intelligence that acts autonomously to meet defined goals — has had barely a year to get out the gate, but it’s already delivering ROI for early adopters. According to the ServiceNow report, 55% of enterprises using agentic AI said it has already improved gross margins.
Reacting with agility to 21st century problems — geopolitical conflicts, global tariffs and skills gaps, among them — requires contemporary architecture, ServiceNow Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott said during the opening keynote at Knowledge.
“AI can only achieve its full potential when it spans across every system, department and function,” he said.
In other words, expect the tech stack to collapse and become core databases that feed into a central platform. It’s there, between the data and workflows, where AI agents are deployed strategically by humans to complete tasks and make business decisions, saving organizations time and money.
‘Autonomous Minions’ Are Proving Their Worth
Integrate Agentic AI
Bradley Hunt
Manager, DevOps and Regional
Apps, Orica
“Agentic AI is really interesting. This is where we're going to get the true value from AI. Up until now, there's been a lot of summarizing and generating text, which is really cool, and it's amazing technology. But how do you get an enterprise use case from summarizing text, and how do you then get ROI on it?”
pacesetter Perspective
36% of pacesetters are using agentic AI,
compared with 19% of others.
