The business value of Agentic AI with ServiceNow: Why it’s all about the ecosystem

By Jatin Rajpal and Andrew Zarenski

Agentic AI has made a huge impression on almost every sector, with the promise of AI agents enabling humans to do complex work faster and more effectively - or even executing work on the human’s behalf. As the speed of adoption takes off, more and more clients are asking us how to build an Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy capable of taking them to the next frontier of innovation.

What we’re hearing from the organizations we work with in the consumer and packaged goods space is that there is huge excitement around the potential of AI to impact both the top and bottom line – however, there is caution around making investments due to uncertainty over AI policies. They’re worried about doing it the smart way, without drowning in unnecessary software licensing costs and all the while keeping ahead of competitors and proving ROI on their budgets. Which platform will deliver the most value to an organization in terms of reinventing how people work, efficiencies gained and the costs that can be cut? Margin pressure means technology needs to consume less effort and budget, while driving more differentiation in core business activities – be it supporting a new brand launch, reducing operational downtime, or enabling faster go-to-market campaigns. 

Inaction is no longer an option

To add fuel to the fire, inaction is no longer an option. The cost of doing nothing can quickly outpace the risks of adoption, with many of our clients citing that their greatest concern as failing to realize ROI from major AI and technology investments. With AI evolving so rapidly, paying a premium without clarity on outcomes or ROI can hinder agility and stunt innovation.

The first step: finding the orchestrator of the AI ecosystem

Driving AI value is about creating an ecosystem of platforms where conversational AI, such as ServiceNow Now Assist and domain-specific large language models (LLMs), allows humans to set tasks and an AI agent orchestrator enables AI agents to work collaboratively, whether for ServiceNow , Microsoft or SAP.

Together, they can answer human queries at speed and scale, pulling quality data from multiple platforms, handing off tasks to each other, and reporting back to humans with possible new insights and actions to be taken, or execute those actions themselves. With multiple agents interacting across several platforms, organizations will be able to transform the efficiency and value of a greater number of tasks within any given process.

You will also need to build a strong data foundation and address the risk that lies with the quality of your underlying data. If the data is poor or difficult to access, the insights, decisions and actions of AI agents will be suboptimal, to say the least.

The second step: applying an agentic AI approach

With agentic AI, the perspective on business challenges changes significantly. Agentic AI smashes efficiency way out of the park at 90% gains, as every element of the value chain can be automated. This unlocks whole new levels of productivity through autonomous decision-making.

A real-life example of the breadth of end-to-end Agentic-AI enabled transformation can be found with a consumer products client who was looking to enhance their employees’ experience and increase productivity through digital workflows powered by AI. Their employees struggled with knowing where to go for help with IT, HR and finance queries and other matters and that often resulted in patchwork solutions and reliance on knowing who to reach out to, which created inefficiencies and a fragmented employee experience. Service teams manually processed these cases, often leading to multiple reroutes between various departments, resulting in employee frustration and loss of productive time. 

Without agentic AI, this process is manual and, therefore, highly time-consuming, lengthy from end to end, and prone to inefficiency. With agentic AI applied, parts of the value chain can be automated so that agents accelerate productivity and drive efficiency and consistency. Humans remain looped in, and the overall process costs and time to complete are reduced. We supported the client in reimagining their employees’ experience by defining an omnichannel, digital-first, AI-powered approach utilizing the ServiceNow and Microsoft as the two main enterprise service delivery and employee productivity platforms.

The third step: experience design: Putting humans at the center

The global EY organization’s approach to agentic AI is rooted in experience design. We consider how different personas interact with it throughout their day. For example, a truck driver’s needs and AI touchpoints will differ significantly from those of a factory worker or desk-based employee. Understanding these nuances ensures agentic AI delivers real, context-aware value to each user.

The fourth step: addressing the fear of sprawl and duplicative investments

Most importantly, with so many financial pressures on the businesses, we can help reduce the costs and transformation and ensure that it yields the optimal financial outcomes for your global enterprise. You already have relevant AI capabilities within your enterprise software solutions, including ServiceNow, so you don’t need to make duplicative purchases.

Our experience in this area

Working with the global EY organization gives customers access to a trusted partner that can help them shape their AI future. We’ve been co-creating multi-agent, cross-platform agentic AI ecosystems for some time. We’re layering multi-agent systems on top of each other, each one powered by a domain-specific LLM to complete a sub-task of a wider project or objective. They’re already helping clients to automate workflows, accelerate value creation, and scale agentic AI across platforms. We can help you build out your underlying data platforms, define and craft use cases, and visualize the outcomes and positive impacts on the teams that your ServiceNow capability serves and enables.

Building the partnership to power the ecosystem

EY has a strategic alliance with both Microsoft and ServiceNow, and our alliance teams regularly collaborate to bring new and emerging technologies to life. This approach allows our clients and users to tap into best-of-breed solutions without having to integrate everything themselves. As an example, an employee can start in Microsoft Teams, use Copilot to ask a question or raise a case, and seamlessly transition into ServiceNow’s Now Assist AI to resolve a query. This accelerates resolution and reduces the risk of ‘AI lock-in’, using a more flexible, transparent, and scalable AI architecture. 

Use what you have. EY can help you take full advantage and shape your agentic AI strategy so that you can move to the frontier of business innovation with confidence.

Now is the time to make the move. Contact us, and let’s start the conversation about how to take your organization’s agentic ServiceNow capability beyond the theoretical and into a quality-driven world of powerful results.