ServiceNow is a $9 billion American software giant that few people in India would have heard of. But it handles the workloads of some of the largest companies in the world. What is even less known is the role that the company’s Indian engineers play in helping the cloud software The company remains ahead in the fierce race for AI supremacy in the enterprise space.
The company’s latest release for its Now platform, codenamed Xanadu, represents its most ambitious AI push yet, with 350 new Generative AI innovations developed with significant contributions from its Development of India centers.
Sumeet Mathur, senior vice president and general manager of ServiceNow’s India technology and business center, says the release required more than 5 million engineering hours and has already become the most successful product launch in the world. business in terms of revenue generation.
“For us, generative AI is not just hype: it adds real value,” says Mathur. “What sets our AI offerings apart is that they are deeply integrated into existing workflows where people actually work, rather than being standalone tools that users must switch to.
Mathur says this integration is evident in practical applications such as the company’s AI-powered case management system. When customer service agents handle cases across multiple shifts, they typically spend valuable time reviewing previous interactions. ServiceNow AI can now instantly summarize these interactions, extracting relevant insights not only from conversation logs but also from connected systems across the organization – from customer relationship management to warehouse data to financial systems.
This comprehensive approach is possible thanks to what Mathur calls the enterprise “knowledge graph” – a unified data architecture that connects different enterprise systems. “When a customer asks about the status of their refund, our AI can simultaneously access their purchase history, returns status, warehouse data and financial information, providing a complete picture instantly,” he explains.
Indian power
ServiceNow’s India operation, celebrating its tenth anniversary, has grown from a support center to the company’s largest global development center. Today, Indian employees represent more than 20 percent of ServiceNow’s global workforce, growing at more than 25 percent CAGR over the past three years.
“Hyderabad has become our largest location in the world in terms of headcount,” says Mathur. “One in three ServiceNow engineers globally is based in India, and 85% of our Indian employees are engineers and developers. » More than 40 percent of the world’s population product engineering this is now coming from India.
Indian teams are increasingly taking a leadership role in strategic initiatives, including the integration of technology and talent from companies acquired by ServiceNow. “When we build a product team, we believe it is important that all functions – development, quality engineering, product management, UX design and research – are in the same region,” says Mathur. “This helps drive better ideation and innovation.”
This philosophy particularly paid off with the Xanadu release, where Indian teams played a central role in the development of key features such as the ServiceNow Skills Kit. The Skill Kit represents what industry experts call the “shaper approach” to AI adoption – enabling organizations to tailor AI capabilities to their specific needs. For example, a company could create custom sentiment analysis tools for customer interactions, using either ServiceNow’s AI models or their own, while maintaining security and governance standards.
A platform game
ServiceNow AI Strategy reflects its evolution from an IT service management company to a complete enterprise platform provider. The company now offers solutions spanning technology workflows, employee services, customer operations and financial management, all built on a single platform.
With this unified approach, when the company develops a new AI feature like text summarization, it becomes immediately available across all of its products, whether used by IT help desks, HR departments, or customer service teams.
“The reason our GenAI products have been so successful is because we have been able to demonstrate real net value. AI will either be a growth accelerator for software companies or it will swallow up their business. The key is to show real impact on the bottom line or bottom line,” says Mathur.
The company is currently working on its next release, which will include features like the ability to convert text to prompts to simplify prompt engineering – the increasingly important skill of creating effective instructions for AI models . The company is also developing an assessment framework to help companies evaluate the accuracy and reliability of their AI implementations.
