Over the past year, ServiceNow has been steadily embedding AI across its platform, using generative and predictive capabilities to automate workflows, enhance employee experiences, and deliver faster time-to-value for customers.
But the company isn’t just delivering AI-powered solutions to customers. It’s using the technology to transform its own operations, applying automation and intelligence internally to streamline workflows and reduce operational complexity.
Michael Park, who took over as VP of global partners and channels in June, said the company has been simplifying, decentralizing, and modernizing its internal structure to match the rapid evolution of AI.
“In order to be AI-led, ServiceNow also has to be AI-led,” Park told NowBen. “We have to walk the talk on AI so that we help our partners understand that.”.
Rethinking the Operating Model
Park’s first move was to address internal complexity in the partner organization. “We did a fairly substantial organizational setup,” he explained. “We took all the resources that were through our organization – and there were too many to count – and we simplified the organizational role construct down to four key roles.”
Those roles – partner manager, partner seller, partner business developer, and partner excellence leader – are designed to remove friction and improve execution.
“We clarified the global function from the geo function, and we’ve put the execution capability all into the geos,” he explained. “Local action doesn’t happen globally. It happens in the field.”
That local empowerment is underpinned by what Park describes as a “stacked-for-simplicity” model, aligning employee incentives and roles with partner goals.
“I’ve now stacked everything for simplicity, to move faster against the goals we need to drive,” he said.
AI as a Catalyst for Change
For Park, AI is reshaping how work happens. “AI itself has profound changes,” he said. “The world we grew up in has kind of grown up in silos… In a world of AI, instead of going north to south, AI is going to converge it east to west.”
That convergence across data, workflows, and business systems demands new ways of thinking about scale and collaboration. “The new world is going to be orchestrating multiple systems through the use of AI to create new kinds of business outcomes,” Park said.
He believes ServiceNow’s single-architecture platform puts it in an advantageous position to lead this shift. “It allows the partner to drive value at the data connection layer, at the AI layer, and at the workflow experience layer, without having lots of different platforms and tools. On one tool, which gives native efficiency for the partner to be more productive.”
But Park is quick to note that ServiceNow must apply the same principles internally. “There’s a lot of administrative work tied to doing work with partners that ServiceNow does,” he said. “There’s a lot of administrative work that partners have to do with us. The endeavor I have within our organization is to make sure that we are really maximizing the use of our own AI capability to take the work out of the job.”
That same mindset is being applied across ServiceNow’s operations in terms of automating routine processes, driving faster decision-making, and enabling teams to spend more time on value creation.
“We’re running at AI speed,” Park said. “We’re doing well on the product piece, but on the go-to-market piece – how we activate the partners, how we sell with partners, how we support partners – we have to be equally fast.”
Managing Change at AI Speed
Park acknowledges that moving at this pace requires a new approach to communication and learning. “The frequency of education has to change dramatically. We have to move from creating documents and sending them out, or setting up websites for people to visit. This is about being hand in hand with our partners – not a far distance away, writing documents.”
That proximity, he added, is crucial in helping both ServiceNow teams and partners adapt to an AI-driven world. “This is about building business, but more importantly, it’s about getting ready for the AI transformation, which essentially is change management.”
ServiceNow’s own experience mirrors that of many of its customers. “AI came so fast that a lot of companies spun up pilots just to go learn,” Park said. “If you kick the tires without an outcome in mind, the likelihood of kicking the tire into something that’s going to result in something may be a little less than if you had a goal up front.”
However, not everyone is ready to make the leap. Said Park: “Some people are just going to sit back in this Kodak moment and say, ‘I like film,’ and they’re going to stay on film. We think film is good – but digital film is coming, and we need to be ready.”
That readiness means embracing automation, transparency, and trust as core cultural values. “Trust, simplicity, transparency – and operating with high frequency. Those are the qualities we need in this next phase,” said Park.
Removing “Soul-Crushing Work”
Ultimately, ServiceNow’s modernization is rooted in purpose. “Before all this AI came along, we were in the business of automating workflows,” Park said. “With AI coming in, it’s just leveling up to the next level of how you automate workflow.
“There’s so much opportunity to remove soul-crushing work that people don’t like to do and allow them to do the work that they do like to do,” he said. “If the agentic capability can actually take that away and focus employees on doing more value-added work – whether it’s in the work itself or it’s engaging more with people to create a better experience or outcome – that is what ‘put AI to work’ means.”
Final Thoughts: Aligning the Inside with the Outside
Park sees a clear symmetry between ServiceNow’s internal transformation and how it’s empowering its partner ecosystem.
“We believe that ServiceNow’s platform is one of the many platforms that will be used to orchestrate these systems. And because of the way that technology is rendered in a single architecture, single data model, single platform, it gives native efficiency for the partner – and for us – to be more productive.”
By redesigning its structure, simplifying its processes, and embedding AI into every layer, ServiceNow is positioning itself for the next wave of digital transformation, believes Park.
“Agility and speed are the name of the game,” he said. “And simple is how we’ll get there.”