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ServiceNow expands footprint in APAC, doubles down on AI

ServiceNow has been building local teams, targeting customers in regulated industries and doubling down on AI to expand its presence in the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region

Aaron Tan
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Published: 05 Aug 2024 13:25

ServiceNow is expanding its presence in the Asia-Pacific region, with a strong focus on leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and helping organisations orchestrate business processes across business functions.

In a recent interview with Computer Weekly, Chia Wee Luen, managing director and vice-president for ServiceNow Asia, highlighted the company’s growth trajectory, noting that it is close to reaching $10bn in revenue and maintaining a healthy growth rate of more than 20%.

In Asia-Pacific, the cloud-based workflow automation platform provider saw its revenues grow by over 30%, from $744m in 2022 to $971m in 2023.

One of the focus areas for ServiceNow in the region is its expansion in markets such as Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, where the company is building local teams and empowering business users to build applications on the ServiceNow platform using low-code development tools.

It is also working with partners, including consulting firms and system integrators, to better understand and address the specific needs of customers in different industries, including financial services, telecommunications, government and manufacturing.

To support its growth in the region, ServiceNow has been operating the Regulated Market Cloud hosted on Microsoft Azure’s Singapore datacentres since 2020 for critical infrastructure providers and government agencies in the city-state.

The service is designed to address the increasing regulatory requirements and data sovereignty concerns of customers in highly regulated industries by offering enhanced security features and data residency options, ensuring that customer data is stored and processed locally.

Chia said the next iteration of Regulated Market Cloud, which does not offer the full suite of ServiceNow capabilities for now, will have “almost 100% feature parity with some of the other clouds that we are operating.”

“It’s a huge investment into Singapore, and that’s because we are bullish about the prospects and strong adoption,” he added, noting that similar investments are being planned for other markets in the region.

Broader business transformation

In its engagements with customers, ServiceNow is going beyond its stronghold in IT service management (ITSM), positioning itself as a platform for broader business transformation. The company’s portfolio now spans various functions, including HR, customer service, and governance, risk and compliance (GRC).

In the area of GRC, Chia said ServiceNow’s platform can help organisations streamline regulatory compliance processes and improve their overall risk posture. This is done by integrating risk management workflows around enterprise risk, IT risk, vendor risk, business continuity and audit management on a single platform, providing a consolidated view of the organisation’s risk profile.

As an example. Chia said ServiceNow’s GRC capabilities have helped Malaysia’s GXBank, a subsidiary of Singapore’s GXS Bank, to demonstrate to the country’s central bank that it is able to orchestrate and automate risk management processes for compliance and control, enabling it to become the first digital bank to launch operations in the country.

He also discussed ServiceNow’s move into security operations, one of the fastest-growing areas for the company, noting that the ServiceNow platform can integrate with various security tools and orchestrate remediation workflows.

By correlating asset data from the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) with vulnerability information, Chia said the platform can help organisations prioritise and address the most critical vulnerabilities, particularly those affecting mission-critical systems.

Like almost every technology company, ServiceNow has been doubling down on AI, specifically generative AI (GenAI), to help customers streamline workflows and processes.

For example, in customer service, GenAI can be used to provide more accurate and personalised responses to customer enquiries by understanding the context and intent behind the requests. This helps reduce the time and effort required by agents to resolve customer issues, leading to improved customer satisfaction.

It can also assist with tasks such as summarising incident details, enabling agents to quickly understand the context and take appropriate actions. Additionally, the platform can route cases to the most suitable agent based on their skills and availability, further enhancing the efficiency of service delivery.

Besides powering its GenAI capabilities with large language models (LLMs) and domain-specific models that are tuned for service management to improve accuracy and remove bias, ServiceNow recently announced that it would let customers bring their own models to the platform.

While ServiceNow customers will have to pay more for GenAI capabilities because of the costs involved in serving the models, Chia believes that in most cases, the productivity improvements will justify the investment by customers.

“We have a lot of conversations with customers to help them identify the value, which will then justify the cost, but if it doesn’t, then it may not be the right solution for them,” he added.

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