“We have one of our customers, Standard Chartered Bank, that I was with about four months ago, and the chief operating officer said she’s driving 77% deflection rates across all of her employee requests,” Fipps recently told Fortune’s Andrew Nusca onstage at the 2026 AIQ Summit. “I always say, if you get 25% to 30% deflection in those use cases, it’s game-changing. If you get 75% to 80%, it is life-changing.”

The productivity gains add up when AI systems can wrangle more than three-quarters of worker requests—with no human touch required. The ServiceNow executive said that most of the high-value use cases involving AI are “horizontal.” Rather than pigeonholing AI into one function, a horizontal strategy leverages the tech across lots of different departments. The idea is to make AI useful across the organization—not just in one corner of it. And ServiceNow is now servicing that enterprise-wide tech to its customers. Earlier this year, the company announced its entire product portfolio will be AI-enabled, dubbing itself the “AI control tower for business reinvention.”

“You might say, ‘Well, why are you investing in employee experience?’ We see it as employee experience drives massive productivity, and it’s not just how you handle HR use cases,” Fipps said. By having them interact with a horizontal use case—like automating legal and technology requests, for example—companies can drive “tremendous ROI.”

And in their broad approach to AI, many of the most successful players are reinventing how they run their businesses.

The companies ‘reimagining’ their businesses with AI are winning out

Embedding AI across the employee experience may be the productivity boost that companies are looking for. But if companies really want to handle thousands of customer and employee issues at scale, Fipps says it can take a bit of tinkering. Simply bolting AI into preexisting systems isn’t enough; companies need to buck the status quo and rethink how work gets done.

“These companies are redesigning their business processes. Now, in that, you have a choice,” the ServiceNow executive said.

“If I just automate or drive autonomous agents to drive the current processes I have, that’s a choice that might get some productivity bump,” he continued. “But the ones that are actually rethinking and reimagining the business processes, and then leveraging AI inside those processes—whether they are vertical or horizontal—I think are really making the difference.”

The companies that are truly winning the AI race are thinking about more than simply automating existing work. First, they’re asking themselves two questions, Fipps says: “How do I leverage the tech efficiently?” and “How do I leverage my workers to do new and innovative things?”

And productivity alone isn’t the end goal. Fipps says companies also need to think about what they’re going to do with the time and resources AI frees up. The real winners are focused on whether the tools are actually improving business outcomes, starting with the customer and working backwards to identify where the tech can make the biggest impact. And rather than pocketing the savings, these companies are using the productivity gains from AI to find new ways to drive growth.

AI governance is becoming a business bottleneck: ‘I can’t rely on humans to control these agents’

Fipps also stressed that governance should be top of mind as businesses steer their workplaces through this current tech transformation. 

There’s a real challenge that AI agents will start to go against compliance, and erode customer trust—especially in regulated industries like those that ServiceNow sits in. Earlier this year an AI agent created by OpenAI escaped its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face’s infrastructure, and just yesterday, the Sam Altman-led company alerted more than 100 organizations of rogue AI agent activity. 

To protect their businesses and reputation amongst customers, Fipps emphasized the importance of thoughtfully building oversight into AI strategy. “I see governance and trust driving speed,” he said. And companies are already struggling to keep the tech in check. The ServiceNow executive said that around four months ago, he was struck by a conversation he had with the CTO of a large bank in India. The business had around 40 custom agents at the ready, but none of them were being deployed. When Fipps asked why, the CTO pointed to the challenge of keeping the agents under human control.

“He finally said to me, ‘I haven’t released any of them because I can’t rely on humans to control these agents, and I’m a regulated bank in India. And so I actually have these 40 fantastic custom-built agents that I can’t release,’” Fipps recalled. 

And he’s not alone, the executive forewarned. It’s estimated that the number of active enterprise agents will swell from 28.6 million in 2025 to 2.2 billion by 2030, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). It’ll take a lot of human hands to keep them in line.