Artificial intelligence (AI) embedded in the ServiceNow platform is helping the National Science Foundation (NSF) accelerate IT service delivery and better manage large volumes of requests, according to a senior agency IT leader speaking at the ServiceNow Government Forum.
Donald Cloutier, IT specialist and ServiceNow project manager in NSF’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, said the agency is already seeing measurable improvements from its use of AI-powered tools across the platform.
“The service in the time to delivery has been cut about 28% today, and that’s only just on the ITSM [IT service management] and the ITOM [IT operations management] side as we work with the service desk,” Cloutier said.
Cloutier explained that AI is helping the agency better process incoming requests by turning large volumes of raw data into actionable work items within ServiceNow’s Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) environment.
“With the demand processing that we have today at NSF, I’m able to take the incoming demands, requests, incidents, problems, and convert them into a usable item within the SPM,” he said. “That’s what I’m really looking for is, let me weed out the noise … give me this raw data, put it into the platform, let me read it.”
“Then from there, I am able to quantify and identify really what it is that our customers are looking for,” he added. “It really helps with identifying any redundancy.”
Those capabilities extend to accelerating incident resolution as well. Cloutier explained that tools such as ServiceNow’s AIOps Learning Enhanced Automation Playbook (LEAP) can help generate step-by-step guidance for technicians in minutes.
“I ran 13,800 tickets over the past three months,” Cloutier said. “What was my top item? … It was MFA, people are having trouble using multi-factor authentication.”
“But I can hit one button, generate the steps, generate the playbook, send that playbook straight to the service desk lead, they approve it, they publish it, and now the technicians all have it in their hands – all in a matter of maybe seven minutes total,” he said.
The tool works right out of the box and saves days of work, Cloutier said.
Michael Hauck, NSF’s acting chief data officer and acting chief AI officer, also joined the ServiceNow Federal Forum, where he said the agency is using zero trust principles to support AI deployment across the organization.