Pharma organisations have become increasingly dependent on technology to run virtually every layer of the business. Commercial platforms, manufacturing systems, clinical environments, regulatory applications, supply chains and employee services now operate as interconnected technology ecosystems rather than isolated systems.
This creates a challenge that organisations often tend to underestimate. When tech environments become more complex, managing IT services through fragmented processes, manual intervention and reactive support models becomes increasingly difficult. An incident affecting one application may have implications for multiple business services, users or operational processes.
In my discussions with stakeholders of multiple pharma enterprises from various regions, I have observed a common denominator – IT Service Management (ITSM) is no longer simply about resolving tickets. It is about creating the visibility, governance and operational discipline required to keep a complex technology environment running reliably.
This is where AI is beginning to change the ITSM equation.
AI Is Changing the ITSM Operating Model
Traditional ITSM has largely been built around a sequence of recording, categorising, routing and resolving incidents and requests. AI has introduced another dimension to it – the ability to understand context, identify patterns, recommend actions and increasingly execute defined tasks.
ServiceNow’s ITSM platform brings AI, enterprise data and workflows together across the service lifecycle. Its current capabilities include Now Assist, AI-powered self-service, Predictive Intelligence, AI Search and AI agents that can perform defined ITSM tasks autonomously.
The real potential of AI in ITSM emerges when intelligence is embedded across the service lifecycle rather than confined to individual tasks. The shift is therefore not simply from manual to automated ticket handling, but towards ITSM environments that can increasingly understand, anticipate and act.
Where ServiceNow AI Capabilities Create Value Across ITSM
ServiceNow is applying AI across key ITSM workflows to improve how organisations detect, resolve, prevent and manage technology-related disruptions.
Incident Management – From Manual Triage to Contextual Resolution
Now Assist can summarise incident information, previous actions and relevant context while generating resolution notes and recommendations. AI agents can go further by categorising incidents, identifying related major incidents or known problems and supporting investigation and resolution. This reduces the time spent reconstructing context and allows IT teams to focus on issues that genuinely require human judgement.
Self-Service – From Ticket Creation to Immediate Resolution
AI-powered Virtual Agent enables employees to interact with IT through natural language, find answers and submit or complete requests conversationally. AI Search can provide direct, context-rich answers rather than simply returning links to knowledge articles. For large organisations, this creates an opportunity to reduce avoidable service-desk demand while improving the employee experience.
Problem Management – From Repeated Incidents to Underlying Patterns
The value of AI extends beyond resolving individual incidents. By analysing incident patterns and clustering related issues, organisations can identify recurring problems and emerging trends earlier. This creates a shift from repeatedly treating symptoms towards addressing the underlying causes of service disruption.
Change Management – From Change Control to Intelligent Risk Management
Change is one of the most sensitive areas of enterprise IT. ServiceNow’s AI capabilities can support change planning, explain risk assessments, identify potential conflicts and suggest configuration items. AI agents can also support defined change workflows, allowing teams to make better-informed decisions while retaining appropriate controls.
Agentic ITSM – From Recommendation to Execution
The more significant shift is towards AI agents that can perform defined, multi-step IT tasks. ServiceNow now supports agentic workflows for incident triage and resolution, post-incident reviews, change planning and other ITSM activities. This moves AI from being an assistant sitting alongside an IT professional to becoming an active participant within the service-management workflow.
The Value Is In Standardisation & Connected Intelligence
For large pharmaceutical enterprises, these capabilities become particularly valuable when they operate on a common service-management foundation.
A standardised ITSM environment can bring incidents, requests, problems, changes, knowledge and configuration data into connected workflows. This gives IT leadership increased visibility into service performance while creating a consistent operating model across teams and geographies.
The underlying data is equally important. AI cannot make meaningful decisions about an IT environment that it doesn’t have context of. Configuration data, service relationships, incident history and organisational knowledge provide the context required for AI to move from generic assistance to informed action.
This is also where governance becomes important. As AI begins making recommendations and executing workflows, organisations need visibility into how those actions are initiated, what information they use and where human intervention remains necessary.
The Evidence Is Already Emerging in Pharmas
AstraZeneca provides a useful example of what this operating model can achieve. ServiceNow ITSM’s AI capabilities have brought more than 60,000 laboratory requests across 400 categories into one system annually. Tasks that previously took up to 30 minutes can now be completed in seconds, with estimated annual savings of more than 30,000 hours. The impact is not limited to IT efficiency; it gives researchers and scientists more time to focus on work directly connected to bringing medicines to patients.
A KPMG case study of a global pharmaceutical company illustrates the value of standardising IT service management at enterprise scale. After almost a decade of fragmented processes and legacy tooling, the organisation implemented ServiceNow ITSM to harmonise ITIL processes across international business units, creating a single global service-management model. Over two years, the platform was rolled out incrementally to more than 4,000 IT employees and 70,000 end users worldwide, covering service requests, fulfillment, service catalogues and core ITSM processes. The case demonstrates that the value of ServiceNow extends beyond technology consolidation; it can provide the governance, consistency and operating model required to manage IT services across a complex global pharmaceutical enterprise.
The Next Phase of ITSM
The industry evolution suggests that ITSM is moving from reactive service management towards predictive, proactive and increasingly agentic operations.
For pharma enterprises, the opportunity is not simply to resolve incidents faster, it instead lies in standardising service operations, improving visibility, reducing repetitive intervention, identifying problems earlier and continuously optimizing how technology supports the business.
As technology becomes inseparable from pharmaceutical operations, AI-powered IT service management is becoming part of enterprise resilience itself.
The question for IT leaders is therefore no longer whether AI can be added to ITSM. Rather, it is whether their ITSM environment is capable of using AI to understand the technology landscape, improve the way services are delivered and increasingly act on behalf of the teams responsible for keeping the enterprise running.
