Fifty-nine per cent of organisations have moved beyond piloting agentic AI. Yet fewer than one in ten (9%) have made meaningful progress building autonomous, multistep workflows. That’s according to ServiceNow’s Enterprise AI Maturity Index 2026. In other words, many organisations are paying for AI capability they haven’t yet unlocked.
Twelve months ago, we launched our AI Unlocked Service Offering with a clear promise: your first working ServiceNow AI agent, live within three weeks. Customers wanted proof over promises, and speed was the proof. For Southeastern that meant building an AI agent that cut their major incident reporting process from 96 hours to four minutes.
A year is a long time in AI, however, and while the fear of missing out has faded, the pressure to act has grown, and the question has changed. It's no longer 'can AI do this?' It's 'did it pay off?'
At UP3 we think that's a question you need to answer before you build, not after.
In our experience AI proves its value when three things are in place: a clearly defined business problem, the right tool to solve that problem, and proof that the solution works before it goes live across the organisation.
They sound obvious right? Yet they’re the three steps most often skipped. So, we’ve evolved AI Unlocked around all three.
Almost every organisation we talk to has an AI target, often set from the very top. That downward pressure is creating action, but not always clarity. ‘We need to do more with AI’ is not a business case. Without a clear problem to solve, there’s no clear way to measure success.
That’s why every AI Unlocked project we embark on begins with one question: ‘why are we really doing this?’ We look for the ask behind the ask. In most cases we ask customers to be more specific about what they need to fix when they come to us. Some may find that frustrating at first but understanding the why gets us to the right solution, with less rework further down the line.
We call it the superhero conversation. If you could solve one problem in your organisation, which one would make you look like a superhero?
Get the problem wrong and everything built on top is wasted effort.
Not every problem needs AI, even though it’s fast becoming the default request. Choosing the right solution can be a valuable route to keeping cost, complexity and risk down.
Our rule of thumb is simple. If a task follows fixed rules with a finite set of outcomes, use automation. It’s quicker to build, cheaper to run and uses less compute, and much of it comes as standard in ServiceNow. If a task needs judgement, or a decision without a fixed set of answers, that’s where AI earns its place.
Often, the best answer is both.
This is the biggest change to our AI Unlocked Service Offering. Validate is a new step in our methodology. Think of it as human in the loop - our experts check what we've built, and your people confirm it works.
AI isn’t a switch you flick. It needs testing, feedback and refinement. Validate is where that happens. We run the solution with real data and check it against your current process.
It has to do the job as well as, or better than, today. If it doesn’t, we refine it or rethink the approach before it goes anywhere near wider roll-out.
Our proven methodology:
We confirm the return, running costs included, before anything scales. That gives senior stakeholders the evidence they need. And it doesn't slow you down: the full AI Unlocked process, Validate included, still takes four weeks end to end.
Validate is also where we confirm the return. McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI report found that eight in ten organisations say AI has made them more productive, yet only 37% can point to any impact on the bottom line.
Feeling faster isn’t the same as a return. And a workflow that saves an hour but costs more than that hour to run isn’t progress. We confirm the ROI case, running costs included, before anything scales. That gives senior stakeholders the evidence they need.
A year ago, AI Unlocked was about getting your first agent live fast. Today it’s about getting the right thing live, and proving it’s worth it, all still at pace.
What hasn’t changed though is how we work with our customers. We are a passionate team of problem-solvers, and we don’t implement and disappear. We get to know your organisation and keep refining once it’s live.
So, what’s your superhero problem? Get in touch and let’s work out whether AI, automation or both is the way to solve it.
Written by:
Director of Professional Services
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