Unlocking AI at UP3: Bringing AI to life for Customers

Organisations feel less ready for AI in 2025 than they did in 2024. That was the surprising headline from ServiceNow’s latest AI Maturity Index, which found that the average maturity score among surveyed companies dropped from 44 points to 35 in a mere twelve months.

That data reveals an interesting paradox about AI. The more that businesses are exposed to this new technology, and the more they understand its potential, the less prepared they feel to integrate and deploy it at scale.

We hear similar feedback from the organisations we speak to. Everyone is grappling with AI and how it can help them. They want the impact to measure up to the expectations, but don’t always know where to start.

"UP3 are a not only implementing solutions for customers but are a partner educating customers on Agentic AI. From the partners and customers I’ve spoken to over the past year or so, their work is very proactive versus the rest of the field. As an example, they’ve stood up their own AI Centre of Excellence." – Jordan Eschler, Senior Staff User Researcher, ServiceNow

In this second blog in our AI series, we’ll explore how we’re translating customer aspirations into real change.

Speeding up with Southeastern

One of our goals with AI is to deliver value fast to our customers. How we do this is something we’ll explore in detail in our next blog, but we always start by having a clear outcome in mind and identifying specific areas where AI tools will make the biggest difference. Through our ServiceNow Managed Service, our approach is always to work in partnership with our customers, innovating together and creating bespoke solutions that address their unique needs.

An example of this is our work with the customer relations team at Southeastern, one of the busiest Train Operating Companies in the UK. Southeastern carries over half a million passengers every day and the customer relations team handles between 10,000 to 25,000 customer contacts each week. Customers have a growing demand for digital channels, and they increasingly expect quick responses and resolutions.

We saw a pain point that AI could help solve.

We implemented ServiceNow Chat Summarisation and Case Summarisation, powered by generative AI, to triage messages coming from Southeastern’s online chat tool. The technology uses AI to summarise chats and cases into an easily digestible format for Southeastern’s contact centre agents. It also provides a summary of relevant customer records, including tickets and journeys.

The impact has been evident straightaway – and the entire project took just three weeks from idea to implementation. Case Summarisation now saves an average of 13 seconds on every customer interaction, adding up to over two hours per week. This has improved customer satisfaction while also improving agents’ productivity, capacity and overall job satisfaction.

New products built on AI

The Southeastern case is powerful proof of AI’s impact. And in addition to public-facing solutions like that, we’ve also found ways to use AI internally to improve the service we offer our customers.

One great example is the way we’ve re-thought our user story development process. In the agile planning methodology, user stories are a standard way of capturing the purpose of a new product or feature from the user’s perspective.

We’d often identify dozens of stories in our customer workshops, as user needs and desired outcomes emerged from the conversation. Traditionally, one of our consultants would write up those stories based on the meeting notes and send them back to the customer for approval before we moved forward – a process that might take a week from start to finish.

But through our new UP3-built AI Agent, we can now take the meeting recording and create thorough user stories within ServiceNow in a matter of minutes. So, the UP3 and customer team could go for lunch and have the stories ready by the time they came back! That massively improves efficiency, and allows us to discuss the outputs from the tool within the workshop in real time – creating more productive and valuable sessions and quicker time to value

Making AI tangible

AI might be the corporate buzzword of the decade. But in the real world, its impact is already clear. As our examples here show, it’s possible to make tangible improvements in business outcomes and internal workflows – within a matter of weeks.

To see how you could get started with AI, visit our ServiceNow and AI page. Or get in touch if you’d like to see how we can bring this kind of benefit to your business.