In ServiceNow’s second annual AI Maturity Index, over 4,500 worldwide private and public sector leaders were surveyed and findings revealed that this year’s average maturity score actually dropped from last year, from 44 to 35 (out of 100 points). In addition, fewer than 1% of respondents scored over 50 on their 100-point AI maturity scale. But this is, in fact, good news for the industry and for AI adoption and here we explore why that is and how CIOs are moving forward.
In a previous article, 4 recs for CIOs as they implement agentic AI, I noted that despite the hype, CIOs agree there’s an approaching reset of agentic AI expectations. The ServiceNow report is further confirmation that the reset is underway, which is due to a number of factors. In implementing agentic AI, organizations began to know what they didn’t know. Unlike gen AI, which could be implemented as a standalone or bolted on somewhere, agentic AI requires far deeper integration — at least if you want to utilize it for maximum benefit.
Instead of just throwing up a user interface and asking questions of a gen AI chatbot, CIOs are looking to use agentic AI to execute tasks and orchestrate workflows going deep into enterprise processes, such as CRM, supply chain, enterprise resource planning, HR, finance, and more. All this, plus the pace of tech advancement, existing silos and legacy apps, and hundreds of new agentic AI use cases, means seriously upping their game in terms of AI integration, orchestration and governance, keeping humans in the loop where needed and taking it beyond pilots to production-grade implementations.
