January 20, 2026 • 5 min read
ServiceNow Claims AI Handles 90% of Its Customer Service Queries, But Hasn’t Made Layoffs
Director of Content & Market Research
January 20, 2026
Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, has stated that AI agents now handle 90% of the company’s customer service queries.
The CEO made the claim during an interview at the SIERRA CXO Summit, which was shared online earlier this month.
Yet, despite automating so many queries, McDermott confirmed that the company has not made layoffs and is instead reskilling customer service reps for new roles.
“We now have 90% of our customer service, our IT service, and our HR service being done by [AI] agents.”
“We don't lay anybody off,” the CEO continued. “We're still hiring because we're a growth company, but we're lifting and shifting humans into jobs that they actually prefer much more.”
McDermott’s comments follow March 2025 claims by Parker Harris, co-Founder of Salesforce, that his company resolves 85% of customer conversations with Agentforce.
By August, Salesforce CEO Benioff had suggested that this heightened self-service capability led to 4,000 customer service employees losing their jobs.
“I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads,” he told The Logan Bartlett Show.
Since then, many have called these numbers into question. For instance, a former Salesforce employee took to LinkedIn to assert that Benioff told an “outright lie”.
Meanwhile, one publication referenced execs to affirm that – in fact - the company had moved too quickly in replacing human staff.
Whatever the case, Salesforce would not be the only company to have over-rotated to AI agents in customer service. For instance, Business Insider reported in September that Klarna had reassigned engineers and marketers to customer service after its job cuts went too far.
By ruling out job cuts, ServiceNow can avoid similar missteps.
Is Resolving 90% of Customer Service Queries with AI Actually Achievable?
Scarred by many misfiring customer-facing AI projects, many contact center professionals may raise questions about whether handling up to 90% of customer queries is truly feasible.
After all, resolving that many queries would likely require AI agents to collaborate across enterprise systems, pulling data and automating actions, much like a human advisor would.
Agent-to-agent communication protocols, such as MCP, hint that this is possible. However, making this practical and secure in the enterprise is proving an almighty challenge.
The Outshift group at Cisco did a test where they looked at 100 different use cases of agent communications, and all of them failed…. If you’re going to deliver truly agentic experiences, you’re going to need that kind of interoperability to work.
Within a walled garden, agents will likely be able to communicate with each other securely. But, contact center reps typically enter numerous applications from various vendors. Currently, orchestrating fully autonomous resolution flows across those systems seems out of reach.
Given ServiceNow’s enterprise workflow automation heritage, it’s possible that the company is further ahead than its competition. Nevertheless, hopefully, ServiceNow and Salesforce will provide more context into how they’re resolving quite so many queries with AI.
How Does ServiceNow Envision the Customer Service Rep of Tomorrow?
“Whether you're in a support function or a direct function, the human capacity is actually being more appreciated now than it used to be,” noted McDermott.
Here, the CEO emphasizes the value of human intuition, contextual judgment, and empathy, framing the future of customer service – and other departments - as agent-first, human-on-top.
What could this look like? Consider an AI agent that detects whether a customer is emotional and/or has a potentially loyalty-busting issue; it may escalate to a human rep who can offer empathy and reassurance, rebuilding the relationship.
Even if AI agents can resolve an issue accurately and with speed, these cases are perhaps best left for a human, as AI cannot deliver authentic empathy. Sure, it can magic up an empathy statement, but that rings hollow when it doesn’t come from a real person (as CX Foundation explored in a recent contact center trends article).
As such, customer service reps will, over time, likely handle carefully orchestrated conversations that can make or break customer relationships.
If contact centers move in this direction, the risk of burnout heightens. Given this, they’ll need to place more emphasis on metrics such as agent training time and compensation, adding less weight to efficiency measures.
Meanwhile, if and when inbound contact volumes drop, alongside taking service queries, contact center reps may engage in more customer success activities.
Courtesy calls at the start of a relationship, customer feedback analysis, and proactive guidance on how to get more value from products are just a few examples of activities they could engage in.
Alternatively, customer service reps can reskill entirely. For instance, after achieving 60% containment, Granite Credit Union started reallocating reps to work in branches, fraud prevention, and collections. The case study underscores how the customer support skillset is transferable beyond sales and success.
Nevertheless, customer success is likely where ServiceNow is reorienting its staff.
“We do not play games when it comes to the customer,” concluded McDermott. “Their net promoter score (NPS), their happiness, the endurance of their expansion, their utilization, the value they derive from the software… We're really into helping this company be the best they can be. That's where we get our high.”