As enterprises rush to show a return-on-investment for artificial intelligence, Accenture PLC is taking a more measured — and confident — approach. By deepening its partnership with ServiceNow Inc., the consulting giant is embedding agentic AI into real business workflows while keeping a sharp focus on security, data maturity and automation that actually delivers value.

At the heart of this strategy is ServiceNow’s Now Platform, which Accenture uses to streamline access to systems spanning IT, HR, case management and more. Rather than automating for automation’s sake, Accenture is using AI to enhance already high-value processes — paving the way for agentic systems that support employees without sidelining them.

Accenture’s Will Coffey and Ellen Currid discuss ServiceNow’s impact on their organization.

“People are very, very anxious about making sure that their data is secure,” said Will Coffey (pictured, right), senior manager of the ServiceNow Business Group at Accenture Federal Services. “It’s especially important in an AI environment, because when you start bringing that in and you start leveraging new models or agent-to-agent conversations, that data needs to be in a mature place where the outcome is something that’s useful.”

Coffey and Ellen Currid (left), Americas partner development lead for Accenture ServiceNow Business Group at Accenture, spoke with theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson at Knowledge25, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They outlined a forward-looking vision for how Accenture and ServiceNow will continue to co-develop intelligent, secure automation solutions — grounded in agentic AI and designed to scale across complex enterprise environments. (* Disclosure below.)

Automating workflows with a holistic mindset

Accenture’s strategy for returning an investment on AI is based on looking critically at a business’ workflows and deciding what actually needs to be automated. The team then looks at how that can translate to a service for consumers, according to Currid.

“We work really hard with our clients to make sure that the business processes and the outcomes that we’re driving from them with the ServiceNow platform are already high value,” Currid said. “So, now to be able to try and automate that, we’re not automating bad processes; we’re automating good processes that humans don’t necessarily have to be in the loop 100% on.”

As Accenture and ServiceNow look toward the future of their partnership, Coffey and Currid have a vision of autonomous agents. Already, Accenture employees are able to access a number of different workflows through ServiceNow’s AI software.

“The nice thing about the ServiceNow platform is its holistic nature,” Coffey said. “You have ITSM, ITOM, case management, HRSD, security operations, GRC and risk. Then the platform itself lends itself to be able to coalesce all of those different activities so that you can start in one place and still leverage the power of the platform to get to everywhere else.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Knowledge25:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Knowledge25. Neither ServiceNow Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE