Leidos CIO Alexandra Guenther speaking at a company AI event in 2024. Leidos

Leidos this week announced an expansion of the ServiceNow AI Platform across its enterprise, providing autonomous, AI-driven workflows expected to reduce costs and ultimately improve the experience of its 50,000 global employees.

The expansion of ServiceNow’s suite of agentic AI capabilities builds on a fruitful, decade-long partnership between the two companies, according to Leidos SVP & Chief Information Officer Alexandra Guenther.

“The length of the partnership is not as important as the ethos of the two companies involved in that partnership,” Guenther said in an interview. “Leidos’ success with AI transformation, building efficiencies and improving business value requires partners to seek continuous modernization. [With ServiceNow], we’re infusing new capabilities that extend the platform’s value further.”

Guenther said ServiceNow’s deployment enhances productivity without sacrificing security—the company’s ServiceNow deployment runs across all FedRAMP environments—which is critical for a company with so many national security-focused customers.

"When you're managing national security workflows, you can't move fast without visibility and governance," said Paul Fipps, president of global customer operations at ServiceNow. "By unifying HR, IT, and shared services on the ServiceNow AI Platform, with AI Control Tower governing the deployment, Leidos can identify workflows and scale AI-enabled operations without adding complexity."

According to Guenther, Leidos expects major returns on its ServiceNow investment. The company expects ServiceNow’s AI-driven IT desk to save $3 million annually, with Level 1 incident resolution time shaved from days down to minutes. In addition, Leidos says ServiceNow’s AI agents will resolve up to 60% of IT tickets autonomously—without human intervention—with the potential to eliminate as many as 80,000 IT tickets each year.

For many Leidos’ employees, automation isn’t new. The company was an early adopter of what became ServiceNow EmployeeWorks, a “unified front door” for employees to use a single conversational AI interface “to search through and interact with Leidos’ data.” In natural language, employees can query an app on their device for numerous requests, “freeing up time for employees with proactive IT issue resolution.”

 Early reviews have been positive, Guenther said, and because the vast majority of Leidos’ employees are customer-facing, improved employee performance translates to improved customer outcomes, too.

“By connecting employees with the right information when they need it, we’re enabling our employees to stay focused on solving our customers’ toughest challenges and turning technology into advantage,” she said.