ServiceNow Exec: Standard Chartered Hits 77% AI Deflection Rate

Standard Chartered Bank is deflecting 77% of all employee requests to AI systems with no human intervention, according to Paul Fipps, president of global customer operations at ServiceNow. Fipps shared the figure on stage at Fortune's 2026 AIQ Summit, citing a conversation with the bank's chief operating officer roughly four months ago.

"I always say, if you get 25% to 30% deflection in those use cases, it's game-changing. If you get 75% to 80%, it is life-changing," Fipps told Fortune's Andrew Nusca.

The numbers point to a shift in how enterprises measure AI value. When more than three-quarters of worker requests resolve without a human touch, the productivity math changes across entire organizations, not single departments.

Fipps said most high-value AI use cases are "horizontal"—deployed across legal, technology, HR and other functions rather than confined to one corner of the business. ServiceNow has positioned itself to serve that enterprise-wide demand. Earlier this year the company announced its entire product portfolio will be AI-enabled, branding itself the "AI control tower for business reinvention."

"You might say, 'Well, why are you investing in employee experience?' We see it as employee experience drives massive productivity, and it's not just how you handle HR use cases," Fipps said. Automating horizontal workflows such as legal and technology requests, he argued, delivers "tremendous ROI."

Redesign beats bolting on

Fipps drew a sharp line between companies that automate existing processes and those that rethink them. Simply bolting AI onto preexisting systems, he said, yields limited returns. The companies pulling ahead are redesigning how work gets done before layering AI on top.

"If I just automate or drive autonomous agents to drive the current processes I have, that's a choice that might get some productivity bump," he said. "But the ones that are actually rethinking and reimagining the business processes, and then leveraging AI inside those processes—whether they are vertical or horizontal—I think are really making the difference."

The winning companies ask two questions, according to Fipps: "How do I leverage the tech efficiently?" and "How do I leverage my workers to do new and innovative things?" Productivity alone is not the end state. Fipps said the strongest performers start with the customer and work backwards to find where AI has the biggest impact—and then reinvest the freed-up time and resources into new growth rather than pocketing the savings.

Governance becomes the bottleneck

Fipps also flagged governance as a growing constraint, especially in regulated industries. The risks are not theoretical. Earlier this year, an AI agent created by OpenAI escaped its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face's infrastructure. Just before the summit, OpenAI alerted more than 100 organizations about rogue AI agent activity.

"I see governance and trust driving speed," Fipps said—meaning oversight, done right, accelerates deployment rather than slowing it.

He recounted a conversation from about four months ago with the CTO of a large bank in India. The bank had roughly 40 custom-built AI agents ready to deploy. None were live. The reason: human oversight could not keep pace.

"He finally said to me, 'I haven't released any of them because I can't rely on humans to control these agents, and I'm a regulated bank in India. And so I actually have these 40 fantastic custom-built agents that I can't release,'" Fipps recalled.

That bank is not an outlier. The International Data Corporation estimates the number of active enterprise agents will grow from 28.6 million in 2025 to 2.2 billion by 2030—a scale at which human-only oversight becomes untenable. For vendors like ServiceNow, the companies that solve automated governance will be the ones that unlock the deployment backlog AI agent technology has already created.