Customer Zero at Scale: How Accenture Is Building the Autonomous IT Function on ServiceNow

800,000 employees. 1,900 business services. One platform running in production before any client gets the recommendation. This is what Customer Zero actually looks like, and it’s the operational model behind the conversation Tony Leraris and Monika Patel-Mistry shared at ServiceNow Knowledge 2026.

Melody Brue sat down with Tony Leraris, Global CIO at Accenture, and Monika Patel-Mistry, Global IT Director, ServiceNow at Accenture, to break down what autonomous IT looks like when it moves into a live enterprise environment, where scale, organizational resistance, and operational complexity all become part of the equation.

The Level One Autonomous Specialist pilot is already handling IT incident triage and resolution across IT, HR, and Finance. The “mean time to resolution” metric is improving. Customer satisfaction scores are climbing. Case deflection through AI agents has hit 10%. Developer productivity is up 15%. 

The harder conversation is governance. Agents do not carry intuition about policy boundaries. They optimize for task completion, and without the right architecture underneath them, that can create risk at scale. The conversation explores how secure-by-design principles need to be built in from the start, what the AI Control Tower provides around agent identity and audit visibility, and why organizations with thousands of employees can’t afford to bolt on guardrails after deployment.

Key Takeaways:

🔹 Customer Zero is an operating posture, not a partnership title. Accenture runs ServiceNow AI capabilities in production across 800,000 employees before recommending them to clients. Accenture’s goal: zero-touch service desk.

🔹 The Autonomous Specialist pilot is live and producing measurable outcomes. 10% case deflection through AI agents via chat and 15% developer productivity gains are already on the board.

🔹 Agents need more governance infrastructure than humans because they have no intuition about limits. The AI Control Tower delivers agent identity resolution, scoped permissions, workflow constraints, and a full audit trail.

🔹 Governance built after deployment arrives too late. Secure by design means controls are in the architecture from day one.

🔹 Workforce trust moves faster than technology adoption when change management is treated as a design requirement. Transparency about what agents are doing is what converts resistance into adoption momentum.

Disclaimer: Six Five Media is for entertainment purposes only. We make no guarantee, warranty, or representation as to the accuracy or completeness of the information presented. This content is produced independently and is not sponsored, endorsed, or reviewed for accuracy by any company mentioned. All trademarks and company names referenced are the property of their respective owners. This is not investment advice.

TONY LERARIS:

You take some of the work that used to be done by humans and you do it by agents. Humans have intuition. They understand what's naturally right or wrong. Agents sometimes will do whatever it takes to get something done, even if it's violating some of your policies or procedures that they're practicing. So you have to build those guardrails in to have the agents act like humans in terms of knowing what's intuitively right to do.

‍

MELODY BRUE:

Hello and welcome to Six Five On The Road. I'm Melody Brue. Today, I'm going to be exploring a really interesting conversation with Tony Leraris and Monica Patel-Mistry about how companies are building AI power autonomous IT function at scale. Thanks for joining me. 

‍

MONIKA PATEL-MISTRY:

Thank you for having us. 

‍

MELODY BRUE: 

Yeah, really exciting to talk to you about this. So I want to start out with Accenture describes itself as Customer Zero with ServiceNow. Now, typically we hear ServiceNow on ServiceNow, but you really built an organization on ServiceNow that you then use as a footprint, right? That you're able to as a blueprint to share to your customers. So what does that mean to you to be customer zero? And how does that give you an advantage when you go out to help your customers do the same?

‍

TONY LERARIS:

Yeah, I think it gives us a great advantage. So at Accenture, we have 800,000 people. And so what we look to do is use the ServiceNow technology as soon as it's available across our entire enterprise. We're not just early adopters. We use it in production at scale across our entire company. And then that what enables us to do is to work directly with our clients with real world experience in production at scale.

‍

MELODY BRUE:

And I imagine that gives you a little bit of ability to give some feedback and help influence not only what you need, but what you're hearing from your customers, what they need.

‍

TONY LERARIS:

That's right. We have a three-way feedback game. We work very closely with ServiceNow and have very good relationships with their product people. We also bring back to them real experience for us internally and our clients.

‍

MELODY BRUE:

And Monica, you're piloting an autonomous specialist for preparing to the AI control tower. What are you seeing? So when AI moves from kind of pilots to big deployments, what are you seeing, especially in that power of that overall control tower?

‍

MONIKA PATEL-MISTRY:

So the control tower power we see is it lets us have the governance layer to know what agents are getting used—how frequently they're getting used and by whom, right? And so it gives us that visual so we can track. Is the agent efficient? Do we need it? Do we scale it back? And do we put some new agent in to help?

‍

MELODY BRUE:

Talk a little bit about what's missing when somebody doesn't, when an organization doesn't have that single plate of glass, that kind of visibility into an organization. We talk about the need for it, right? But then at the same time, there's another conversation around what happens when you don't have it.

‍

MONIKA PATEL-MISTRY:

When you don't have it, you kind of risk knowing how much is utilized and how effectively it's utilized. So you're not able to adapt to your customers' needs or your business needs.

‍

MELODY BRUE:

And for you at 800,000 employees, governance at scale is paramount, necessary. So how does that translate for you of what you need and then also how do you help deploy that?

‍

TONY LERARIS:

Yeah, so a couple of things. Number one, everything we do is going to be secure by design. So we build that into our initial design. And then the second thing that you have to think about as you take some of the work that used to be done by humans and you do it by agents, is that humans have intuition. They understand what's naturally right or wrong. Agents sometimes will do whatever it takes to get something done, even if it's violating some of your policies and procedures and practices. So you have to build those guardrails in to have the agents act like humans in terms of knowing what's intuitively right to do.

‍

MELODY BRUE:

Well, and sometimes even humans are going to have a little bit of resistance. And so as you look towards kind of change management, that's a big part of how companies are looking to adopt AI, why they're not adopting AI, why maybe it's happening in certain parts of an organization and not others. So talk a little bit about the adoption struggles that you see and also how do you help to get customers past that?

‍

TONY LERARIS:

What we're trying to do is help people and companies realize that they're going to be able to accomplish so much more if they adopt agents and generative AI into their business processes. Now, you have to do it the right way with the right guardrails. But what you're doing is creating capacity to do a lot more high-value work because you're letting the agents do a lot of the repetitive tasks.

‍

MONIKA PATEL-MISTRY:

Yeah, I think exactly what Tony said, but also you have to build that trust. You have to build a trust with your workforce that the change is good. and it's not a negative change, right? And so you have to have the messaging so the adoption kind of increases.

‍

MELODY BRUE:

I think that trust is important and also the reasoning around it, right? Like how this makes me better at my job, how it makes me work smarter. I think we've moved beyond the productivity discussion into more of a human-led, like, where are the benefits here? Do you see that conversation coming up?

‍

TONY LERARIS:

I absolutely do. So I think that's spot on. I mean, what we should be doing is creating better employee experiences to allow people to be able to create the kinds of things that they want to create within their organization and do the kinds of things that make them feel really valued. And that's what this technology should enable us to do.

‍

MELODY BRUE:

I love that. I think that's an important thing that is sometimes missed in this is the employee experience at the end of the day has to be positive, especially for people to continue to work with it. And ultimately, that's just a good business decision. As we're looking at more of an automated or autonomous IT service desk, how does that change for employees and how does that change the experience in general?

‍

TONY LERARIS:

Well, I think what we're going to see is we are going to, I mean, we've been on an automation journey for a long time. What this is going to allow is basically like a hyper automation that should create better experiences for our employees who are customers of the service desk, as well as the people who are providing that kind of support. And it should open the kind of doors for them to be able to, I mean, I keep saying higher value, but to do those higher value things that really make a difference, that are going to make things better for all the employees at Accenture.

‍

MONIKA PATEL-MISTRY:

So for the employee that's actually running the problem solving of the ticket, it takes away the boring. The boring mundane tasks, it eliminates that for them and it lets them focus on more critical problem thinking skills, more innovative ideas. It lets them focus on higher value items, right? So that's kind of the experience there. And then from the end user perspective, what this does is help them get their resolution quicker. and faster, and then get the real tactical problem solved.

‍

MELODY BRUE:

And so as companies prepare for that shift towards more of an autonomous service desk, is there anything that they should be thinking about, be aware of, kind of prepare themselves for?

‍

MONIKA PATEL-MISTRY:

I think they really need to look at what are the low-hanging fruits, but the high impact. Right? So it could be low-hanging. As long as it's high impact, you're still going to get the resolutions. We need to focus on how do you better your workforce.

‍

MELODY BRUE:

There's a lot of talk around AI and a lot of assumptions that things will be built or that these are kind of forward-thinking things. Right now you are using the ServiceNow platform, and it is live. Where's the proof point for you in that when you go to customers to talk to them, this isn't a concept anymore, right? We're now, we're now moving towards this autonomous IT, right?

‍

MONIKA PATEL-MISTRY:

Yeah, so I mean, I think some of the proof points that we were seeing is it takes, it reduces the time that someone's spending. So our mean time to resolutions improved, our turnaround times have improved, and it— again—frees up and improves the customer experience, right? Or the CSAT scores, if you think about it. With what we've been doing, we're seeing that improvement and a lot more satisfaction going.

‍

MELODY BRUE:

All right. Well, this was great. Thanks so much for joining us. And thank you for tuning in to this last episode of Six Five On The Road. I'm Melody Brue. Please follow along and check out Six Five .com for more content. We'll see you next time.