ServiceNow targets APAC growth through AI visibility, security and channel scale

The APAC region continues to show strong growth opportunities for ServiceNow, says Adrian Johnston, President of Asia Pacific at ServiceNow.

Findings from ServiceNow’s AI Maturity Index 2026 revealed a 110% surge in AI spending based on feedback from 4,500 executives across 19 countries and 12 industries. What’s interesting is that despite that surge, many organizations are still running AI on broken foundations with only 16% replacing their fragmented, legacy systems with an integrated IT platform.

The findings also revealed that 71% of organizations struggle with data accuracy, access, and management. While these are global findings, in the Asia Pacific region, the trends are somewhat showing a similar scenario as well.

According to Adrian Johnston, President of Asia Pacific at ServiceNow, the challenge that organizations have today with AI centers around how they manage their agents especially in understanding the assets they have on the network, the access to data and other digital assets as well as having sufficient visibility on it.

“As businesses go from traditional workflows they’ve always had and deploy more agents, they need to have visibility and identify the agents in their organization. They need to know whether what’s in their organization is productive and what it is actually doing. For example, if an agent goes into an area that it’s not supposed to go into, how does the organization stop access or have some sort of kill switch associated with that,” he said.

Johnston pointed out that this is where ServiceNow’s acquisitions of Veza and Armis come into play. With solutions from both acquisitions now integrated into the ServiceNow portfolio, organizations can now only have a platform that manages how they use AI but also gives them the security visibility on their AI agents, especially with businesses moving towards more agentic workflows.

Growth in APAC

For Johnston, the APAC region continues to show strong growth opportunities for ServiceNow. The vendor has already increased its investment in the region and is seeing potentially stronger growth in markets like India and Southeast Asia, an area which Johnston also believes will need the strong support of ServiceNow’s channel ecosystem.

Johnston shared that the investment ServiceNow made in BUSINESSNEXT gives them a great capability in reaching out to the financial services industry in both India and the rest of the region.

“We have great capability, and we're always looking for great partnerships. BUSINESSNEXT provides that branch automation, the retail experience, which is really, really strong, and it integrates back into our middle office workflows that we have from our CRM solutions. When you add ServiceNow Control Tower, it provides an advantage to their existing clients and also allows us to go and talk to banks and financial services outside of India that are now interested in talking to us about what they're doing on the front,” he explained.

Put simply, Johnston believes the partnership allows ServiceNow to have an extension into building a new go-to market in the retail banking sector. This includes enabling banks to modernize and run their front office operations.

“Our financial services were more traditional and focused on integration and risk technology. We did not have as much presence as we wanted from the commercial and the public sector. So, we put a strategy to increase the number of about go to market resources, strengthen our channel growth out of the business overall into the key markets in India with the partnership,” he added.

Over in Southeast Asia, Johnston mentioned that ServiceNow has always had a strong presence in Singapore as a base which has been growing out of the work that the vendor has done in the public sector as well as with the telcos and some of the banks.

But looking at the rest of Southeast Asia, he said ServiceNow has had some presence in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. A big win Johnston highlighted is the deal with Maybank in Malaysia in terms of replacing all of their ageing legacy systems for all the operational response.

“It is 5-year deal worth millions. So, we're starting now to get success in there and then the other markets seeing growth is North Asia, especially in financial services and telco spaces in Hong Kong and Korea. Overall, the business is contributing more to the global growth we're probably growing twice as fast as the company overall in Asia,” he said.

The channel opportunity

Johnston also acknowledges the strong reliance on its channel ecosystem as it continues to grow in the APAC region. With a new channel team since the beginning of the year in Asia, he believes that the only way ServiceNow can successfully grow and scale profitably in APAC is through the channel.

“While we’re directly led in certain markets and certain areas, we have an indirect market approach as well. In the past, it wasn’t an independent channel and I'm trying to build an independent channel,” he said.

“If you take Thailand’s automotive industry for example, we need partners there who have deep expertise in that sector. So, what I'm doing is trying to make them the lead engine through our MDF funds. That's going to allow us to scale in parts of the market that we’re not in today. Even in India, we’re in the major cities but we are not in the tier 2 cities. I've got to scale through a distributor model for that most likely. But we're making really deliberate decisions on who do we want to scale with based on the profile of our partner and then how do we support them in the go-to market,” he explained.

Johnston also stated that ServiceNow wants to create new routes to market that aren’t a conflict.

“Partners are more important now than they were when I got here about 12 months ago, because in the past, they were following us around and it's just they were doing the traditional services work. Now, I want to shift the channel to help go and create new business, and we support them with our partner funds and go to markets,” he concluded.