ServiceNow wants to put AI to work for partners

Michael Park, ServiceNow’s SVP of Global Partnerships and Channels, is on a mission to reshape the tech company’s global partner ecosystem, with a stronger focus on AI.

With AI adoption increasing in Asia Pacific, the challenge organizations are having now is ensuring they can get the best value from their AI investments. While the ROI is becoming increasingly justified, the reality is the next step of the AI journey still needs to be well planned and executed.

This is where ServiceNow is hoping to play an important role. The tech company, which recorded total revenues of US$3.7 billion in Q1 2026, representing 22% year-over-year growth, 19% in constant currency for its first quarter ended March 31, 2026. Subscription revenues in particular were US$3.6 billion in Q1 2026, representing 22% year-over-year growth and 19% in constant currency.

What this clearly shows is that the tech vendor is making the right choices in its expansion plans. With the acquisition of Armis now closed as well as the completion of the Veza acquisition, the vendor now has the opportunity to go all out in providing customers with the AI that works for them.

Driving this charge is Michael Park, ServiceNow’s SVP of Global Partnerships and Channels. As the vendor moves towards a channel focused growth, Park is on a mission to reshape the tech company’s global partner ecosystem, with a stronger focus on AI. There is already a US$100,000 channel-led growth plan to support partner-led projects that showcase practical applications of ServiceNow’s platform.

But that’s not all that ServiceNow is focusing on. Speaking to CRN Asia during a recent visit to Singapore, Park shared that it’s now important to think about the customer’s lifecycle when it comes to AI, given the speed of innovation.

“The speed at which we have to communicate knowledge and transfer that to customer value through the partner ecosystem is the challenge. And in order to activate the channels to be successful at doing that, we have to design AI speed, which means we need to radically simplify everything because there's too much noise in the market. There's too many moving parts in the channel. When you think about the sheer number of vendors they need to absorb in order to deliver value, you have to reduce the noise,” Park said.

As such, for the last nine months, ServiceNow worked with global partners and channels to pivot its focus globally from thinking about the partner as the endgame to thinking about the customer as the endgame.

“At the end of the day, we're here to accelerate customer transformation of how AI can be put to work to drive transformation in a better, faster, cheaper, more measurable and safer way. So, when we're selling AI, what's changing is you have to sell the quantified value in a measurable term for the outcome. You have to sell against the change management. You have to sell against security, the risk, compliance, the auditability and the mindset fear of change. And in order to do that, you need to simplify things,” Park said.

Getting the program right

Looking at partners in Asia Pacific, Park pointed out that the change suggested is not simple as there are many inputs to be absorbed. Partners would need to map the customer’s journey from first point of awareness all the way through to deployment.

“We're looking at the channel programs we're running and we're like, are they simple enough to help a partner accelerate the customer through the journey? And the answer was no, because we had 16 incentives and 39 programs. And in the last nine months, we have reduced the incentive programs to just four. We now have one for demand gen awareness, one for proof of concept, we have one for the sales transaction, and we have one for deployment. And partners love that,” he said.

The next step is how partners can benefit from these four programs. Park said ServiceNow measures the temporal aspect of each program. This includes simplification with incentives for speed and the consolidation of the number of training programs.

More importantly, the program itself will now leverage AI a lot more with the ServiceNow platform, which Park believes puts the vendor and partners in a good position to connect with the multiple data sets they have.

“And so fundamentally, the paradigm shift of the economics for how partners will make money will also change. They're going to have to learn new skills versus old skills. You have to meet the customer where they are by making it an industry need,” Park said.

This means partners will need to use the tools by ServiceNow and apply it to their market knowledge.

“From a software standpoint, the more workflow transformation you drive, the more leverage you get because it's the same tooling, the same data model that you're working with,” he said.

For example, if a partner has optimized a model for the public sector in Malaysia, they can take that model, stick it into the platform, it will connect to the data, get that specific inference out of the platform, and then they can render it into a cross system workflow transformation.

“These capabilities allow the partner to do things faster and deliver a better outcome with more agility. That sounds simple, but the change management to execute that is the hard part. Why is that hard? Because for the whole history, every function has come up uniquely inside of HR, inside of ERP, inside of IT. If you look at our common use cases today at ServiceNow, we oftentimes start in IT, but we incorporate and hook into Workday for HR, Salesforce for CRM, and SAP for ERP. And from one common experience, the employee can now hit all five systems in one workflow instead of having to go into five different applications,” Park explained.

Partners have a choice

For Park, what ServiceNow is doing to the partner program is to allow partners that want to be part of it to have the journey of creating the value for the customers.

“We are serving them everything they need to be successful in the transformation of their business model in helping us drive to the channel. We can't force the partner to the table. We create the best strategy and the best programs to help our customers be successful. And then it's the partner's choice to lean in,” Park said.

“We're creating a framework to allow a partner to transform, make new kinds of business, and to be successful in what the vision of what we're trying to achieve is. And I think that ServiceNow has got pretty good momentum on that,” he added.

Park concluded that what ServiceNow needs is more partner support to come in on that model to complete its ability to realize the opportunity. Importantly, Park believes that this may not be built for everyone, but ServiceNow is going to continue to invest heavily in frameworks that enable partners to drive the highest performance.