Las Vegas, May 8 — Enterprise software giant ServiceNow expects its generative AI business to hit $1 billion in annual contract value by 2026, underscoring the company’s aggressive push into artificial intelligence as Indian IT firms struggle to monetise similar capabilities.
At its annual Knowledge 2025 conference in Las Vegas, ServiceNow said its flagship generative AI product, Now Assist, had already reached $250 million in annual contract value and was rapidly scaling. CFO Gina Mastantuono noted some customers were spending up to 60% more after upgrading to AI-enhanced versions of the company’s offerings.
“The agentic AI capabilities are compelling, and these double upgrades make for some really great math,” Mastantuono said. Shares of ServiceNow have jumped nearly 20% since April 23, reflecting investor optimism.
ServiceNow’s first-quarter results showed a 19% year-over-year increase in subscription revenues to $3.005 billion, with full-year 2025 revenue projected to exceed $13 billion—up from $10.9 billion in FY2024. Its new AI platform, built to deploy models across enterprises, is already being used by Adobe, Visa, and Wells Fargo, and is backed by partnerships with Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, and Oracle.
The company also introduced Nemotron 15B, a 15-billion parameter large language model co-developed with NVIDIA, and launched a new AI-first CRM platform—its fastest-growing product, with $1.4 billion in ACV and 30% annual growth.
In contrast, India’s top IT firms—TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCLTech—have been vocal about integrating AI but have disclosed little about revenue impact. While Infosys claims to run over 400 generative AI projects and Wipro says all of its Q4 deals included GenAI components, none have broken out financials linked specifically to AI.
“There is a lot of AI washing,” said Paul Smith, former global head of customer and field operations at ServiceNow. “Many companies get stuck in pilot purgatory. What matters is enterprise-wide deployment that drives action, not isolated experiments.”
Among Indian IT firms, HCLTech stood out slightly, reporting 12 GenAI deals and 500 engagements across 400 clients in Q4. Tech Mahindra has also made moves, including developing an Indic large language model and embedding AI into its engineering workflows.
By contrast, Accenture has been more transparent, booking $1.4 billion in generative AI deals in Q2 FY25 alone—about 7% of total bookings—even amid a quarterly revenue decline. ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott was clear about the company’s direction. “We are leading the AI race because we ourselves are running it,” he said, noting that the number of high-value AI deals had quadrupled year-over-year.
While Indian IT firms possess the scale and global reach to compete, analysts say they lag in AI maturity, execution, and monetisation—a gap ServiceNow is now exploiting with clear revenue figures, platform integration, and aggressive go-to-market strategy.
