Orica scales GenAI capabilities with Now Assist

Orica has rolled out 20 artificial intelligence-powered capabilities for its IT service desk function, a year after integrating ServiceNow’s generative AI suite into its support operations.

The explosives and blasting systems company has embedded generative AI into its support operations and recently activated five agentic AI use cases using the vendor’s Now Assist toolset.

Orica manager of DevOps and regional apps Bradley Hunt said that AI had assigned cases to three-quarters of the company’s IT support team in the past three months.

Speaking at ServiceNow World Forum in Sydney, Hunt said Orica had taken a “technology-led” approach to its rollout of Now Assist.

“We've been trying to turn on the technology, get it in front of people, get them using it and get them familiar with what AI can do,” he said.

Orica joined ServiceNow’s early access program for Now Assist two years after reimplementing its decade-old instance of ServiceNow.

Although “very early days” into using Now Assist’s virtual agent, Hunt said Orica had quickly “doubled [its] success rate with the virtual agent” within IT support.

“We now deflect about 94 percent of successful flows away from the service desk, and usage among IT has grown as well.

“In the last six months, we have seen a 70 percent increase in IT people using AI, and we now have 75 percent of IT agents who [have been] assigned cases using AI over a three-month period.”

The growing adoption is now driving around 12,000 AI-driven actions each month, Hunt added.

Having scaled up Now Assist across the IT support team, Hunt said he had since moved from a “tech-led approach to a process-led approach” to adoption.

“We are going to go to teams and map out their processes and [say], ‘What steps can we use AI to completely eliminate and what steps can we really reduce and drive that [return on investment]?” he said.

Orica is now managing its AI demand and governance directly within the ServiceNow platform, which has become a “single source of truth” for turning AI concepts into production-ready solutions.

According to Orica CIO Rachael Sandel, the next step in scaling this capability will involve ServiceNow Control Tower — a framework for visibility, orchestration, and automation across the platform.

“Now today, this is not just about technology,” she said.

“It's also about creating the environment and the conditions where AI can thrive.”