ServiceNow's Fipps: Standard Chartered hits 77% deflection

Fipps's remarks at the 2026 AIQ Summit centered on a single customer example: Standard Chartered Bank, where he said the COO is driving 77% deflection rates across all employee requests. He contrasted that with a 25% to 30% band he called game-changing, placing the bank's result in what he termed life-changing territory. ServiceNow, meanwhile, announced earlier this year that its entire product portfolio will be AI-enabled, positioning itself as an 'AI control tower for business reinvention.'

Fipps drew a line between automating existing processes and redesigning them. Simply bolting AI into preexisting systems, he said, might yield only a productivity bump, while companies rethinking business processes and then leveraging AI inside them are the ones making the difference. He added that productivity alone is not the end goal, and that the real winners ask how to use freed-up time and resources rather than pocketing the savings.

Governance emerged as the counterweight to those gains. Fipps recalled a large Indian bank whose CTO had roughly 40 custom agents ready but had released none, citing an inability to rely on humans to control them. Against IDC's estimate that active enterprise agents will swell from 28.6 million in 2025 to 2.2 billion by 2030, that hesitation suggests the pace of deployment in regulated industries may hinge on how oversight is built, not on how many agents can be built.