ServiceNow AI co-investment fund part of partner programme changes

“If we’re expecting the partners to be at the tip of the spear on AI innovation, co-creation, on developing agents, we have to support them better,” said ServiceNow VP of partner experience

ServiceNow executives are bringing a host of updates to its partner programme, including a strategic investment fund offering $100,000 (£73,970) for AI projects, programme credit for subcontracting work, and a way to identify customers with undeployed products.

The business workflows automation vendor aims to simplify and improve how its solution providers work with customers as the company looks to grow beyond its reputation as an IT-focused platform and seize share in the AI market, executives told CRN.

“When I think about the channel ecosystem, I don’t think there’s any ecosystem that’s ever going to be asked to move as fast as we’re going to have to move to be ready for the opportunity,” Michael Park, who became ServiceNow’s channel chief and SVP of global partnerships and channels in June, told CRN.

“There’s all kinds of new ways to stitch technology layers, stacks and departments and systems together in a much faster way for a higher value add.

“What we really want to do for the next couple of years here is set a clear operating model.”

ServiceNow Global Partner Ecosystem Summit

Park and other ServiceNow executives also detailed some of the changes during the vendor’s Global Partner Ecosystem Summit event held Wednesday at company headquarters.

ServiceNow has about 2,200 channel partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.

Ohad Kushner, chief customer and delivery officer at Massachusetts-based ServiceNow partner GlideFast Consulting, told CRN that the firm has been adopting AI internally to remake its business.

He said that he views the implementation partner business model transforming but enduring in the new era, with AI unable to replace the more complex work his firm does around data normalisation and rationalisation, integration, and business process consulting.

“If we do this right, I think clients are just going to get to value quicker,” Kushner said.

Strategic investment fund part of changes

In an interview with CRN, Jen Odess, ServiceNow VP of partner experience, said that the $100,000 co-investments available as part of the strategic investment fund makes up a gap ServiceNow recognised compared to other vendors.

Elite and global elite consulting and implementation partners are among the ones that can qualify for the fund if they have validated practices.

Work that qualifies for the investments includes proofs of concept, proofs of value, and AI architecting.

“If we’re expecting the partners to be at the tip of the spear on AI innovation, co-creation, on developing agents, we have to support them better,” she said.

Odess also called out that more partners need to look into becoming industry suite certified on ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management (CSM) products.

“That is going to be the new gold standard,” she said.

“The fact that only 15 per cent have it is not going to cut it next year.

“The field is going to be pushing on selling only the industry-suite SKUs even.

“The partners have to come on that journey.”

About 300 ServiceNow partners have already been promoted against the company’s new modelling in its partner programme, which went into effect in January, Odess said.

About 130 partners now have validated ServiceNow practices.

Subcontracting credit coming

Going live in the fourth quarter is partner programme credit recognition for solution provider implementation subcontracting work, Odess told the audience during the GPES event.

Partner subcontracting contributes to about 70 per cent of expert services work in the Americas and 60 per cent in EMEA, according to the vendor.

Along with the subcontracting change, the vendor promoted a five per cent retain and expand incentive for Pro and other ServiceNow packages with net-new ACV of $100,000 or more and shared early results from a partner matchmaking programme that matches customers with partners to drive adoption.

So far, the matchmaking programme has resulted in six matches among 75 onboarded partners and $300,000 in backlog now deployed.

Odess said that comes out to about $2m in upsell pipeline for those six matches.

ServiceNow is building an AI-driven recommendation engine to scale the matchmaking programme in early 2026.

Partners who want to join the programme must hold a product line achievement in the geography that the customer has purchased the product in.

Partners with validated practices are prioritised first for matches, Odess said.

Along with those updates, the vendor’s deployment success incentive is now worth 50 per cent more when partners focus on time-to-value and deploy at least half of the purchased products within the first year.

Partners can flag accelerated product deployments during registration to maximise the reward, she said.

The partner portal will have product readiness pages to help with enablement to add to AI and CRM enablement navigators already released for the portal.

Partner deal registration is getting an AI-first redesign for speed and efficiency that is rolling out in phases, Odess said.

A virtual agent for deal registration is now live.

Automated email-to-deal registration and automated voice-to-deal registration will also go live “in the near future,” she said.

In the fourth quarter, a new incentive tracking dashboard will go live.

In the first quarter, ServiceNow will roll out a new partner programme fee structure, with more details coming.

Execs highlighted growth potential from ServiceNow’s Impact value acceleration product.

Customers who adopt Impact grow 13 points higher, Simon Short, ServiceNow SVP of customer excellence, told the crowd.

About 16 per cent of all ACV across the world is covered by Impact, with the number expected to reach 19-plus per cent in 2026.

Short said partners can wrap services around Impact and leverage its stackable discounts.

Impact partners also gain access to the product’s digital experience for greater visibility.

The vendor has lowered its list price from ten per cent to eight per cent to grow the margin.

The vendor has built triggers to find customers with products that are still unused after more than 180 days.

Short estimated that 68 per cent of all applications are undeployed, translating into 28 per cent of all customer ACV and $3.5bn of product that’s been sold and has gone 180-plus days unused.

Bringing in more partners with specialties that fit a customer’s needs could be a potential solution to the undeployed products issue, Odess told CRN.

The goal is to also introduce partners to customers earlier in the order life cycle.

Partners growth milestones

ServiceNow’s channel chief told the audience that in ServiceNow’s second quarter, 22 per cent of net-new annual contract value (ACV) was partner-sourced.

In AI, 40 per cent of net-new ACV was partner-source, the biggest quarter ever for partners with momentum in every geography.

Solution areas that should be a focus for ServiceNow partners include autonomous IT, risk and security, customer relationship management, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) modernisation, Park said.

The goal for partners in the AI era is faster project completion, Park told the crowd.

“The days of three-to-five-year projects where you lock in and it’s five, ten, 15 per cent net margin to you guys, it’s over,” he said.

“There are partners and there are platforms that will go do that. Have fun with that.

“I want this ecosystem to be high growth, high impact, high speed to value because the customers are looking for speed to value. And we can deliver it.”

The CRM market offensive reflects comments ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott has been making to tout his company’s growth in the market.

In turn, CRM giant Salesforce has said it will launch a product to challenge ServiceNow in the IT service management (ITSM) space ServiceNow is known for.

The vendor has added federal government and retail to its list of focus industries, which include banking, technology, telecoms, health care and automotive, executives shared Wednesday.

Reseller partners have reached a variety of milestones, including net-new ACV growth of 67 per cent year-on-year in the first half of the year, David Boyle, VP of resell sales for ServiceNow’s Global Partnerships and Channels (GPC) organisation, told the crowd at the company’s headquarters.

New transacting resell partners have increased ten per cent since January.

Partners who sell software licenses with services win bids 35 per cent more often, Boyle said.

Net new logos to the resale channel are growing 30 per cent year-on-year.

ServiceNow will work on more pre-sales resources for these partners.

The company measures reseller success based on net-new ACV growth, net-new logos, and the number of certified sales and pre-sales resources.

“This is a huge, huge focus for us,” he said.

Looking at geography, ServiceNow wants to grow commercial and midmarket business in the APAC market, Marc Monday, GVP of Americas partnerships and channels, told the crowd.

He estimated that the business contributes about 11 per cent of ServiceNow’s ACV while the total addressable market should be closer to 50 per cent.

This article originally appeared on CRN UK sister website CRN.