Adding AI is easy. Integrating is where Irish firms are falling behind

Guest post by Paul Turley, Senior Director, ServiceNow Ireland

Almost every number in enterprise AI this year points up. According to our latest AI Maturity Index, spending across our region rose 113 per cent in twelve months. Almost six in ten organisations are now using agentic AI. Maturity scores kept climbing, to 51 out of 100. One number went the other way, and it is the one that decides whether the rest of it ever pays off.

Worldwide, the share of organisations that had streamlined and integrated workflows across business functions with AI fell from 30 per cent in 2025 to 16 per cent in 2026, almost halving in a single year. Across the EMEA region, the figure is lower still, at 15 per cent. So, the tools are multiplying while the number of firms joining them up is falling. That’s the opposite of what all the spending is meant to buy.

The reason is that the quick wins pull against the hard ones. When each team solves its own problem, the natural move is to buy a tool for that problem and bolt it onto the systems already in place. Do that across a dozen teams and you get a dozen capable tools, each sharp inside its own box, yet blind to everything outside it. Single-purpose agents make it worse because they add moving parts without connecting any of them. Our own research names the consequence: a new wave of agent sprawl sitting on top of platforms that were already fragmented. More gets added every quarter. Less of it connects.

What it looks like on the ground

You can see the cost of this in how the service is really delivered here. Our 2026 CX Shift research in Ireland found that three in four service reps have to log into between three and five separate systems to resolve a single customer query, and six in ten say the customer data in front of them is inconsistent from one screen to the next. Less than half of a rep’s day is actually spent helping customers, and the rest goes on admin and chasing information across those systems. Give that rep an AI tool that drafts a reply and you’ve helped with the reply. You’ve done nothing about the four other systems or the record that contradicts itself. That’s why Irish customers at the other end still lose 284 million hours a year to slow service, even as the spending climbs.

From automation to orchestration

The distinction that matters here is between automation and orchestration, and it is easy to blur the lines. Automation makes a single task faster: a form filled, a ticket routed, a summary written. Orchestration changes how the work moves across the whole organisation, connecting the systems, decisions, and people that a task passes through. You can buy a great deal of the first and slip backwards on the second at the same time, which is what the integration number indicates.

Picture a single customer request that comes in, gets classified, pulls the right account data, updates the order, triggers the refund and closes the loop, with a person setting the rules and stepping in only for exceptions. That’s one piece of work moving cleanly across four or five systems. It’s also what a business can’t do when those systems were never connected, no matter how much AI sits inside each one.

The organisations getting this right start underneath the AI. They connected their data and workflows before adding more on top, so that each new tool plugs into something that already connects rather than adding another island. Assistive AI earns its place in that setup, sitting on connected ground so the same investment compounds instead of fragmenting.

What the groundwork pays back

The payoff is the whole reason to bother. Only about one in five organisations are turning their AI spend into a real return, and they got there by joining things up first. That group is already delivering a 164 per cent return on its AI investment today and expects 199 per cent within two years. It’s also five times more productive than the rest and six times more likely to be building new services and revenue from AI.

The advantage widens with each cycle because each connected workflow becomes context the next one can draw on, so their AI gets cheaper and better to run over time. For everyone else, each new tool adds complexity and cost without much to show for it, and the gap keeps widening.

So, the question worth asking in Irish boardrooms has changed. The count of AI tools you have deployed says very little on its own. The number that matters is how much of that AI can act together across the business, and this year, that number moved in the wrong direction. Turning it around is slower and less exciting than the next launch. It’s also the only thing that turns a pile of clever tools into a business that runs differently.

About Paul Turley, Senior Director, Enterprise Sales Ireland, ServiceNow

As leader of ServiceNow’s enterprise sales in Ireland, Paul and his team manage relationships with clients and partners across all industries and sectors on the island of Ireland. Paul has over 25 years of experience working in various large software businesses in Irish and international markets, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Micro Focus. After graduating from UCD with a degree in Engineering, Paul started his career working with Enterprise Ireland, helping Irish technology startups build routes to market across Scandinavia.

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention. The ServiceNow AI Platform integrates with any cloud, any model, and any data source to orchestrate how work flows across the enterprise. By unifying legacy systems, departmental tools, cloud applications, and AI agents, ServiceNow provides a single pane of glass that connects intelligence to execution across every corner of business. With more than 80 billion workflows running on the platform each year, ServiceNow helps organizations turn fragmented operations into coordinated, autonomous workflows that deliver measurable results. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at www.servicenow.com.

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