Raleigh, North Carolina, reduces IT service desk costs by 66% with ServiceNow AI agents

Raleigh accepted 98% of AI-generated incident summaries as-is, while help desk staff oversee the AI specialist’s work.

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Raleigh is the first municipal government to deploy autonomous workers using ServiceNow’s IT Service Desk AI Specialist

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the Super Intelligence Control Tower for business reinvention, today announced that the City of Raleigh is the first municipal government to put ServiceNow’s IT Service Desk AI Specialist into production. Raleigh is adding new residents everyday, and that steady growth has created more requests, tickets, and pressure on a lean team. The city is keeping pace, while increasing productivity, with AI agents and specialists built on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

The challenge: keeping pace with one of the fastest-growing cities in the country

Raleigh’s help desk staff of four people supports 4,400 city employees, while the city fields roughly 300,000 resident service calls each year. A decade of IT, HR, facilities, and security workflows on ServiceNow had already given the city a deep knowledge base, but as internal ticket volume climbed, more of the team's day went to routine device and connectivity questions and less to the complex problems and service improvements that matter most to employees and residents.

The solution: AI agents that help guide, resolve, and scale

Raleigh built ‘Ral-E,’ a ServiceNow AI agent that guides employees through self-service requests and answers questions from the city's knowledge base across IT, HR, and facilities. Each conversation is unique to the problem at hand, getting employees an answer or routing them to the right team with a 98% deflection rate.

Building on that success, the city put ‘Alli,’ its L1 IT Service Desk AI Specialist, into production. Where Ral-E guides and routes, Alli resolves complete workflows—handling common requests from start to finish using the city's knowledge base, historical incident data, and remediation workflows. Help desk staff oversee Alli’s work and keep the knowledge she learns accurate and current.

With the help of Ral-E and Alli, key outcomes include:

• 66% lower IT service desk costs achieved by redirecting staff time
• 98% of AI-generated incident summaries accepted as-is
• Nearly half of IT support requests resolved autonomously, with the city targeting 85%
• 98% of tickets routed correctly on first contact
• 20+ workflows automated through ServiceNow’s Autonomous Workforce

What’s next: bringing the same experience to residents

Raleigh is now extending its ServiceNow model beyond city hall. Ral-E and Alli will soon connect to the “Ask Raleigh” resident portal, helping nearly 500,000 residents get answers and complete service requests without ever picking up the phone—and giving city staff more time for the residents who need a person on the other end.

Comments on the news:

"Our residents expect their city to keep pace with their lives, and our employees deserve tools that make that possible," said Mark Wittenburg, chief information officer, City of Raleigh. "We're introducing AI deliberately, building trust step by step and keeping our people in the loop. Every hour we give back inside city hall shows up in the service our residents receive. As we bring the ServiceNow AI experience to ‘Ask Raleigh,’ that impact will reach every corner of our community.”

"The City of Raleigh is setting the pace for what cities and states of any size can achieve at the intersection of innovation and service," said Mike Hurt, group vice president of U.S. Public Sector at ServiceNow. "Raleigh is using ServiceNow Autonomous Workforce to put ServiceNow AI Agents and Specialists into production inside governed workflows that complete work end to end without compromising the security government agencies rely on. That's the hybrid workforce of the future: AI and people working side by side to deliver mission results."

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is the Super Intelligence Control Tower for business reinvention. The ServiceNow platform integrates with any model, any cloud, and any data source to orchestrate, govern, and secure work across the agentic enterprise. ServiceNow gives customers the enterprise context and control to build and scale confidently. With more than 100 billion workflows running on the platform each year, ServiceNow helps organizations turn fragmented operations into coordinated, autonomous work for IT, CRM, Security, Employee Experience, and more. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at www.servicenow.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261008344133/en/

Media Contacts
ServiceNow
Samantha Baker
press@servicenow.com

Source: ServiceNow

Key Terms

deflection rate technical

The share of customer inquiries or requests that are handled without escalation to a higher-cost or live support channel (for example, solved by a knowledge base article, chatbot, automated phone system, or self-service tool). It is usually expressed as a percentage: (number of contacts resolved via self-service or lower-tier channels) ÷ (total incoming contacts) over a given period. Different organizations may count ‘‘resolved’’ differently (excluding repeat contacts, follow-ups, or certain channels), so methods and time windows should be checked when comparing rates.