July 22nd, 2025
3 min read
With businesses embracing AI, it is essential to build strong connections between data and workflows, eliminate walls between systems, and leverage integrated platforms to drive innovation. That’s why NTT is partnering with companies like Microsoft and ServiceNow, to extend its services and help organizations accelerate transformation through seamless, data-driven solutions.
Carol Scott, Senior Director Software & Digital Platforms, Partner/ISV AI, Microsoft, and WanTing Huang, Director of Innovation and Research, ServiceNow, shared their perspectives on this hot topic.
Bridges and Barriers
As AI evolves, one of the most important areas of focus is the intersection of data and workflows, with the need to provide a seamless, integrated cross-platform experience for end users. Across CRM, IT, operational data, and business logic and strategy, it’s critical to view data from both the vertical and horizontal perspectives of the organization.
Platforms like Microsoft are leading the charge in reducing the friction that comes with “swivel sharing” – that exhausting back-and-forth between different applications as employees switch from task to task. Using AI, one of Microsoft’s goals is to provide a unified experience that empowers users to seamlessly manage their workflows.
Huang shares the journey of a ServiceNow support ticket. “When a customer reaches out, data about that customer flows across various platforms,” she says. “From creating the ticket to tracking interactions, it’s almost like the ticket is the customer data. This is where agentic workflows come in: by automating the process, we create value that builds from the bottom up, ensuring that data flows back into the business for smarter decision-making.”
One of the key advantages of modern platforms is their ability to allow citizen developers to create workflows using the tools they’re already familiar with. As Scott says, imagine building AI-powered workflows directly within the Microsoft environment or integrating with Azure AI. Whether it’s AI Studio, Azure AI, or AI Foundries, these platforms allow you to bring Copilot into workflows that depend on critical IT and operations data, like those pulled from ServiceNow.
This seamless integration supports meaningful alignment between IT and business operations, facilitating rapid, enterprise-wide AI adoption. By enabling users to build on top of existing data flows, organizations can accelerate both innovation and productivity.
A major opportunity for companies is identifying common workflows across different functions, especially in areas like sales and marketing. Think about how data from customer-facing teams could feed back into IT operations to enhance performance and customer satisfaction.
Another area that deserves attention is the back-office versus front-office use cases for automation and agentic workflows. By understanding the points of intersection between these two worlds, companies can identify opportunities for workflow optimization that extend beyond the front lines and into core business operations.
AI in Society
“Working with our ecosystem partners like Microsoft we can fundamentally provide a better user experience and more value driven by data across the business from the ground up. With core IT, operational, and customer data and intersection points built deeply into agentic workflows by combining these data provides a game changer in terms of speed to business value and also bespoke solutions unique to each enterprise customer’s business requirements. We are doing innovation sprints and hackathons to give developers and engineers hands-on experience playing with those technologies with our partners. Microsoft has all the AI capabilities like LLMs and the AI Foundry. Working with those big players allows customers to tap into the frontier of model development, standing on the shoulders of those platforms to get to competitive advantage in a shorter timeframe.”
WanTing Huang, Director of Innovation and Research, ServiceNow
“ServiceNow has been a strategic partner of ours for several years now, and one of the things we really like about working with them is they don’t just talk the talk, they walk the walk. They’ve adopted Copilot technologies and worked with our development tools for AI to understand not only how we can work together but bring solutions to our joint customers. Our goal is to make a seamless experience for customers so they customize their agentic workflows with their complex data and use cases. With partners and platforms that already have the benefit of literally billions if not trillions of dollars of investment, the citizen developer or average user can customize and use technology.”
Carol Scott, Senior Director Software & Digital Platforms, Partner/ISV AI, Microsoft
When it comes to adopting cutting-edge technologies, businesses often face a critical decision: should they buy, build, or partner? As Scott points out, the key isn’t just to buy off-the-shelf solutions but to customize them for your specific needs. Platforms like Microsoft, when combined with other powerful tools like ServiceNow, offer immense potential for cross-sectional integration of data, whether operational, customer, or IT data.
These platforms make it possible to seamlessly integrate data into workflows that not only support existing automation but open up opportunities for entirely new use cases, some of which could even be revenue-generating. By combining data across departments, organizations can unlock a more holistic view of their operations, leading to smarter decisions and improved outcomes.
