U.K. organizations are deploying AI at pace—spending has doubled in recent years—yet enterprise maturity sits at just 51 out of 100, exposing a critical gap between investment and readiness. ServiceNow's Adam Spearing frames this as a natural inflection point: most spending to date has funded exploratory pilots and proof-of-concept work, but organizations are now moving into production environments where governance becomes non-negotiable. The shift demands more than budget enthusiasm. Once AI operates within live customer service workflows—whether through Zendesk, Freshdesk, or native platform agents—teams need observability, policy enforcement, data lineage, and kill-switch capability. Without these controls, the risks compound: Spearing cites a client that discovered 20,000 unsanctioned AI agents already running inside the business, a shadow AI problem that exposes data, compliance, and operational vulnerabilities that no CX leader can afford to ignore.
For support teams and CX consultants, this maturity gap has immediate operational implications. The gap between claiming agentic AI adoption and actually running autonomous end-to-end workflows remains wide; many organizations are bolting AI onto existing silos rather than reimagining processes around what AI can do. Data quality emerges as a second-order blocker—where humans might question dodgy inputs, AI systems act on them directly, amplifying poor data into poor customer outcomes. This raises a harder question for teams already running agent-based systems: are you measuring whether your AI is behaving as intended, or simply measuring whether it's running? Governance frameworks that feel like compliance overhead are actually the foundation for confidence and ROI. Without visibility into what your AI is doing, where it's accessing data, and whether it's delivering promised value, you're operating blind—and the cost of that blindness compounds as deployment scales across support channels and customer touchpoints.
U.K. organizations are investing heavily in AI, but many are now confronting a harder question: are they ready to put it into production safely? In this CX Today interview, Technology Journalist Nicole Willing speaks with Adam Spearing, EMEA Head of AI Innovation at ServiceNow, about why AI spending