KPMG expanded its ServiceNow alliance, becoming an implementation and services partner for EmployeeWorks and HR Service Delivery while helping ServiceNow transform HR operations with AI, agentic workflows, Moveworks technology and KPMG’s Mystro platform.
Audit, tax, and advisory company KPMG Wednesday said it has extended its ServiceNow relationship, becoming a new implementation and services partner for ServiceNow’s EmployeeWorks and HR Service Delivery, both for its customers and the vendor’s own deployment.
ServiceNow EmployeeWorks is the company’s enterprise “front door” that provides an enterprise’s employees with a conversational AI to provide answers to requests for information and then takes actions as needed. It combines the company’s unified portal with conversational AI technology that came from ServiceNow’s March acquisition of Moveworks.
ServiceNow HR Service Delivery is a cloud-based application suite for digitizing and automating internal human resources services, requests, and workflows.
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The expanded KPMG-ServiceNow relationship builds on their multi-year commitment signed in May to work together on AI-powered transformation of common enterprise customers.
KPMG is one of ServiceNow’s largest global alliance partners, and has standardized many of its own processes on the NOW platform, said Gary Plotkin, KPMG’s global ServiceNow practice leader and digital platforms practice leader.
“KPMG will be helping ServiceNow with their end-to-end HR transformation,” Plotkin told CRN. “Incorporated in that transformation is a technology deployment of ServiceNow’s EmployeeWorks platform.”
Under the relationship, ServiceNow has hired KPMG to help modernize its HR operations to take advantage of not only their capabilities, particularly with their recent acquisition of Moveworks, but also to reimagine what the HR operations of the future will look like, said Joe Koester, KPMG’s US ServiceNow practice leader.
“It’s thinking about agents along with employees to deliver HR services, and it’s leveraging not only their traditional HR service delivery capabilities, HRSD, but also to bring Moveworks in as the front end to all their employees globally,” Koester told CRN. “It’s about leveraging their tech, it’s about AI, and it’s about imagining a new operating model, the HR model of the future.”
As part of that transformation, ServiceNow wants best-in-class use of its technology and best-in-class processes from KPMG, Koester said.
“And then they want to be able to show that to their clients as an example of how their clients should be running HR,” he said. “They’re doing it for efficiency improvements and to run better operations, but they also want to be a shining bright beacon of how their clients should be using their tools and technologies as well. What we’re bringing to the table is technical expertise, but primarily it’s our functional knowledge and expertise of what HR operations should look like in this new world of AI.”
KPMG’s contribution also includes KPMG Mystro, the company’s AI-based transformation platform for managing both human and AI agent labor for sustainable growth, Koester said.
“Mystro is a tool and capability that our human capital advisory team has developed, and its main focus is to come into organizations like ServiceNow or any of our clients, ingest information about their current staffing and their current operations, and then identify opportunities for AI and agentic improvements,” he said. “It ranks a list of targeted opportunities where agentic workflows can dramatically increase efficiency and take a lot of that burden off of employees. We leveraged Mystro in the analysis and assessment, and then it fed into the roadmap of what we’re going to tackle during this engagement in terms of agentic workflows, or Agent Assists, which is what ServiceNow calls them.”
KPMG’s implementation of Mystro, EmployeeWorks, and HR Service Delivery at ServiceNow is expected to take about 180 days until MVP, or minimum viable product, Koester said.
“We are all committed to achieving significant phase-one) of this in 180 days, so six months,” he said.
Plotkin said that many clients today are doing proofs of concept or pilots in dipping their toes into the AI world.
“That’s not what this is,” he said. “This is an end-to-end transformation being done in phases. This is full-on leveraging ServiceNow and its AI capability, along with KPMG’s knowledge and innovation, to fundamentally change ServiceNow’s HR operation.”
Once the HR side of the implementation is done, KPMG expects to expand its relationship into other areas including finance and supply chains, Koester said.
ServiceNow’s AI technology helps partners like KPMG with massive projects like HR transformation, said ServiceNow President of Global Customer Operations Paul Fipps.
“If you think about the agentic front door for a customer to drive not just a great employee experience but tremendous employee productivity, you have native AI as your user interface with Moveworks,” Fipps told CRN. “Behind the scenes, we have our core HR Service Delivery product, also native AI, that actually helps you agentify those core processes.”
That combination is resonating with customers, Fipps said.
“It’s a huge growth area for us,” he said. “KPMG has stepped up and said it will implement this inside of their firm. They become client zero, but actually the best version of client zero. They are also doing the work internally for ServiceNow.”
ServiceNow is completely rethinking the entirety of the HR process and what HR can look like in the world of ServiceNow, and that’s where KPMG is helping, Fipps said.
“It’s much more of a vision of how do we change the way they’re thinking of and leveraging ServiceNow technology,” he said. “They have their IP (intellectual property), and like many of our partners they’re building out their own IP on top of our platform. They leverage capabilities of ServiceNow, build IP on top of our platform, and go to market either in a direct selling motion, which we help them with, or in a managed services capability, where customers are saying, ‘You just take care of it for us.’”
