During ServiceNow Knowledge 2025, Savannah Peterson of theCUBE sits down with Will Coffey, senior manager of the ServiceNow Business Group at Accenture Federal Services, and Ellen Currid, Americas Partner Development Lead for Accenture ServiceNow Business Group at Accenture, to explore how AI is transforming federal and commercial enterprise operations. The discussion focuses on the convergence of AI, data security and cross-functional collaboration as keys to unlocking innovation.
Currid brings forward the essential role of a strong data foundation, noting how collaborative partnerships accelerate AI success. Coffey expands on the importance of automation and strategic governance, especially in high-security environments. Together, they paint a picture of how AI, when implemented with intention and oversight, can dramatically improve both efficiency and customer outcomes.
Looking ahead, both experts see continued evolution in AI capabilities, predicting the rise of autonomous agents by next year’s event. The conversation highlights the strength of the Accenture-ServiceNow alliance and the shared commitment to trustworthy, secure AI that delivers measurable value. For organizations navigating complexity, their insights offer a clear path forward.
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Will Coffey & Ellen Currid, Accenture
Exploring ServiceNow Innovations at Knowledge 2025
Join Ellen Currid of Accenture and Will Coffey, a certified master architect and the North America security and risk lead, as they discuss their roles and insights at ServiceNow Knowledge 2025 in Las Vegas. This engaging session, covered by theCUBE Research and hosted by Savannah Peterson, delves into how Accenture leverages partnerships to deliver exceptional value to clients.
Currid and Coffey offer a deep dive into the current landscape of generative artificial intelligence and agentic AI, sharing their expertise on building a robust foundation for AI integration. Topics include essential data quality, leadership and teamwork, alongside insights into benchmarking and achieving return on investment in AI projects. They emphasize the importance of collaborative ecosystems in driving innovation.
Key takeaways from the session highlight the importance of data security and governance in AI environments. Currid underscores the necessity for thorough process management and automation of valuable business processes, while Coffey discusses the comprehensive capabilities of the ServiceNow platform in transforming workflows. Together, they illustrate how strategic partnerships enhance deliverables and client satisfaction in highly regulated sectors such as finance, telecom and healthcare.
During ServiceNow Knowledge 2025, Savannah Peterson of theCUBE sits down with Will Coffey, senior manager of the ServiceNow Business Group at Accenture Federal Services, and Ellen Currid, Americas Partner Development Lead for Accenture ServiceNow Business Group at Accenture, to explore how AI is transforming federal and commercial enterprise operations. The discussion focuses on the convergence of AI, data security and cross-functional collaboration as keys to unlocking innovation.
Currid brings forward the essential role of a strong data foundation, n...Read more
Will Coffey
Senior Manager Accenture ServiceNow Business GroupAccenture
Ellen Currid
Americas Partner Development Lead Accenture ServiceNow Business GroupAccenture
>> Hello, AI fans, and welcome back to the Accenture Reinvention Lounge here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're at Knowledge 2025. My name is Savannah Peterson. Very excited for this next segment with Ellen and Will. Thank you both so much for taking the time to come hang out, share some insights. It's a busy week for y'all.
Will Coffey
>> Yeah. Thanks for having us. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. It is a busy week for us this week.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yes, it is. Let's start off by talking a little bit about your roles. Ellen, I'm going to start with you. I know you're on Dave's team. We get to chat with Dave a lot, but we haven't had the chance to talk to you, so tell us the scoop.
Will Coffey
>> Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. I'm the Americas partner lead here at Accenture. I work with ServiceNow on our partnership and help to pull programs together to deliver more value for our clients. It's really exciting, and I also work on our generative AI and agentic AI strategy.
Savannah Peterson
>> Oh, that's fun. That's a busy job. You're wearing a couple different hats. What about you? You're a master architect, I hear.
Will Coffey
>> I am. I'm one of our certified master architects. I'm our North America security and risk lead, and I'm delivering to several of our clients right here.
Savannah Peterson
>> That's got to be a really high pressure job.
Will Coffey
>> It can be, yeah. That's why I like it.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah. You like the intensity?
Will Coffey
>> I do. Yeah. It keeps it exciting, keeps it fun. There's no boredom in anything that I'm doing day to day, so it's great.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah. Well, I can imagine that. I can imagine lots of concerns and curiosities for your customers and your communities right now, especially at the velocity we're moving with generative AI. Talk to me a little bit about the foundation that's necessary to be successful and how you're empowering that. Ellen, I'll start with you and then we'll get back to Will.
Will Coffey
>> Yeah. It's a great question. It really starts with data, so making sure that you have information, quality information to be able to even get started. The other thing I would say is a really good team that's committed to the mission. It takes time, it takes effort, but we see success when we have that foundation of really good data. And then, a really strong team and leadership support to be able to achieve the goals that we set out with our clients to reach.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, definitely.
Will Coffey
>> Yeah, I definitely mirror that. I think that one of the other things that we look at is when we're starting that process, we're starting that journey of AI generally, not just generative AI, because AI covers all manner of things now. We look at what are the things that we need to actually automate, what are the things that can be automated, what are the things that we can take to our customers and to their customers, and how can we make those more efficient, better, faster, easier, more customer-friendly. Things like that. So, starting with the data piece, looking at what we can actually automate, how we take AI to the next step to bring it to a broader audience. Definitely where we start.
Savannah Peterson
>> Well, and that's where it really starts to get exciting, right? I mean, I love us all little nerds hanging out and applying things and playing with models, and even browser-based exploration in AI is one thing, but it really goes a lot deeper than that. Ellen, you mentioned providing real value to your customers. What does that actually mean in this era of technology?
Will Coffey
>> I think especially when it comes to AI and agentic AI, there's a desire to have a strong ROI and obviously deliver value and be able to report that or talk about that, especially to the board. There's board-level initiatives that our clients are trying to achieve, and so it's really important that when we get started, as Will said, we're not only thinking about what they're trying to achieve from a process standpoint or from a client experience or an employee experience standpoint, but also making sure we're benchmarking where they are today and then how we're measuring back towards that throughout the entire process. That's really key to being able to quantify the value and then justify additional spend or additional the roadmap that we want to try and deliver with them, how do we do more.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, absolutely. Especially this particular technological revolution, like most of them not cheap. Definitely not cheap. I mentioned-
Will Coffey
>> .
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah. Well, great point. Great point. You mentioned data being such a fundamental foundational piece of all of this. I can imagine there's a bit of anxiety around the security of that data. Will, what sorts of advice are you giving your customers when it comes to making sure that stays that way?
Will Coffey
>> Yeah. I mean, that's a great point about any data really. You are very, very anxious about making sure that their data is secure, that it is governed properly, that it is compliant, all of those different things. That is the basis that we put in front of all of our customers for all of their data, no matter what we're doing, not just AI related things. It's especially important in an AI environment because when you start bringing that in and you start leveraging new models or agent-to-agent conversations, that data needs to be in a mature place where the outcome is something that's useful. If your data is either dirty or unorganized, disorganized, or if it's not secure, the returns might be things that you don't want people to see, or it might be things that you don't anticipate for it to return back or it might be wrong answers. Hallucinations do occur, and a lot of that is based on the data that's in the systems.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah. It's always been important, and you've seen it go through a lot of different revolutions. Sticking with you for a second, Will, what is it about the ServiceNow platform that enables you to reinvent work for your community?
Will Coffey
>> Yeah. The nice thing about the ServiceNow platform is its holistic nature. It's touching all different parts of businesses. It's touching a lot of different workflows. You have ITSM, ITOM, case management, HRDS, security operations, GRC, and risk. The platform itself lends itself to be able to coalesce all of those different activities so that you can start in one place and still leverage the power of the platform to get to everywhere else. I think that's really unique about ServiceNow is that it touches across all those different capabilities.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, it really does. That ecosystem is so critical. I've been screaming it from the rooftops here at theCUBE analysis . It's going to be the ecosystem that wins this era of technology. It's not going to be one slice of this pie. I suspect you see similar things on your side, Ellen. How important are tools like this, and building on what Will said, what does that enable you to be able to achieve?
Will Coffey
>> Well, I think what Will said is really important, because the rich data set that just inherently is within the ServiceNow platform, because it touches all of these different workflows and business functions. You need that to actually start using generative AI and agentic AI. ServiceNow also already has processes defined. So where we work really hard with our clients to make sure that the business processes and the outcomes that we're driving from them with the ServiceNow platform are already high value. Now to be able to try and automate that, we're not automating bad processes, we're automating good processes that humans don't necessarily have to be in the loop 100% on. You can still have a human plus AI factor in there, but you can automate some of the menial tasks so that our workers and our customers can focus on more high value and more important things.
Savannah Peterson
>> Absolutely. That process intelligence that you just mentioned is so critical, and replicating good behavior instead of even marginal behavior. There's so many little details within the puzzle, little Legos within the piece or within the set, so to speak, as we're navigating this. Speaking of the partnership here, how important are partnerships, like the ServiceNow-Accenture partnership? The expression on your face, Will, just said a lot.
Will Coffey
>> Well, I mean, I looked at Ellen because she is our partner manager, but to me, it's everything, honestly. I work so closely with my ServiceNow counterparts every single day. I talk to them every day, and it's been a really, really strong and good partnership. To me, it makes a complete difference in how I am able to deliver and the things that I'm able to bring to everybody else.
Savannah Peterson
>> I can imagine there's a lot of trust there.
Will Coffey
>> Tons, yeah.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah.
Will Coffey
>> I mean, when we work together with ServiceNow and our other ecosystem partners, it's not just Accenture and ServiceNow, but there's all the hyperscalers. There's a lot of other partners in the ecosystem that need to be involved to really make agentic made real. So, I think between what Accenture brings from our global partner ecosystem, ServiceNow touches many of them as well. So for our clients where we're delivering the most value, we're bringing the best of all of that together and surrounding our clients to make them successful. I think ServiceNow is one of our best partners that I've seen do that with Accenture now.
Savannah Peterson
>> We've been talking about security and how important that clean data foundation is. This is critical across industries, but particularly in a lot of the ones that you touch with high velocity. Can you give us some examples of some of the industries where you've been the guiding light, if you will?
Will Coffey
>> The three that come to mind for me, especially in highly-regulated industries, are financial services, telco, and healthcare and life sciences. When we look across those industries, there's a lot of common regulations in there, but also they're looking for specific capabilities that help differentiate them within the industry environment. In the financial services sector, you're looking for wealth management solutions to help their clients individually. In healthcare and life sciences, you're looking for patient care, payer-provider services, or anything that allows you to go in and do research, or pharmaceutical companies that are doing drug discovery, things like that. And when we look at some of the other industries, they're trying to tie all of their different capabilities to provide a broader set of services to their customers that differentiate them across all of the other regulated sectors.
Savannah Peterson
>> Whether it's personalization or privacy-
Will Coffey
>> Absolutely....
Savannah Peterson
>> it's all really critical, and this is all super sensitive data.
Will Coffey
>> Yes. What we love about the ServiceNow platform capabilities is the openness. When we are talking to clients about, well, what platform should we choose? What's the best for me? Should I build custom? Should I go with a product? The answer is always yes. It's an end, it's not an either or, because there are very proprietary things that clients are going to want to invest to build custom models and custom capabilities. But what we heard yesterday be announced with the agent control tower, that agent-to-agent operability and the ability to leverage custom or third party capabilities with ServiceNow to really create that end-to-end workflow is how our clients are going to really get the most value out of agentic and gen AI.
Will Coffey
>> Yeah. You talk about trust. It's not just trust in the system, it's trust in the data as well. You talk about people and caring for people. People process technology and trusting between all three.
Savannah Peterson
>> Last question for you both. When we are hanging out at Knowledge 2026 a year from now, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today?
Will Coffey
>> You see that awesome thing that I did that we're talking about right now at this Knowledge, probably going to be up on stage talking about it. It's going to be great. You're going to love it. It's going to change the way that we do AI in the industry.
Savannah Peterson
>> I love that. Okay. We'll see you on stage.
Will Coffey
>> Yeah.
Savannah Peterson
>> Ready for that. Ready for the green room interview.
Will Coffey
>> Okay. Yeah.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, there you go. There you go. Okay.
Will Coffey
>> You'll never believe this one simple trick that I did to totally change the paradigm of AI.
Savannah Peterson
>> You heard it here first. You heard it-
Will Coffey
>> You wait for it to summon. You have to stick.
Savannah Peterson
>> There you go. All right. Well, what about you, Ellen?
Will Coffey
>> I'm not sure how I follow that up.
Savannah Peterson
>> I know. I think...
Will Coffey
>> I think I would love to be able to sit here next year and talk about autonomous agents, right?
Savannah Peterson
>> Oh, yeah.
Will Coffey
>> To really automate those simple tasks that really drain a lot of time, but have not a lot of value for the person actually doing them. So next year, that's my goal, is to be able to say we've made that real. We need that vision real.
Savannah Peterson
>> I love to hear it. You are the second person on the show today to bring up autonomous as the 2026 theme. I'm starting to see a trend here. Very exciting. Thank you for taking the time during such a busy week. Really fabulous to chat with you both, Ellen and Will. Appreciate it.
Will Coffey
>> Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
Will Coffey
>> Thanks for having us.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah. And thank all of you for tuning in to our fantastic coverage here from the Accenture Reinvention Lounge in Las Vegas, Nevada. We're at Knowledge 2025. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.
Savannah Peterson