Common Misconceptions About Adopting an ESM Solution
An organization should not feel apprehensive about adopting an ESM tool based on its size or maturity. Rather than asking, “Are we big enough for ESM?” Christensen says, organizations should reframe the question as, “Where is our service delivery breaking down and costing us time and money?”
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Midsized companies can already have inefficiencies in IT, HR and finance that are negatively affecting the employee experience. An ESM solution that comes preconfigured at a fixed price can support such organizations to go live within weeks instead of quarters.
However, consolidation can quickly go south if companies try to do everything at once.
“Where consolidation goes wrong is when organizations try to boil the ocean. They map every single workflow before going live, chase perfection and end up with a multiyear program that loses organizational will before it delivers value. The overhead that people fear from a single platform is often self-inflicted from overengineering the rollout,” she says.
So, what’s the right approach?
“Constrained scope with high confidence,” she explains. “Start with the workflows that are already semistructured, the ones where people know roughly what should happen, but the execution is messy. Those digitize well, fast and create momentum. The complex, exception-heavy processes can come later, once the platform is trusted.”
The Role of AI-Driven Automation in ESM
Work that is high-volume, repetitive and rule-based will see the most immediate, clear value for automation, Christensen notes. That includes password resets, ticket classification and routing, and first-line responses to common HR questions.
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The more complex capabilities appear when AI is embedded into a platform solution from the start, integrated within the workflow so an employee can easily use familiar tools, such as Slack or Teams, instead of navigating to a separate portal. She notes that ServiceNow’s AI “deflects 70% of Robinhood’s employee requests before human intervention is needed across IT, HR and legal, reducing manual effort by 2,200 hours across 1,300 tickets monthly with AI embedded directly into workflows. That’s a real experience improvement.”
True automation requires documented processes, she says, and it can’t fix broken processes.
“If your onboarding workflow has five handoffs that happen inconsistently, automating that workflow just makes the inconsistency faster. The discipline of implementing ESM — mapping the workflow, agreeing on the steps, defining ownership — is often more valuable than the automation itself. AI amplifies that foundation, but it doesn’t replace it,” she adds.
