As organizations continue to invest heavily in artificial intelligence, a growing concern is emerging: the metrics used to gauge success may be fundamentally flawed. According to John Phillips, Group Vice President of Employee Experience at ServiceNow, the industry's focus on AI adoption rates—counting how many employees use a tool—misses the real point. What truly matters, he argues, is whether work gets done faster, with less friction, and with better outcomes for both employees and the business.
Phillips shared these insights during a recent episode of the You Should Know podcast, hosted by Ryan Leary and William Tincup. The conversation, which spanned nearly an hour, delved into the chaotic state of AI in the workplace. Phillips described the current landscape as a “train wreck of productivity,” caused by every system of record shipping its own AI agent. This fragmentation, he explained, creates chaos for practitioners who are left to manage a patchwork of disconnected tools.
The episode arrives at a critical time, as chief human resource officers (CHROs) face mounting pressure to demonstrate AI's productivity gains across increasingly complex technology stacks. Phillips predicts a fast pivot in measurement strategies: “We're going to quickly stop talking about AI adoption as tool usage, and we're going to start looking at the outcomes and jobs to be done.” This shift, he suggests, will force organizations to focus on the actual value delivered rather than superficial usage statistics.
Phillips also explored the two-sided value exchange between employees and employers, questioning what happens to the 23 hours a tool claims to save. He emphasized the importance of discretionary effort over traditional engagement surveys, arguing that hyper-personalization is more effective than one-size-fits-all pulse data. Tincup, who has long criticized engagement surveys, pushed Phillips on whether discretionary effort is the truer metric, while Leary shared a personal story about applying to Home Depot and never receiving an acknowledgment email, highlighting the disconnect between employee expectations and employer actions.
The discussion also touched on the collapse of work boundaries post-COVID, burnout, and the internal dialogue of “am I enough.” Phillips noted that high performance requires both extreme focus and extreme recovery, a principle he believes applies universally. Drawing from his time spent in refugee camps, he added, “Skills and talent is universal and opportunity is not,” underscoring the need for equitable access to opportunities.
ServiceNow's approach, as described by Phillips, involves layering an agentic companion across existing systems rather than ripping and replacing them. He described customers arriving with eight purchased AI tools plus one they built themselves, none of which communicate with each other. ServiceNow's AI control tower vision aims to stitch together 15 large language models and 100 systems, providing a unified interface that reduces complexity and improves outcomes.
The episode, part of the WRKdefined Podcast Network, is available now. With over 3.9 million verified monthly listeners, You Should Know delivers unfiltered conversations for people invested in the evolving world of work. As AI continues to reshape the workplace, Phillips' insights offer a timely reminder that the focus should be on outcomes, not just adoption.
