At ServiceNow, bringing the brand to life is a shared responsibility. Every day, employees, agencies, and partners around the world make thousands of decisions that shape how the company shows up. Each choice may seem small, but together they create a clear, cohesive identity.

Audyn O’Rourke, Director of Brand Management, Global Brand, and her team want to play a more active role in those everyday decisions, shifting from a final checkpoint to an ongoing source of guidance. As ServiceNow’s identity evolves, the team is seeing early wins as it implements Adobe Brand Intelligence to bring its brand expertise directly into the tools employees already use. The goal is to help more teammates make stronger decisions from the start while giving the brand team greater capacity for work that requires human judgment.

“We’re a small team of experts, and we can’t scale unless we have the right tools in place,” says O’Rourke. “Beyond our employees, we support hundreds of agencies and thousands of partners around the globe. We need partners and tools that help us move quickly.”

Facing a math problem that process can’t solve.

Over the past five years, ServiceNow’s global brand team has built a strong foundation for managing the company’s identity, including its digital Brand Center. The site serves as the single source of truth for guidelines, templates, and creative assets, as well as the intake point for brand reviews.

Submissions flow into Adobe Workfront, where brand managers review them manually each week, document feedback, and email it to employees, often through multiple rounds. Depending on when a request comes in, feedback can take up to five business days. With limited capacity to scale this process across 30,000 employees, the team has historically reviewed less than 1% of the creative produced across the company.

The challenge isn’t just review capacity. As more teams create more content, including with AI, a review-at-the-end model makes it increasingly difficult to scale both speed and consistency at the same time.

“It’s basically a math problem,” says Ryan Thompson, Senior Manager of Global Brand Management. “One we can’t solve with humans alone.”

That challenge raised a bigger question for Brand Manager Sytira Saunders, who was rethinking the traditional review process. “We always wanted a tool that could help people understand the brand and review their creative on the fly. But nothing like that had ever existed,” says Saunders.

The team had already begun mapping out what a tool like that would need to do when an Adobe demonstration introduced them to Brand Intelligence. “As aggressive adopters of AI, we came in with high expectations,” says Thompson. “When Adobe showed us the brand validation capabilities that go beyond written rules, I thought, ‘Holy smokes, this is exactly what we’ve been waiting for.’”

Teaching AI brand nuance.

The team began building Brand Intelligence’s understanding of the ServiceNow brand using guidelines from its Brand Center, then added over 100 pieces of approved creative from past reviews, including social banner ads, solution briefs, white papers, and blueprints. It also introduced rejected work and examples of what not to use, helping the system understand how ServiceNow applies its brand standards in practice.

With ServiceNow’s core guidelines living in its Brand Center rather than in static documents, Adobe and ServiceNow are designing a process to keep Brand Intelligence aligned as the brand evolves. Updated guidance can be introduced, evaluated, and refined as the team prepares it for broader use.

But written guidelines are only the starting point. Much of what makes ServiceNow’s brand distinctive lives in the judgment of its experts: why an exception was approved, why one execution works and another doesn’t, and how standards should be interpreted in context. During weekly reviews, managers evaluate Brand Intelligence’s responses and provide feedback to help it navigate more nuanced decisions.

“There’s a lot of knowledge that lives within our team that isn’t necessarily written into the guidelines,” says Saunders. “We’re working to teach the system how we make those decisions, so it can understand the context behind our brand standards.”

Capturing that context helps O’Rourke’s team share brand expertise more broadly, reducing manual reviews and freeing people to focus on the decisions where their judgment matters most.

That includes knowing when not to follow a rule. As the team shares the reasoning behind its creative decisions, Brand Intelligence can develop a more nuanced understanding of how ServiceNow applies its standards in different contexts, including where human review or an exception may be needed.

“Two-tone typography is a big part of our brand. The guidelines generally call for text to start in green and end in white, but there are exceptions where we might end in green to emphasize a particular message,” explains Thompson. “We’re teaching the tool why we make those decisions, so it can recognize when an exception makes sense and apply that understanding to future reviews.”

As ServiceNow evolves its brand, it’s working with Adobe and its agencies to make future guidelines useful for machines and people. “Non-designers probably need to know as much as AI does,” says Thompson. “AI is technically a non-designer.”

Rolling out AI-powered brand validation.

ServiceNow is introducing Brand Intelligence’s validation capabilities within the brand team before gradually expanding AI-powered guidance across the company.

In the first phase, employees will continue submitting creative for review through the Brand Center, with requests flowing into Workfront. ServiceNow will focus Brand Intelligence’s first-pass reviews on core brand elements such as colors, logos, icons, and fonts, with brand managers guiding reviews and applying their expertise throughout the process.

But the business case goes beyond improving review efficiency. As AI accelerates content creation, ServiceNow sees an opportunity to scale brand governance without growing its brand team at the same pace as content demand. That means bringing guidance closer to where work happens.

In the next phase, ServiceNow and Adobe are working toward experiences that surface feedback inside existing creative and review workflows, helping employees identify issues earlier and giving brand managers richer context when human judgment is required.

“We’re working closely with Adobe to bring Brand Intelligence into the tools our employees already use,” says Saunders. “They’re helping us create an experience that makes brand guidance easier to access, right where people are working.”

Moving from checkpoint to partner.

As more employees get brand guidance earlier in the creative process, ServiceNow’s brand managers will have more time for complex reviews, developing guidance, and the decisions that benefit from human expertise. Just as important, they can engage earlier and help employees deliver on-brand work before it reaches final review.

“We want to position ourselves as partners and enablers, not just a checkpoint at the end of the process,” says Thompson. “We’re here to help make people’s work better and faster, and we want employees to feel like participants in the brand, not subjects of it.”

Brand Intelligence could also answer a question the brand team has never been able to — whether its guidance is working. “Right now, we can only see the number of people using the Brand Center,” says Saunders. “We can’t tell if they’re actually absorbing the content and making a change on their side.”

Today, about 75% of assets submitted for review need some rework for brand compliance. As adoption grows, ServiceNow plans to look beyond usage alone, examining signals such as rework, time saved, and validation outcomes to understand whether earlier guidance is helping employees apply the brand more effectively.

That learning will continue as ServiceNow expands the rollout. Starting with the Brand Center team, the company plans to involve additional marketing and creative specialists in training and refining Brand Intelligence before gradually expanding access across the organization as its brand guidelines and workflows are approved and ready.

The longer-term vision is a system where the brand team continues to define and refine the guidance, while employees can apply that expertise throughout their everyday work. For O’Rourke, that also means making change easier to adopt. “Brand evolution is going to be a constant for us,” she says. “So it’s also about getting people comfortable with change and making it easy and frictionless for them to adopt.”

Hear more from Thompson and Saunders at Adobe MAX 2026 in the “Protect Your Brand. Scale Your Creative Craft.” session (S6201).

Explore how Adobe Brand Intelligence brings brand guidance into the creative process.

https://business.adobe.com/fragments/resources/cards/thank-you-collections/brand-intelligence