ServiceNow deepens India bet as 45% of product engineering shifts to country

ServiceNow has significantly expanded its engineering and product development presence in India, with more than 45 per cent of its global product engineering work now being carried out from the country, according to a report by Moneycontrol.

India also accounts for over 20 per cent of ServiceNow’s global workforce, with nearly one in five employees among the enterprise software firm’s roughly 28,000-strong staff base located in the country. ServiceNow crossed $10 billion in annual revenue in the last financial year.

The expansion comes as ServiceNow sharpens its focus on AI-led workflows and agentic automation, with Indian enterprises increasingly adopting autonomous capabilities across IT and business operations.

ServiceNow chief technology officer Pat Casey told Moneycontrol that more than half of the company’s global engineering operations are now run out of India, adding that Hyderabad has emerged as the firm’s single largest engineering site worldwide. He stated that India has been built out as a full-featured engineering hub spanning application and platform engineering, artificial intelligence, databases and systems integration.

The importance of India to ServiceNow’s global strategy was also highlighted last week by vice-chairman Nick Tzitzon, who said Indian enterprises rank among the company’s most innovative customers globally and could become role models for how enterprise AI adoption evolves. Speaking to Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum 2026 in Davos, Tzitzon pointed to the company’s international development centre in Hyderabad as a key pillar of its global operations.

ServiceNow said it expects continued momentum in India, driven by the country’s dual role as a major engineering base and a fast-growing market. The company plans to expand teams in Hyderabad this year, with a focus on hiring software engineers with AI expertise, machine learning specialists, research scientists and forward-deployed engineers.

AI proficiency is increasingly being treated as a baseline requirement in engineering hiring, with the company indicating that the use of AI coding assistants is now considered a standard part of modern software development practice.

ServiceNow also said Indian enterprises are moving beyond basic AI assistants and are increasingly adopting agentic AI models that can execute complete tasks autonomously. The company stated that across recent projects with major Indian customers in sectors such as technology services, banking and financial services, manufacturing and global capability centres, most new automation initiatives now include agentic elements from the outset.

This marks a shift from AI being used primarily to save incremental amounts of human time to systems taking on end-to-end tasks independently.

Beyond product engineering, Casey said ServiceNow views India as a strategic market where it intends to expand its customer base and increase go-to-market investments, adding that the company aims not only to operate engineering centres in the country but also to participate more deeply in the local economy.