One of the more relatable sessions at ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 came from Pilot Company, the massive travel center operator serving more than 1.2 million guests daily across nearly 900 locations throughout North America.
On the surface, the session focused on HR Service Delivery (HRSD) transformation inside a large, distributed workforce environment. But underneath the operational metrics and platform discussions was more universal: the realization that many HR teams are still attempting to scale modern employee experiences on top of communication systems that were never designed to function as operational platforms.
That distinction became the foundation of the entire conversation.
Pilot operates at an enormous scale. The company supports more than 30,000 employees across retail, travel center, logistics, and operational environments spread across dozens of states and provinces. Like many large organizations, its HR operations evolved through a combination of email inboxes, phone numbers, fax lines, ticketing systems, SOPs, and disconnected support channels.
One slide summarized the “before” environment in a way that likely felt familiar to a large percentage of the room:
(The humor landed well. Likely because the operational pattern is more common than companies realize.)
At CoreX, we see this frequently in organizations whose HR support structures grew organically over time. Different business units create their own intake channels. Shared inboxes become operational systems by accident. Routing processes become dependent on tribal knowledge. Escalation paths live inside individual teams instead of structured workflows.
Over time, employees stop knowing where to go for help, while HR teams lose visibility into workload, ownership, service performance, and employee experience.
The issue is rarely that HR teams are underperforming. In many cases, they are working extraordinarily hard inside systems that were never built to support scalable service delivery.
One perspective contrasted what the presenters described as “two HR realities.”The first relied heavily on email as the operational center of HR support. The problems attached to that model were immediate and recognizable: inconsistent employee experiences, manual routing, poor transparency, limited reporting, and compliance concerns surrounding sensitive HR information.
The second approach reframed HRSD as an operational product rather than a collection of inboxes. In that environment, ownership becomes clearer. SLAs become measurable. Employees interact through structured intake experiences and guided workflows. Reporting becomes possible. Knowledge content becomes reusable. Access controls and audit histories become manageable.
That shift in thinking matters because HR transformation on ServiceNow is often misunderstood as a technology modernization effort when, in reality, it is usually an operational maturity initiative. The platform itself is important, but the larger opportunity comes from redesigning how employees interact with HR services altogether.
The session repeatedly reinforced this idea through a phrase that deserves attention: “One front door.”
That concept continues surfacing across HRSD transformation conversations happening right now. Employees do not want to navigate organizational charts to figure out where support lives. They want a consistent, trusted experience that routes them toward resolution without forcing them to understand internal operational complexity.
Creating that experience requires governance, ownership models, service definitions, workflow discipline, knowledge management, and ongoing operational refinement.
One of the more practical sections of the session focused on what the presenters described as the future direction of HR Service Delivery transformation. The recommendations were refreshingly operational.
The discussion centered on designing around desired outcomes instead of specific features, identifying pain points according to who experiences them most acutely, prioritizing high-impact operational improvements first, and resisting the temptation to simply “give the current chaos a fresh coat of paint and a nicer lobby.”
That last line drew laughs, but it also captured something implementation teams encounter constantly.
Organizations often approach HR transformation hoping technology alone will standardize fragmented processes that were never operationally aligned to begin with. Simply migrating disconnected workflows into a modern platform rarely produces transformation by itself. The operational model underneath the technology still matters.
The session also emphasized several trends that feel increasingly important as HR organizations modernize:
Interestingly, the presenters were equally clear about what organizations should avoid. Overengineering was repeatedly called out as a risk. The guidance was straightforward: keep workflows simple, use employee-friendly language, and ensure automation preserves the human factor instead of eliminating it.
That perspective aligns closely with what many organizations are discovering as AI and automation become more deeply integrated into employee operations. Employees still want clarity, empathy, transparency, and confidence in the process surrounding their requests. Automation improves experiences only when it removes friction without removing trust.
Following transformation efforts, Pilot accomplished the following;
Reduced its email assets from 81 to 75 while consolidating systems and dramatically improving employee engagement with centralized HR services.
Reported more than 57,000 satisfaction surveys launched
Approximately 400 employee-facing knowledge articles
More than 100 operational enhancements
Generated a 61% year-over-year increase in case submissions through structured channels
Reported more than half of its employee population actively using the portal experience.
Perhaps most notably, the environment ultimately consolidated down to a single ticketing system and, according to one slide, “zero chaos.” That last metric may have been partly tongue-in-cheek, but the operational direction behind it wasn't.
The real value of HR Service Delivery transformation is in creating an operational framework where service ownership, employee experience, governance, visibility, and workflow orchestration all become manageable at enterprise scale.
And that is where ServiceNow continues to stand apart in many organizations pursuing HR modernization. The platform allows HR organizations to move beyond fragmented communication channels and toward structured, measurable, service-oriented operations capable of scaling consistently across the enterprise.
For organizations still operating through sprawling inbox structures and disconnected support channels, sessions like this one serve as an important reminder: HR transformation is rarely about replacing email. Just the ambiguity that comes with it.
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This session showed what's possible when HR communications and operations are optimized. Ready to see if your own setup is ready for now, and for what's next? Set up an HRSD Consultation and find out!