This article was inspired by the CRN article ServiceNow AI Co-Investment Fund Part of Partner Program Changes by Wade Tyler Millward 9/22/2025 and discusses why partner:partner collaboration is becoming an essential component of a balanced resource strategy in the ServiceNow partner ecosystem.
ServiceNow is quietly signaling a big shift in how partners are expected to deliver.
I was recently brushing up on the evolving @ServiceNowPartners Consulting & Implementation (C&I) program and came across a CRN article from last fall based on interviews with several ServiceNow partner leaders. I’ll link to it in the comments, but a few points stood out and some are highly relevant to what we’re building at Billfly.
First: subcontracting is becoming mainstream.
According to the article, ~70% of ServiceNow Expert Services work in the Americas is subcontracted through partners. ServiceNow itself is deeply reliant on the partner ecosystem to deliver.
Second: industry & domain expertise matters more than ever.
In the early IT-centric days of ServiceNow, vertical experience wasn’t always critical. That’s no longer the case. A CRM/TSM implementation for a large telecom looks very different from one in Financial Services or Retail. When partner teams lack that domain expertise, projects struggle and everyone (including ServiceNow) feels it.
Third: specialization is rising… but expectations haven’t shrunk.
We’re seeing more C&I boutiques that are exceptional in very specific areas of the platform or focused on narrow use cases or verticals. That’s healthy for a growing platform, but ServiceNow still expects customers to deploy as much of what they own as possible.
Why? Because shelfware is expensive.
Per the article, 28% of ACV ($3.5B in product) is sitting undeployed 180+ days post-purchase.
That puts pressure on partners to think beyond a single, limited-scope win and align to a longer-term account strategy, even when the initial project fits squarely within their niche.
So how do partners deliver the required depth and breadth, while also staying lean?
ServiceNow’s answer is increasingly clear: partner-to-partner collaboration
One concrete signal: effective 4Q 2025, partners can earn subcontracting credit for work delivered on projects led by another partner (with defined criteria, including minimum hours and shared CSAT accountability).
Historically, this kind of collaboration has been hard. Trust issues, discovery challenges, and no efficient way to find the right partner with the right skills at the right time.
That gap is exactly why we built Billfly: a platform where ServiceNow partners and freelancers can post short-term project needs, share available bench, and collaborate without adding long-term overhead. There is zero cost to join/subscribe!
Here is the original CRN article: https://www.crn.com/news/ai/2025/servicenow-100-000-ai-co-investment-fund-part-of-partner-program-changes