From Inbox Chaos To Journey Control: Inside Vantage Towers’ ServiceNow AI Shift

A CIO’s case study in moving from reactive case handling to proactive lifecycle management

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Vantage Towers ServiceNow
AI & Automation in CXCase Study​

Published: May 18, 2026

Rob Wilkinson

Vantage Towers has moved its landlord relationship management onto the ServiceNow AI Platform as part of an ‘Agentic AI First’ strategy.

Building a system that can sense inbound signals across channels, understand context, prioritize work, and drive consistent outcomes across markets.

The goal is simple to state and hard to deliver: make landlord service feel like a modern customer journey, even though Vantage Towers pays the landlord, not the other way around.

The shift matters because Vantage Towers operates at a scale where experience quality directly protects investment. The company manages 88,000 locations and works with roughly 55,000 landlords. When those relationships break down, the commercial downside is not theoretical. It can mean losing a site, losing sunk build costs, and triggering disruption for mobile network operators and local communities.

The Starting Point: A Fragmented Experience With No Single View

Before the change, the landlord service experience looked like many static maps do in enterprise environments. Contacts came in through multiple channels and ended up in separate places. That made it difficult to see the full picture and manage service fairly.

As Tobias Steinig, CIO at Vantage Towers, explained, when requests are scattered across individuals and channels, teams lose the ability to prioritize intelligently.

“If you do not have one central bucket where you have all of the things flowing in, how would you prioritize.”

The practical impact is not just operational friction. It is inconsistency. One team might respond quickly because they happen to have capacity. Another might miss context entirely. And at Vantage Towers scale, inconsistency becomes risk.

Steinig’s framing of the problem starts with the economics of tower infrastructure.

Vantage Towers’ model depends on matching the right location with the right mobile network operator and the right landlord agreement. Once contracts are signed, the company invests heavily to build and operate the infrastructure.

That makes landlord sentiment a business control point, not a soft metric.

Steinig emphasized: “There’s nothing worse in our business than if the landlord, after two three years, is fed up with you because you didn’t do a job properly, and then ask you to leave.”

He tied that directly to financial and operational fallout. “That means all the investment is gone,” Steinig noted, alongside disruption to operators and communities. From that perspective, landlord experience behaves like a retention journey. It is just inverted commercially.

Choosing ServiceNow Over A ‘Patchwork Enterprise’ Approach

Vantage Towers evaluated options that might typically sit in a customer service stack. But Steinig said the company needed a provider willing to co-create, because landlord management is not a standard customer scenario.

ServiceNow stood out for two reasons.

First, the platform could consume data from existing systems without forcing wholesale migration. Vantage Towers keeps asset data in other platforms and payments in SAP, while running the landlord domain on ServiceNow.

Second, ServiceNow was willing to help tailor customer service to a stakeholder that is not a customer in the traditional sense. Steinig framed it as a practical shift:

“We came to conclusion that we want to treat that stakeholder like a customer, but there’s a big difference between a landlord and a customer. Customer usually pays you, while we have to pay the landlord.”

Steinig described the outcome as a co-creation model rather than a standard vendor deployment. For ServiceNow, he suggested the opportunity was also about proving the platform in a new scenario.

From Static Handling To Dynamic Journeys With Agentic AI

In the legacy model, a landlord’s request could land with a person who only saw one slice of the overall workload. That limits context, prioritization, and consistency.

In a dynamic journey model, inbound signals flow into a single layer that can interpret urgency, route work, and keep the landlord informed.

Steinig gave a clear example of context-based prioritization. A landlord changing bank account details is not always urgent. But timing changes everything. If it is late in the month, it becomes a high-risk issue because payments could go to the wrong account. Meanwhile, a water leakage issue at a site is immediately more urgent.

The point is that ‘priority’ is not a fixed label. It is contextual. And at Vantage Towers scale, context has to be understood and actioned consistently. That is where AI features come in.

Vantage Towers’ program uses ServiceNow’s CSM platform and deploys:

Now Assist for real-time case sumarization
AI-driven document intelligence to process around 50,000 legacy contracts
An AI Voice Agent to automate landlord inbound calls

The initiative is already live in production and is designed to reduce manual workload and cost. But Steinig positioned the aim as experience outcomes rather than headcount cuts.

What Changed For Employees And Governance

Introducing agentic workflows changes how work feels for service teams. Some tasks disappear. Others shift toward exception handling, relationship management, and higher judgment decisions.

Steinig was direct that the initiative is not about reducing headcount. It is about raising the landlord experience to the level required to protect relationships and investment.

He also acknowledged the human side of AI adoption and the need for change management, along with guardrails and governance. The core challenge is confidence. Teams need to trust what the system is doing and understand when a human should step in.

Why This Case Study Matters For CX Teams

Many CX organisations still operate with static maps. They document ‘the journey’ then run operations through disconnected tools. The result is often a gap between the ideal journey and the lived experience.

Vantage Towers is showing what it looks like to treat journeys as operational systems. The company is consolidating channels, building real-time visibility, applying context, and using AI to keep experiences consistent across scale.

It is also a reminder that the customer is not always the buyer. Sometimes, the stakeholder you pay is the stakeholder who can create the biggest risk if the experience breaks.

In the next phase of CX, journey management will look less like a diagram and more like a control tower. AI will help enterprises sense what is happening across channels, understand intent, and trigger the right actions at the right moment.

Vantage Towers is pushing in that direction by turning landlord relationship management into a living system. The companies that win the next era of CX will be the ones that stop mapping journeys and start running them.

If your organisation still relies on static maps and fragmented workflows, the question you need to be asking now is whether you can operate a customer journey dynamically and at scale, before the experience becomes a business risk.


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Agentic AIAgentic AI in Customer Service​Agentic AI SoftwareAI AgentAI AgentsAutomationAutonomous AgentsCRMSPOTLIGHT: From Static Maps to Dynamic Customer Journeys​
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