How Palo Alto Networks Saves 351K Hours with Moveworks AI

Palo Alto Networks operates at a scale and pace that few companies match. With nearly 15,000 employees spread across 150+ countries and a cybersecurity product line that never sleeps, the internal support infrastructure has to keep up. As the company grew and shifted to a hybrid work model under its FLEXWORK program, demand for IT, HR, payroll, and policy support rose sharply—while the expectation of adding proportional headcount to handle it did not.

Before deploying AI, support was fragmented. Employees had to figure out which channel to use, which team to contact, and which tool held the information they needed—all before getting an answer. With teams operating across time zones, that fragmentation meant delays accumulated fastest for employees who needed help outside business hours or in regions far from central IT and HR hubs. Support tickets and policy questions that should have resolved in minutes were taking hours. The help desk was caught between a growing volume of repetitive requests and the expectation that it focus on higher-value transformation work.

In April 2020, Palo Alto Networks deployed Moveworks—known internally as Sheldon—as an omnichannel AI Assistant integrated with Slack, email, and ServiceNow. Sheldon understands natural language queries, applies contextual awareness of the employee’s role, location, and permissions, and resolves issues autonomously across IT, HR, payroll, and policy. The deployment was fast: according to Steve Januario, VP of Digital Employee Experience, the team was seeing impact within a month of go-live. Within months, Sheldon had also helped surface and expand the internal knowledge base from 10 articles to more than 250, filling gaps that had previously been invisible.

The numbers from the deployment reflect genuine operational scale. Moveworks handles more than 145,000 interactions and resolves 4,000 issues per month across IT and HR, with more than 90% of employees having used the assistant at least once. Over the deployment period, the cumulative productivity return has reached 351,000 employee hours saved. The IT Slack help channel alone sees 1,000 issues resolved monthly through direct AI intervention—a figure that represents thousands of person-hours that no longer flow through human agents.

For Palo Alto Networks, the shift enabled by Moveworks is less about cost reduction than about redirection. The IT and HR teams that previously spent significant time resetting passwords, provisioning software, and answering benefits questions now focus on the transformation work that requires human judgment. Nicole Tate-Pappas, Senior Director of Digital Experience Management, described it as up-leveling the workforce rather than replacing it. The company continues expanding Moveworks across its flexible work program, treating the AI Assistant as foundational infrastructure for a distributed, high-velocity organization.