At The Salvation Army Australia, frontline personnel were losing time simply working out which of dozens of systems held what they needed. Goldie is an AI employee-support tool that gives them a natural-language interface through Microsoft Teams.
Built on ServiceNow’s EmployeeWorks platform and implemented by 89 Solutions, Goldie had to simplify access without bypassing the organisation’s existing controls. Milad Kruze, Chief Information Officer at The Salvation Army Australia, explains how the organisation addressed that constraint and how Goldie is changing its employee services and wider technology priorities.
What operational challenges led The Salvation Army to deploy Goldie?
The Salvation Army’s frontline teams operate in challenging environments across Australia, supporting people experiencing homelessness, family violence, addiction, financial hardship, and other complex life circumstances. We recognised that our people were spending too much time navigating systems, searching for information, and completing administrative tasks rather than being fully present with the people they serve.
Our goal was to reduce that mental and administrative burden by giving employees a simple, conversational way to access information, support, and services. Goldie became a single access point within Microsoft Teams, allowing personnel to find policies, access knowledge, complete requests, and obtain support without needing to know which system held the answer. The intention was simple: spend less time navigating technology and more time on mission and people.
More than 10,000 personnel have access to Goldie. It has facilitated tens of thousands of conversations, resolved approximately 90% of queries without escalation to a support ticket, and saved frontline teams thousands of hours.
What factors led you to choose ServiceNow and 89 Solutions for this initiative?
Our focus was never simply to deploy AI. We wanted to create an employee tool that people could trust, that was appropriately governed, that could be scaled, and that fitted into the way they already worked. ServiceNow provided the underlying platform and workflow environment, allowing us to connect Goldie with existing services and processes rather than create another standalone tool.
89 Solutions had experience implementing systems of this kind and worked closely with our frontline taskforce, technology teams, and business stakeholders to turn operational needs into practical uses. Involving these groups was important because we wanted Goldie to address employees’ actual challenges, not merely demonstrate technology features.
This approach also met our requirements for using approved knowledge sources, retaining existing access permissions, and establishing clear guardrails. These controls were central to ensuring that employees could trust Goldie and use it responsibly.
What were the biggest challenges integrating Goldie into existing systems and workflows?
The technology itself was not the only challenge. Goldie had to connect with an established set of systems and processes across a large and diverse organisation while meeting its security requirements and governance obligations.
A major focus was creating secure integrations with enterprise platforms that could be scaled while retaining existing permissions and access controls. This required us to define API requirements, establish consistent integration patterns, make architectural decisions, implement security controls, and assign responsibility for ongoing support.
We also had to address practical constraints, including sandbox availability, API access for new use cases, a process for adding approved external content, resource capacity, and responsibility for the product throughout its lifecycle. Within the organisation, we involved frontline teams, provided support during the change, and established clear AI guardrails so employees would regard Goldie as a trusted source of assistance rather than simply another system to navigate.
How has deploying AI changed the way your technology team approaches employee-facing digital services?
Goldie has shifted our approach from delivering separate technology systems to designing employee services that work together. Instead of expecting personnel to know which portal, application, or process to use, we are increasingly designing services around natural-language interactions and the outcome each person wants to achieve.
The experience showed that employees do not necessarily care which platform contains the answer. They want a simple way to complete a task that they can trust. We are therefore focusing on making tasks easier, simplifying the steps involved, and providing a single point of access to organisational services.
It has also strengthened our approach to governance. We are developing AI principles, acceptable-use expectations, product guardrails, and security and risk processes as adoption grows so that the use of AI can expand without compromising trust, privacy, security, or compliance.
What are The Salvation Army’s technology priorities over the next few years beyond this deployment?
Goldie is not the destination but part of a broader program of technology change. Our priorities include simplifying our technology environment, strengthening the foundations for data and integration, expanding workflow automation, and creating digital services that work together across mission and support functions.
AI will continue to play an important role, supported by formal governance, risk classification, intake and assessment processes, an AI register, reliable underlying data, and integration capabilities that can be scaled. We also need clear ownership and long-term product management for the services and integration layers that support these functions.
Ultimately, our objective is to connect our technology and use intelligent tools to support our mission, reduce administrative work, improve decision-making, and allow our people to spend more time helping Australians in need.
