AI Leadership Insights: The Impact of AI Powered Platforms

Amanda Razani: Hello and welcome to our latest edition of Techstrong.ai Leadership Insights. I’m Amanda Razani and I’m excited to be here today with Terence Chesire. He is the vice president of customer industry workflows for ServiceNow. How are you doing?

Terence Chesire: Thank you so much. Really excited to be here, Amanda.

Amanda Razani: Can you share a little bit about ServiceNow and what are the services that you provide and where are you in that process?

Terence Chesire: Yes, so ServiceNow is a technology platform and we like to think of it as helping organizations and even the world work better. So we help drive processes for technology, drive processes for employees. But the area I sit in, we are very focused on driving work on behalf of customers. So you could think of us as fitting in the customer service area and we call it customer workflows. And because this area, anything to do with customers, any example I give you is inherently about a particular industry. We’ve extended what we think of customer workflows to be customer workflows and industry products.

Amanda Razani: Wonderful. Okay, so I believe that you have been sharing how AI-powered platforms are the way of the future and more business leaders are looking to those to solve their customer service issues. So can you go into detail about that and what are some ways in which that is helping?

Terence Chesire: Certainly. I think of AI being a turbocharge or an accelerant to what we’re doing extremely well already. So if you’re okay, I’ll take a step back and express how we view the world slightly differently. We entered the customer service realm with a fairly unique view that the systems that existed already were sufficient, but not everything that was required. Many of you who are listening to this have reached out to seek help from an organization and that’s what’s typically called customer engagement. You’re making a phone call, you’re texting them, any means of communication. But the reason you’re reaching out is to get work done. And that’s what we think of the end-to-end process, which is engagement and orchestrating the work on behalf of the customer.
And so when we did that, we saw tremendous benefits for our customers. For example, I’ll give some examples. Rogers, a leading telco in Canada saw a 41% reduction in daily case volumes. The state of South Dakota digitized their employee, sorry, not their employee, but their citizen experience with sd.gov, dramatically reducing the time it took for citizens to apply for services. And even another area that we’re expanding into, an area of order management, we think of it as getting work orchestrated and Kraft Heinz who I think all of us have their products in our homes, ketchup or whatever, saw that whenever that there needed to be a touch with an order, that we could orchestrate that process and the information we presented to the employee and it flowed right through. And the validation, at least for us, of this approach is that customers believe in the power of our platform and our ability to deliver these end-to-end experiences. And that’s how we were able to cross over a billion in ACV at the end of last year.
To your question around AI specifically, what we have done is applied AI to support those processes and fused them into our workflows in a couple of key ways. For the customer who’s seeking help, they can get a very easy conversational answer to what they’re looking for, “How do I apply for this benefit?” And it’s not just an answer. We can give a definitive answer to say, “This is exactly what you need to do and if you click here, you can directly get to applying for this benefit and access this benefit.” And on the flip side, for the team members on the other side who are receiving those requests, we have assistive technology where they’re trying to understand what has been going on with this case that I’ve received and we have an ability to summarize. It may have gone back and forth across different teams and they can get up to speed extremely quickly on everything they need to understand about and then what step to take next in the process. That’s the power we’re seeing to dramatically accelerate and power these workflows.

Amanda Razani: When business leaders are trying to implement these new platforms and technology, what are some of the first steps before they begin this process?

Terence Chesire: What we advise them to do is start first from the customer and map what that journey should look like ideally. We hold a process called a customer experience workshop. And if you keep the customer at the center of the process, what they do is invite different teams that support their customers, their citizens, their clients to map out their role in it. What starts to become fairly apparent is how disjointed those processes are and those handoffs across the team. And that for us is where it’s really critical, which is how might we serve these customers dramatically better? And you connect those dots across the organization, across teams, across processes. That is how the work on behalf of the customer flows. And you can see why we are fairly excited about the concept of workflow, which is getting work done on behalf of the customer.
And the end result is you see some of the results that I mentioned earlier, but then when you add AI, you get even better results. So for example, we are seeing customers reporting 56% positive sentiment both for employees and customers on the quality of the summarized results they get back. For agents, there’s a 54% helpfulness for the case summary in helping them understand what the context is. And 99% of employees get a summarized gen-AI definitive answer on what they should do next and dramatically improving productivity and satisfaction.

Amanda Razani: Wonderful. So from your experience in working with these businesses, we hear a lot about automation and wanting to automate and what are the main things that they are trying to automate? Can you give some examples of some of the top things that they hope to automate?

Terence Chesire: Yeah, certainly. For example, I alluded to Kraft Heinz at the beginning of this conversation, and what they found is while there may be an idealized process, anytime there may be an exception or a change that needs to be done to an order, people leave the systems, leave the screens and they go into spreadsheets, they go into email, there’s lots of unstructured communication. At the very end of it, there’s a frustrated customer who simply wanted their order corrected. And so for us, automation is connecting the systems, the technology and the people to orchestrate a single process in service. So very often we’re connecting into underlying systems of record. We’re also connecting into paper-based processes. We’ve got a great AI-powered technology that’ll automatically read any image and turn it into a digital artifact.
And then last of all, it’ll summarize and bring all the information together and then back to the last element about people without relying on humans to have tribal knowledge of oh, it’s this person or it’s that person and this department who I need to reach out to. The system automatically understands based on the context, the customer, the value of the order, the situation, who it should go to and supports them on what they need to do and automatically sends it to the next stop. And so all those are how we think of automations. And as I’ve said already, AI just accelerates those elements. We see people copying and pasting fields from one system to another. And it’s actually very unfulfilling because most people who join these organizations, especially in customer service, seek to help others and want to deliver good outcomes and good results, and ultimately a happier, more satisfied customer.

Amanda Razani: So it sounds like it essentially breaks down any of those siloed areas and makes a more streamlined process for sure.

Terence Chesire: And you took the words out of my mouth, right? You’ve described it much better. We break down silos so it’s not apparent to the end customer all the different disparate teams and processes that they need to navigate.

Amanda Razani: So looking toward the future, AI technology seems to be advancing very quickly and everybody’s trying to use it in the best way possible. As quickly as it’s advancing, what do you see in the future as far as the enterprise and how it’ll be harnessed moving forward?

Terence Chesire: I think it’s no longer the potential of generative AI. I think it’s about the impact to some of the things I’ve mentioned. But for me and my area where I particularly sit in, it’s not general purpose, it’s industry specific applications, workflows, and AI. This is a fast moving area. We’ve been on a fairly accelerated cadence of capabilities that we are releasing. We are just announcing Now Assist for telecommunication service management at partnership that we announced earlier this week with Nvidia to boost agent productivity and speed time to resolutions.
We also announced a financial services operations for banking, dispute management with Visa, which is driving AI-powered workflows to reduce the time that it takes for you, if you ever reach out to your credit card issuer, how quickly you can get your credit card dispute resolved. And we’re delivering capabilities in public sector digital services to accelerate and make it easier for constituents to access social services. And so we’ve been on a cadence of delivering every couple of months at this point, starting last summer, and they’ll continue through this year. So every couple of months you’ll probably hear an announcement from us, but that is the pace at which we are delivering both horizontal and vertical momentum to drive this core strategy of end-to-end, but seeing tangible impact out of AI.

Amanda Razani: Awesome. Well, congratulations on those recent announcements. Those sound like big and very impactful announcements. If there was one key takeaway that you could leave our audience with today, what would that be?

Terence Chesire: The key takeaway I would say is think about end-to-end resolution for your customers. And when you do, you probably will require a platform. And many, many others are realizing that the ServiceNow platform and specifically our customer workflows and industry products are here to help you deliver seamless, frictionless, end-to-end experiences for your customers and we’d love to help.

Amanda Razani: Wonderful. Well, thank you for coming on our show and sharing your insights today. It was informational and I look forward to speaking with you again soon.

Terence Chesire: Looking forward to it. I really enjoyed our time here, Amanda.

Amanda Razani: Thank you.