Erica Volini, senior vice president, global partnerships, ServiceNow, along with Dave Kanter, global leader, Accenture, ServiceNow Business Group, and Francisco Marin, co-founder and CEO, Cognitive Talent Solutions connected with Acceleration Economy’s Bob Evans to discuss how AI changed the cocreation game for the Acceleration Economy AI Ecosystem Course.
Highlights
01:24 — Volini shares how ServiceNow builds Large Language Models (LLMs) into its workflows so, for customers, “the opportunity is to not just be able to embed GenAI but do it in the context of the specific workflows they’re using to drive significant transformation.”
02:32 — The company takes a methodical approach to GenAI and has created adaptable learning journeys for its partners to ensure they understand the Now Assist capabilities. It provides courses for a better understanding of ServiceNow GenAI functionality. “It’s not just about deploying GenAI; it’s about really thinking through the use cases where GenAI can have a significant impact on employee productivity,” Volini says.
06:28 — Companies must be able to know, grow, and scale when it comes to generative AI. Partners have the comprehensive capabilities to both understand how to implement the functionality and contextualize it within what the business needs.
07:43 — Kanter shares insights on the early adopters of Accenture AI Lighthouse. He mentions a recent survey they completed showing that 74% of the company’s clients plan to increase their GenAI-related spend in 2024. Early adopter customers prefer to consume GenAI capabilities directly into the platforms they already own.
14:25 — Cognitive Talent Solutions focuses on organizational network analysis (ONA). here are two core features that Cognitive Talent Solutions will deploy with ServiceNow. The first will involve a chat interface, enabling users to ask questions about specific areas of ONA analysis. Secondly, the AI is able to run and execute code based on the user’s prompt.
20:32 — Volini says the ability to use Now Assist in Virtual Agent and have a more conversational chat experience is a core use case. It can be extended across anything in the enterprise where you want to have that better experience. This is where the productivity savings start coming into play.
21:36 — Flow generation is the ability to take plain text and convert it into low-code workflows without development need. What ServiceNow is providing accelerates low-code/no-code development through flow generation.
22:22 — There’s Now Assist for Field Service Management. ServiceNow wants technicians focused on getting into the field, addressing the issues they need to address, not worrying about how to summarize information and how to get insights from that information. GenAI provides the ability to do all of that.
25:06 — Volini wants ServiceNow to build a platform where the ecosystem can take its innovation, take its thought leadership, and build on ServiceNow’s platform, and develop tools that are fundamentally going to accelerate digital transformations. GenAI only adds on to that.
27:42 — Accenture and ServiceNow are collaborating to bring GenAI solutions to help telco network engineers do their work with greater speed and minimize performance issues. They use GenAI to help as they design new networks; it can monitor networks and auto-generate tickets.
29:31 —There are two other industries that can benefit from these offerings: retail and the consumer products industries. Clients in these industries are incredibly excited about the ability to take global business services and customer service to new levels of productivity. ServiceNow wants to take the time that agents are spending resolving basic issues that are recurring and flip it. So they’re spending more time on engagement on the complex issues. The way it does that is by using ServiceNow GenAI to create issue summaries.
32:54 — Kanter says Accenture envisions a future with “invisible” customer service by leveraging GenAI to deliver a productivity boost in a contact center and then advancing to hyper personalized care. Accenture is working with ServiceNow to realize this potential.
35:57 — Marin says that especially in large companies, GenAI can help users understand people analytics at scale, in a more intuitive way, supported by storytelling. For example, it could automate mentor-mentee connections for new hires, which previously would have required lots of manual work and intervention.
39:00 — In the era of GenAI, “innovation is here, and there’s no limit to it,” Volini says. The focus shifts away from what the technology can do to a focus on what organizations want to achieve. That fundamentally changes the role that partners play with customers. “I think we’ll find that our customers and our partners are going to push our platform well beyond where we could have pushed it alone.”
