In a Knowledge24 interview, Tony Uphoff sits down with Asish Ramchandran, global chief commercial officer, ServiceNow Alliance for Deloitte, to talk about the strategic partnership between Deloitte and ServiceNow and the impact of generative AI on workflow automation and workforce dynamics.
Highlights
3 Focus Areas (01:59)
Three key points come to mind for Ramchandran around the Knowledge24 event. The first concerns the customer question, “What will GenAI do for us?” Deloitte gives customers tangible examples of processes that might have previously take 10 weeks, now being done in eight weeks.
The second point is that the event is a way to educate Deloitte’s team members on all the things that ServiceNow is doing. Every year there are two releases and in between there are other changes to the ServiceNow app store.
The third point is to ensure customers understand how technology and advances will translate to them and their systems. If Ramchandran is talking to a healthcare life sciences client, the conversation might be framed in terms of how its research and development (R&D) efforts can become more efficient so that patients can get drug outcomes more quickly.
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Impact of GenAI on the Workforce (03:42)
As baby boomers age out, the workforce coming online is smaller than the workforce that is retiring or realigning. It’s about a gap of 20 million, and it’s not that far away. It’s as close as 2035, coming soon.
The opportunity with GenAI is to say, “How do we get ahead of it so that activities that we are not enjoying can be enabled and hastened through its capabilities while things that are purposeful we still do?”
Human Element of AI (06:07)
One can do things better and cheaper, but will it be done so that it has the greatest impact on the customers, employees, and consumers experiencing it? It comes down to how human the interaction model is. If one thinks about it, when a curated experience is received, it’s that last-minute human touch that brings it to life. There might be efficiency elsewhere, but for effectiveness, the human touch is needed
Vertical Market Focus, Industry Transformation (09:14)
Healthcare/life sciences industries are typically higher-margin industries. They are not as worried about pennies on the dollar on a given product. They want the experience. But that is not the reality if you are in a hardcore consumer retail segment, where you’re making three margin points and 1/10 of a margin point makes or breaks your quarter. Therefore, these use cases are very different.
Software-defined vehicles are coming in. All of a sudden car mechanics are being asked to start understanding the nuances of what’s effectively a laptop that moves, with a lot of power and a lot of weight. That’s where the real power of these industry verticalizations comes in, because you have people who worry about how to make it seamless so that when someone gets out of his car and walks into his house, the entire communication spectrum follows him inside.
Partner Ecosystem Renaissance (11:40)
Why is the industry experience what is “perhaps a renaissance in the partner ecosystem?” Ramchandran sees multiple factors. One, it’s a decided change in strategy for ServiceNow. The partners ecosystem has become a priority. The second aspect is GenAI’s maturity. As the tech becomes more mature and used in large transformations, it’s no longer focused on bespoke pilot experiments. It’s going from IT to operational technology (OT), a term Bill McDermott used in his presentation.
Generative AI: Force Multiplier (13:46)
GenAI changes everything. It’s a “truth is stranger than fiction” moment. We’re in the midst of that cycle, where you can’t really predict what it’s going to look like. But you know it’s not the same anymore. It’s ubiquitous and everywhere, and wherever there’s change, there’s opportunity.
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