Knowledge 2024 keynote recap: The AI platform for business transformation
“Every workflow in every company in every corner of the company will be reinvented with generative AI,” announced Bill McDermott, chairman and CEO of ServiceNow, during his opening keynote at Knowledge 2024. “This is not a moment for incremental thinking. This is a moment for exponential thinking.”
McDermott reminded the approximately 20,000 attendees that only five years ago, every company had a digital transformation mandate to correct the chaos of too many systems, broken systems, and “soul-crushing work.”
Offering a single system of action with AI built in to automate every workflow in any business in all the industries that exist, the Now Platform can reduce the chaos to the lowest common denominator of one.
“ServiceNow is the AI platform for business transformation,” McDermott declared. “It’s one pane of glass, one experience layer, and one automation layer for any company. This one system of action can put AI in every corner of a business.”
Making work frictionless and fun
ServiceNow Chief People Officer Jacqui Canney took the stage and introduced Jennifer Remling, chief human resources officer at Warner Bros. Discovery. When Warner Bros. and Discovery merged in 2022, it brought together CNN, Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO, TNT, Eurosport, HGTV, Max, and many more brands.
Warner Bros. Discovery wanted to create an employee experience that empowered its storytellers to tell their stories in the best way possible. It also wanted to cultivate a frictionless experience and culture for its people that would allow them to produce their best work and get things done in a way that allowed them to have fun.
To stitch together an effective tapestry for employees, the company implemented a chatbot called Ask Sheldon that enables employees to quickly find answers to their questions across HR, IT, and finance. "The partnership between HR, IT, and finance is critical,” Remling said.
Exceeding customer expectations
Hena Jalil, chief innovation officer at BT Group, the world’s oldest telecom company, joined John Ball, senior vice president of customer and industry workflows at ServiceNow, to describe BT’s business transformation journey.
BT had 125 service platforms, 865 monitoring systems, and 76 different processes, making for a very siloed customer experience. The company consolidated all its service platforms onto the ServiceNow platform and has seen significant improvement in its Net Promoter Score as a result. "Customers tell us we’re making a massive difference,” Jalil said.
Increasing procurement efficiency
Josh Kahn, general manager of creator, finance, and supply chain workflows at ServiceNow, took the stage next, accompanied by Marc Jones, global head of digital products at financial services firm HSBC.
HSBC wanted to improve business processes for its 230,000 employees. So, the bank consolidated 50 fragmented systems down to 15 using the ServiceNow platform. “Small efficiencies can have huge impact in the long run,” Jones said, especially for an organization that raises 300,000 purchase orders each year.
Putting AI to work for people
Jon Sigler, senior vice president of platform and AI at ServiceNow, and Joe Davis, senior vice president of platform engineering and AI at ServiceNow, walked attendees through the architecture of the Now Platform. They explained how each layer—experience, workflow, intelligence, and data—is purpose-built for business transformation.
The experience layer is tailored to an individual, not a department. The workflow layer connects and orchestrates different systems. AI is built into the intelligence layer, allowing exposure of that AI and service to every product in every corner of the business so that those systems can work together.
In 2023, ServiceNow created 18.5 million knowledge base articles, each of which took about 30 minutes of an employee’s time to make. With Now Assist, we were able to reduce article creation time to a single click and a few seconds.
“AI and Now Assist help people accomplish things faster, be more productive, and have a great experience—it's all part of putting AI to work for people,” Sigler explained.
“We’re on the cusp of something really, really big.” McDermott concluded. “We are here to make you a winner and to make your companies even greater than they already are.”
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