How Servicenow changes the working environment

A few years ago, Servicenow called its core product ERP the IT department. What do you think of this title?

Dave Wright: To some extent, it still applies. It was originally a customer, and initially called our platform “IT’s ERP”. I think it is General Electric. Because the description is appropriate, we used it ourselves for a while. However, at the same time, the term covers only part of our scope. The services we provide through enterprise service management are not limited to IT, but also aim to provide services to customer service, finance or personnel departments. If you want to optimize the process, you must ultimately start from the perspective of the entire company.

Which business areas are you going to develop next?

We also hope to penetrate into the vertical market in the future. I am considering branch specific solutions for banks, telecommunications companies or industrial companies. We hope to develop such offers with our partners. We will also develop new services based on artificial intelligence. The exciting thing in this area is: the longer the system runs, the more data it collects. In turn, this allows us to better train machine learning algorithms. Our goal is to integrate more intelligent systems such as virtual agents into daily life.

Where do you currently see the biggest challenge of using artificial intelligence?

The main difficulty lies in the way we deal with artificial intelligence and how we can further develop artificial intelligence. It starts with data. Anyone who trains a model based on deformed data sets is doomed to fail. Therefore, you need balanced data materials, sufficient data sources, and maintenance of data cleaning. Then it’s about our mentality. There are still fears caused by culture, which slows down our pace of development. This is why we must prove today that the opportunities provided by artificial intelligence outweigh the risks. On the one hand, smart technology can free us from unpleasant activities. On the other hand, artificial intelligence can help us do better things we like to do. The same is true for automation.

What do you say to critics who warn about unemployment?

The idea that automation leads to unemployment is ancient. The point is that as technology advances, the world of work is changing. Of course, jobs will disappear, but new, more demanding tasks continue to appear. I saw it when I was a teenager.

In what way?

My first job was to install the tape in the tape drive. No one has done this. When my boss used a robot to complete this task, I got up to become a mainframe operator. They later used the software for mainframe automation, so this work was also abandoned. But my boss gave me further training opportunities, so I became a software developer. The irony is that if my first two tasks were not automated, I would not be here today. I will never have time to learn new skills and develop myself further. Of course, promotion is my luck. But I firmly believe that most companies today have realized the huge potential of new technologies.

This dialogue took place on the sidelines of Oerlikon’s future work tour in Zurich in 2019. In the event, Servicenow showcased the new features that users of the service management platform can expect. Read more here.