Welcome to The Innovation Today podcast where we speak with today's technology leaders about how they're innovating to stay ahead of changing industry Dynamics and reaching new levels of productivity and automation brought to you by service now your partner in digital transformation all right everyone thank you for joining us today for another episode of The Innovation Today podcast I'm your host Spencer biller Innovation officer at service now and today we're super excited to welcome jinu Koshi here in person live from Vegas the vice president Global head of domain Consulting Communications media and technology and emphasis welcome Janelle hello Spencer great to talk to you great to be with you since last time we've talked you've gained a new role can you tell us a little bit about this new role sure I lead infosis industry Consulting unit for the communications media and Hightech this is telecoms Media and Hightech TMT as you call it yeah from a Glo on a global basis so what happens is I therefore interact with cios CTO cdos and chief product officers of uh Telos media companies also semiconductor companies so get a ringside view of uh the industry of all what's happening globally to join customers so uh it's a privilege role that I play uh across the globe and it's fascinating to to examine what's happening the industry I bet that's a lot to Encompass it's a lot to take together well on coming from the the CX side and this Telco lens can you give us a little bit or share a little bit of the evolution of Telco and some of the adjustments or impacts that you're seeing on improved in customer service in this space sure uh Telos have evolved significantly with some of them even having a 100 plus here history yeah now whether you're a large medium or a small C customer the digital natives like the Amazon and the Ubers and the apples and Netflix's of the world have redefine customer experience because it's the same customers for dealing with whether you're a telecom company or whether you're buying off of Amazon or Netflix now so therefore this has redefined customer experience and customers are using the digital channels that these digital natives have exposed and therefore the expectations have gone up significantly sure and this digital service therefore now leads to customer acquisition customer retention and all of that experience that determines the stickiness of our customers so now when it is let me split this into two uh really B2B for example for B2B customers this is about agents who are swivel sharing between let's say sometimes hundreds of applications and then having to respond to customer queries and uh it's uh not an easy experience for the customer who's receiving the the the uh output really of that customer agent that you've got to really uh swivel chair between all of this applications to provide this and you know see the customers are asking where's my order when do I get my order and it's interesting when I uh speak to the heads of operations the CEOs of customers they tell us the problems are that I have too many systems to manage all of this estate the it estate and business is pounding on me and customers are pounding on me asking the question you know can I give the single source of truth of uh where is my order stuck why is it stuck and the whole experience that rallies around that as an example yeah so we need to really move from a this complexity into a very simple instead of a reactive to a proactive to a predictive sort of a customer experience and that's the evolution that we are seeing especially and not only that this needs to span it networks and business it's if you really slice the Telo and look at you know the different segments there the it and network organization the business organization the operations of all of this needs to come together into a seamless unified experience to really provide the customer experience that we're talking about you know so I think in terms of examples you know I would think about something like a service Bridge which I keep you know hearing that service now offers that customers very excited about now here's an example so picture an Enterprise customer either a bank or a or a retail Enterprise who's a customer of the Telco that we are serving and what happens is that let's say there is a ticketing system inside that customer organization the ticket moves up the chain and then goes to the agent the agent needs to connect to let's say the Telco to hand over that and then all of this friction that is generated in this handoff is really what service bridge is after so how if we could unify these experience in a seamless manner frictionlessly let's say the call gets generated you know the ticket gets generated inside the customer domain and then movees seamlessly to the Telco domain and then all of this through service Bridge that's the kind of impact that uh you know avoids the svil chair that uh we talked about earlier so yeah lots going on in terms of possibility and uh the Legacy situation that's so huge too because I would imagine this is where the swivel chairing comes in today of those two systems trying to communicate but having to maybe manually enter in data or manually pass off data between the two businesses to then get the properly updated data in each of the systems which in turn could probably create a little incon fluence or in in congruence between the two instances indeed indeed service Bridge adapting to making that a very seamless matter where I can just kind of push and pull based on the information that I need with the proper role-based Access Control to be able to ensure that only the data that needs to be pushed around is indeed indeed so the sensitivity and security I would imagine is still top of Mind in this indeed and if I were to just add just not two systems we're talking about sometimes 10 to 20 to 30 systems depending on the size of the Telco when somebody needs to go through all of that to even respond to that ticket and the ability then to just you know condense that to just perhaps two systems or even one system if both parties are using service now which 80% of the Enterprises on the itsm side seem to use and therefore frictionlessly to be able to hand off to the Telo how wonderful an experience that is I love it I love it can can you paint us a picture for maybe some examples or or just some of your expertise and where you've seen efficiency gains in clients that have done this currently or in the process of doing it oh absolutely and I I cite that example Spencer because of the fact that this is perhaps I see as the single most you know driver for adoption also in this whole transformation and simplification process in fact I know of a major t who you know stopped their current effort then pivoted on to adopting something like this and this being the sort of single most driver for enterprise-wide service now adoption wow and so we're talking of another example of a a European Telco where we've delivered service Bridge empasis delivered that to this customer using service now tool chain the ability to roll out to the Enterprise customers of this Telco we rolled that out in flat four months and then started now onboarding customers onto this uh onto this effort and now uh customers are enjoying the benefits of this kind of a migration wait a four-month rollout for a service Bridge connection that seems pretty expedited that's pretty quick that's quick time to Value how how did you paint the success or how did you measure along that time to help the companies evangelize that this this makes sense to connect these two instances what are some key contributors to ensuring that this messaging gets filtered into each of the organizations that make them know that this technology is helpful for agility in their organization in fact there is there was Prior work done in this regard as well and that drove some of this adoption as well Spencer but I would think that the key experience of the Enterprise customer here of what I said the frictionless Handover into this into the support organization is essentially what clinched the deal if you will that sort of drove the the adoption of the technology there was a question of implementing it and making sure it becomes a project success and customers get onboarded and so we had customer number one and then we had customer number two and then slowly this is becoming a a poster child for Success yeah because you proved it out initially with that quick time to Value exactly and of course everybody else sees that that now shining star and wants to jump on board to be a part of it exactly yeah exactly that's amazing well like we said we're at knowledge and as you can imagine as you've seen in some of the Keynotes and maybe even some of the guests out here that are listening on streaming the event generative AI it's the topic right every platform every customer every business transformation that's happening out there is going to be a gen first mindset as we start to evolve into this technology field what's your stance on generi where do you see this affecting TMT no absolutely I think uh it's uh probably a cliche to say that this is a once in a generation moment that we're witnessing sure which is the Advent or the adoption of AI and generative Ai and I will draw our attention to what our chairman is driving us to Lon Nik he was uh closely working with Jensen hang who was on the stage earlier this morning at K24 with CJ at uh the service now kote Nandan and Jensen have met and uh driven a close collaboration between the two companies so from a service now perspective we we think that this whole triangle between empasis and uh service now and Nvidia is very interesting and then we also have an effort with Microsoft and so Satya was also uh in video this morning uh at the stage and I think this whole angle of all of these companies converging together to drive this common purpose it is Big so let me step back and answer that question that you said which is uh what is the direction that we're taking AI first is uh really the agenda that we are driving and to serve our customers with AI first what we are attempting to do is really be AI first ourselves it is a little bit like the now on now strategy that you adopt which is you need to really shape and we're a 350,000 people organization serving quite a bit of the fortune 2K worldwide and we're dealing with their systems we're dealing with digital transformation of those systems so to be able to serve this Enterprise first the CTO of nasis Rafi runs this chter to drive AI first internally so that our employees are first all trained on AI so number one we become AI first in our identity two our systems and experiences internally are also made AI first so that we are then able to serve our customers yeah and this could be you know employee experience systems ticketing systems you know onboarding systems our ability to engineer products and and services to our customers so what are the software engineering purposes so so really it's breaking this down into three blocks one how do you make sure that software engineering practices inside the way you develop code the way you gather requirements how do you Infuse AI into all of that the second is particularly contact center and customer experience how do you have the next generation of contact center and customer experience at the heart of uh of uh you know AI infused and therefore the heart of the customers needs and thirdly in the Telco side really bringing the network data together to meure that you're able to harness all of that data from the network as well in addition to it and Business Systems so that's really what we are attempting to do at emphasis that's amazing so you had the experiential layer on the first two and then on the that third one I think that's one that I feel most excited about that's what I'm feeling the energy from this week too is the breaking down that complexity of the connectedness of these systems behind the scenes and letting gen mask a bit of that complexity to just get us the determined solution that we need so I'm sure that some of these TMT environments of infrastructure can be Rel relatively complex I mean they've been around for decades upon decades trying to paint a holistic picture of that can off also be complex so pointing it towards a model to that understands what we're asking of it the outcome based intention if you will gives us a lot more Foundation to be able to root from indeed I think that question that you raised is important Spencer or the articulation that you did which is the really networks with which are yera networks our what we call the Legacy networks the older systems which are not necessarily built for something like this so therefore how do you harness data from that kind of a setup and then the networks of the future which are virtualized which are containerized which are ensuring that you're able to then do Telemetry in those situations which are much more easier if you will built to harness that data and then so in a in a typical Telco situation that we encounter especially with the fortune, kind of companies that we're dealing with we would need to harness both these situations so in other words the scenario is brown field as opposed to Green Field and therefore the ability to deal with the Legacy situation is also very important it's a good point it's a good point because you can't just I mean I guess you could have a hard cut over into the new world of completely virtualized technology in Cloud infrastructure but often times I mean especially large a lot of the larger customers out there are going to have a fair amount of investment in that old infrastructure that's right so being able I haven't heard that term before Brownfield being able to take in the Brownfield into existence and still Leverage The use that it has out of it but kind of painting in in in a picture of a new world is is extremely helpful indeed yeah indeed indeed from uh so I think as we start to kind of get to wrap this a bit we customer experience was a big theme initially and as as part of your dialogue when we think about customer experience and for those listeners out there that are are looking to embark on this this business transformation Journey where where do you suggest usually that they they get their foot started in it and then after they start what are some testim to success to allow them to realize the full benefits of digital transformation I think for customers uh uh that are of the Telco kind that we're dealing with service Bridge is a great place to start I would think that rolling out a service Bridge would um ensure that the B2B customer experience is already visible to its top clients to make sure that you're dealing with your top Enterprise clients in a frictionless manner their customer service their customer retention their end customer retention Etc are are really sacred and kept so that's one place I would start the other plac is really the contact center as a whole and doing next Generation customer experience on that contact center experience so building attributes of proactive preventive sort of elements into the customer care scenarios versus the reactive approach that normally besets the yerer experience do you have an an interesting idea or example of a a preventative measure or something that's a a client has done in a proactive approach to maybe that customer service example MH so let's take uh a um example of of a retail user a b2c scenario where let's say the Wi-Fi usage uh is uh is looking patchy yeah I experienced this on the floor earlier today so let's say you and I as a retail experience instead of to be able to be complaining that my experience is poor to be able to then proactively be measured around that right to be able to proactively address that scenario saying hey you're experiencing Wi-Fi patchiness do you or do you want to or connectivity patchiness do you want to improve that if that were a scenario that would be quite extensive now back on the stage you saw the digital Avatar that uh CJ presented as well that's a great case if uh that can be pervasive so that's those some of the examples where uh data connectivity experiences can be enriched through either upgrades or or other proactive notification mechanisms that that the customer could take to remediate the situation extremely helpful thank you so as we bring this to a wrap say we come back and knowledge next year or maybe 5 years out where do you think we stand anything else you'd like to add on where you see the the future of of Telco going yeah yeah I think this whole customer experience that that was reactive outcome focused one- siiz fits all sort of approach needs to change to a proactive hyper personalized un and I as n equal to one user what Spencer gets is very different from what jinu gets as customer experience optimized also for cross Channel which is doesn't matter which channel you're going to use you're able to get that experience and then the behaviors Drive the outcomes that would be what what it would be let's say you know as I'm responding if I'm an agent in the uh in the Telco and I'm responding let's say as close to real time as possible the supervisor gets the alert of sit sitation going out of hand and the supervisor dashboard being able to then respond proactively to that situation instead of customer escalating and can I get the supervisor on the line sort of a situation right or here's another example where customers or agents are getting onboarded and new agents are getting onboarded and agent churn is a big thing in the contact center industry let's say new agents are getting onboarded you always want to have the experience of the best agent in the in the lot and how do you ensure that the new agents that are coming at are at a fast clip are able to then Benchmark themselves against the best-in-class agent experience in that tribe in that Community now let's say AI is able to then give that uh you know feedback intelligent feedback real time as this agent is getting on boarded all this is possible in this whole scenario when in even in the agent onboarding you could replay the complex calls back what did Spencer the great agent do right and then in that tough situation right so can I learn can Janu the new agent learned that these are possibilities that we can play out in this new new generation customer experience and so it's that every role then within that full value chain becomes AI assisted AI enabled that's the new generation of uh proactive preventive customer care that we're looking I AB I absolutely love that I I'm I'm also in the camp of saying that AI is going to be this augmentation of our worlds it's going to know us better it's going to learn about us better it's going to know the how people on our team operate in awesome conditions and it's going to learn the intent of how that was received by our call receivers so you know your Star team player your star would you call Spencer the great so whoever the great is on the team everybody else could then learn from that grade and the suggestions from AI can then say this is how this really landed well for our customers out there you can use that as a a best practice if you will to hone your calls into an amazing customer service experience absolutely that's such a great use point I hope I hope we get there within maybe a year hey next time we meet but Janu this has been absolutely fantastic thank you again it's always a pleasure it's great to see your smiling face here in person I hope to host you again soon on this thing Spencer it's always a privilege talking to you wonderful always to be at K24 and uh thank you for the opportunity perfect thank you so much that's been so great and thank you to all the listeners out there please subscribe and share if you'd like what you heard today we'll be back with you on the next one of innovation Today podcast [Music]