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 thank you everyone for joining us today for another episode of The Innovation Today podcast I'm your host Spencer B Miller responsible for executive Innovation and strategy at service now and today I'm extremely excited to be hanging out with Stephanie AO in person from Cass Global director of strategy and Innovation step welcome thank you thank you so much for having me I'm excited to be on your podcast I love Innovation and I love what you guys do so I'm thrilled to be here it's literally in your title I love that it's great and we're at knowledge 2024 and we're at knowledge all about Innovation we're in the energy of the Innovation it's almost ecstatic here with just walking the floors actually I'm touching door and it's that static here that I'm getting shocked every time so a lot of good bubbly intelligence in the air it's good to be with you so we we've actually had the pleasure of knowing each other and we we're working relatively closely together and and our companies of innovation given that we're both in the orgs so we already have a little bit of background that I think sets us off on some warm footing but as we know the topic of conversation at any large Tech conference this year especially knowledge is AI and that's top of mind for everybody out there so how can we digest this into something something of this large field that has just taken the the tech World by explosive expansiveness yeah it's fascinating they're it's really I think gen is absolutely like changing Behavior faster than any innovation in history yeah right I think it's estimated even Bill mcder said it yesterday on his knowledge keynote which is 11 trillion dollar to the global economy in the next three years which feels like out of control and it feels like there's a lot of hype going on right now but I think uh at this conference what we're seeing from some of our customers is they're actually breaking it down and seeing real impact and that's what's going to take it from hype to reality yeah so I think today everyone's G to you know it's been everyone's kind of floating around here and uh I think we're going to get a little bit more grounded today with people actually understanding like the value it can provide and actually how to get there because it's not super easy as we know you can't just turn it on and it's all good there are things that you have to prepare for yeah yeah that's kind of the governance behind the scenes me right making sure that you're you're setting up the the data in a proper way that the AI will be able to generate intelligent results for you that's right because if you don't have yeah if you don't have data if you don't have good like service catalog or knowledge or content in general then you can't do a lot of things like you know summarize content like you know accelerate results accelerate productivity if you don't have some of those backings behind you sure how are you getting your customers started on this so what what are you thinking of when they come to you and Innovation and Cas is a huge partner of service now so you have a fair amount of customers I'm sure thinking about this where do you help them get a little bit more tangibility around starting in this ever growing field of mass intensity yeah it's actually a great question because so many people they they're like oh yeah we got to do gen it's like why yeah and they're like what do you mean why because everyone's doing it no no no I mean what is your purpose what's your intent who is your audience what problem are you trying to solve and most people haven't thought about that really so I think the number one thing you need to do is to really Define and understand what your strategy is and understand um yeah what you're are you trying to solve a problem for your employees or your customers uh your business is it your agent productivity is your developer productivity like the first thing is really understanding that big pivotal like Northstar why are you doing this what's the intent and then once we do that we can say great now instead of just looking at you know now assist or or my assist that it's really looking at like all of the different use cases so thinking bigger thinking outside the box thinking about like truly kind of transformational use cases that'll impact their business and then just creating a a basically a road map that sequenced in a way that they can actually get the results that they need because otherwise if you just have someone going off in a different department and just implementing something now all a sudden you could be causing I know technical death risk if it didn't work all a sudden the perception is as it failed so I really do think there needs to be Buy in from the top it needs to be an Enterprise wide strategy versus just one little kind of Department yeah it's a holistic approach to to viewing it I think you're right if it it's it gets turned on in some little area of the of the corporation and it's not well thought out of why we're turning it on that the why is the huge thing that I'm hearing from you is it gets a little lost and then if it does fail then it's a hard it's a hard thing to dust off that failure it is if if you set it up in such a way that you're thinking about it from that holistic approach you're getting the executive buy off you have a strategy plan you understand the why behind it then you're you're setting yourself up as an organization for much better success for that thing to fruitfully grow from there absolutely I mean it's we've been saying for years right digital transformation like 70% of them fail yeah and I think really a couple reasons why they fail is one is the focus is too narrow so you're just focusing on one small little piece and you're not building it as part of your core business strategy or you don't have the governance to be able to sustain it long term and you don't have the change management and the rigor for that momentum because again if you do it once and it doesn't work and then people go oh yeah that was bad you know nobody bought into it it didn't work and now other people are threatened by it all of a sudden you're gonna it's going to be very difficult to make that change you only get one time to make that first impression you do you do it's so true yeah so along those lines what themes are you hearing when you're talking to customers about their why and you talk to a wide away r a wide array of customers out there from verticals that they land in what are there common themes that you're hearing and pulling out as to what their why is that gets them this definition of why we should go down the route of generi yeah and I think I I think it's not about I just want to increase productivity now that we're talking with customers and really getting into these conversations they're thinking much bigger about I fundamentally want to shift either how I operate or deliver value to my customers or my employees or my business so instead of just thinking pragmatically about the technology they truly are thinking about it as a business strategy where they can leverage it as a catalyst for to really kind of Leap Frog their competition rethink how their business operates and rethink about their Workforce so I think that the the answers are getting much higher level which is great because like these leaders are going to we're going to shift this Workforce forever right like in the order you know when dot came around if you didn't have a strategy then like you just didn't survive same with Gen there can be a lot of hype around it but you need to just you know actually there was a good comment today from the CEO of Nvidia saying I don't know if you heard it but it was about you know when you're watching a train go by yeah yeah that train goes really really fast but when you're on the train actually experimenting it doesn't feel like like it's moving that fast right and you're always in forward progression and I think in life with people with businesses with world we just need forward progression and this is a way to continually progress forward that's actually kind of how I view Innovation that's what we do in in in our parts of the yorg as we challenge the status quo right we say this is working this new technology is out there and we can get on board with it because it's moving really fast or unfortunately you could kind of get left behind if you don't you don't jump on board so create a structure of an agile organization create a safe container for people to feel like they can try new things with the technology set them up properly with the strategy initiation and understand the why behind it to then evangelize the success after the fact that's exactly right and make sure you have those business outcomes that's another key yeah point of this right we can do everything all day long but if we're not understanding like the impact it'll create and we can't showcase that success again from a change management perspective people are going to be like well how do I know if it worked like you need tangible measurable results that kind of prove that business case and then you say okay great we all need to understand like what our technology investments will give us back um you know especially there's just a lot of business pressure today so I think it's more important than ever that people really think about those outcomes ahead of time and can justify it and then say wow I invested X but my return was tenfold MH and then it makes everyone feel good it makes everyone else embrace that change and then you've got other people who feel threatened by gen who say okay now I want to contribute to the organization I want to make sure I'm upskilled I want to reskilling yeah I was researching something as I was giving a talk yesterday on upskilling the the workforce and how how corporations are thinking about it I saw a statistic out there that said 60% of individuals in the workforce are looking to upskill themselves are going to get value out of that within a year yep and we're doing I thing at service now that riseo program where we're upskilling and reskilling a bunch of individuals to get a million people certified or confident Style by the end of this year it's really profound but a lot of other customers are also doing it out there they're thinking of new ways to take their existing Workforce and help them grow because disgruntled employees that don't feel like they're growing are going to leave the company but if you Foster their growth so true and show them things for areas or show them areas of opportunity to help them grow and AI can actually start to present those opportunities for them those people are going to stay with you so we actually can I say a customer's name so is that okay di me um they they've been public so I don't think it's an issue but five or six years ago vertex Pharmaceuticals I love vertex oh I love I was just talking with them on the way up here they're talking tomorrow too yeah I know and they're up for best portal um little plug for that um but five or six years ago they came to us this is before service now had their employee growth and development product um but they came to us with an basically a problem to solve and originally they were inspired by something that they saw here that we had done at knowledge about onboarding but they realized they had a much bigger issue and the issue was 50% of employees were actually leaving the organization because they didn't know their career path yeah so we're like well let's work together and fix it now we realize there's nothing you can't do on service now so we started to build we were truly building the plane while flying and so we built this like really incredible experience that was able to track people's skills we integrated with workday people were able to look at where they were on their on their career path choose different areas and actually discover their career path we integrated artificial intelligence and machine learning to recommend relevant jobs based on their skills we had a skills algorithm that actually told why they were meant set up for that job and how much was skills based I mean it was incredibly Innovative and that was like 5 years ago so and they're continuing to just like go crazy and and really expand on those algorithms but I think they really started us thinking about skills years ago and then maybe two or three years ago it really started to hit from an indust stre so they've been so far ahead of the curve so it's it was fascinating and the results have been unbelievable and it significantly impacted the culture of that company yeah and no longer is that the reason people are voluntarily leaving no they're staying they're stay yeah because they feel like they can grow with it they feel like they can grow it's one of the areas that I'm actually more personally excited about where service now plays in this but even technology plays in this is we're we're great at operationally understanding what's happening in the business we're we're tasking engine we're workflow back we we know how things are flowing through the orc as we start to develop these skills persona and skills portfolios you can start use gen to start to map those things together so it can suggest those opportunities to help you grow in areas that you maybe hadn't been presented before that's right and they say you know it's like people wonder how many people are nervous that J will take their job yeah jobs are going to fundamentally change right sure they always have they always have right they always have your and I jobs didn't exist probably two decades ago yeah and I think our jobs are actually more important than ever now because you need people to continue to think bigger about how this will impact the world but even though the jobs will change people are either going to learn to live and work alongside the technology or they're going to have to go in a different direction like you just can't stay you know stuck in a a single way and realize like well no I've had this job forever and I can't change always changing we're always growing right and that's the that's the beautiful thing about being in the workforce yeah so anyways so I think skills is really really critical today yeah what else excites you outside of of skills from a platform standpoint or just anything in Innovation well I you know I was just talking to a couple people today about you can change like your call desks yeah right you have tons of people who are Manning these desks who are it costs companies a lot of money and that money could go to innovating and further trying to accomplish whatever they're trying to accomplish but instead they have to invest so much money and things like call desk and I think things like gen you can bring that into the conversation and all of a sudden expedite things and so some of those funds can go from spending it on call desks and managing call centers to actually like solving these incurable diseases or solving big global economic issues or things like that so I think it's just going to allow companies to digitally transform faster I mean and it's funny we talked about this in a session uh yesterday but on average only 14 of all Industries businesses are about 14% automated which is astounding that means 85% of most businesses today deal with like manual processes Legacy applications where they're handcuffed or they have to you know do all these different hand handoffs to different you know applications and it just slows them down yeah so I think gen is going to help accelerate that it's going to help people get their jobs done done faster it's going to help developers develop faster you know we're the United States of America right we should be continually you know innovating and and changing the way we live work in blood so for some of those old maybe maybe not old but more systems or companies that have been rooted in their ways for decades upon decades how do you get them to adapt an Innovative first mindset what what are some steps that they can take to say we need to be an agile organization we want to be around for another 10 15 maybe 100 years how can we get on this train to use your analogy from earlier to get our people thinking more agile because there's naturally what happens in these things is technology comes around in a big wave but like at the same time people in process are the hardest things to meet part of it so adapting an agile mindset adapting Innovation and wanting to have that is easier said than done yep what would you suggest for those listeners out there that are looking to be the evangelists of inovation and transformation in their ORS so I think probably two things one is a lot of people um I think it's just the way a lot of brains work is we we can't see like the art of the possible like we can't see the future of what doesn't exists yet a lot of people they can see what's in front of them but it's really hard to see what's like three or five years down the road yeah so anyone who can help paint that picture of what's the art of the possible I think helps unleash the possibilities and open open up the imagination of what they never thought could be done before so I think that's one thing is just really helping them to think broadly and differently about what they can do by example right by example something illustrating showcasing them creatively expressing an idea yeah that makes it from the intangible to the tangible and then the second thing I think would be give them some quick wins I think when people have to go through these long transformational Journeys or things take a year it's like too much money too much time people get tired like I think we can fuel them without that passion and that energy by saying listen let's get something done let's have a result that happens in a quarter in a five weeks let's just do something fast to show what it can do and then people oh my God it didn't cost me a fortune it didn't take me forever and look what I was able to accomplish great now let's do another one and another one and another one and all of a sudden you start to build agility without them even knowing it but we've seen a lot success that way where companies who weren't doing it all of a sudden they did one thing and it just again Unleashed like their mind of what can be accomplished and how quickly it can be accomplished and the results that it can actually have that's perfectly put so yeah I love to hear it yeah question on that and I don't want to bring it to maybe the negative side of it or darker side of this but part of innovation is failing fast too yes so Y what happens when failures occur and how do you make sure that those aren't the thing that you hold hold on to as an Orc but you you Enlighten the things that are working well as part of this agile train and realize that failures are are okay and should be accepted as part of that what's a so word of advice there so I have to do another shout out so Rick Howell who's the CIO of Perkins kie their an international law firm yeah they were up speaking on this yesterday and they had to fail fast and they realized what happened is they tried to go do something very quickly and but they realized they didn't have the data in the governance behind it so they had to slow down just for a moment to identify and look at that and then jumped right back on board you have to be a bit Fearless yeah um like you can't be afraid to jump on that train right you know we can't be afraid to like go for a ride in life right that's what we're here on the planet to do is to go experience things um and and do things that makes us a little bit uncomfortable so the CEO of Nvidia was up on stage today and he has this quote which is probably won't do it from SC but anyways it's about you have to start you have to actively experiment with things in order to make progress and I think that act of doing allows you to make the leap from like say gen as a cool technology to gen is like a real force that affects our lives and our work and our future and things like that so it's just actively experimenting and making sure that you're not staying back in that Legacy old school mentality because I think the world is not putting up with it you know people expect better experiences at work right right uh employees expect better experiences you know on in their daily lives nobody tolerates a terrible business experience that's why doing things like beautiful onboarding experience changes the game because they go oh I want to go work with that company because they're modern because they're they're digital they're at the Forefront even if they're not they appear to be because it was a great onboarding experience you know how many people will leave a company if they go to onboard and it's like this manual process they can't log in they can't you know they can't figure out who to talk to they have to call they're like forget it I know so many people because we've done a lot of that with companies so many people would just literally say I'm done they accepted the job and they would just quit because the company didn't feel like what bonds with them from like a society from a cultural aspect because they weren't Innovative enough they weren't modern and we all need people people make up the workforce right so people is power and if we don't have people we don't have power and we can't move forward yeah I mean it's and it's a little bit indicative of what you're getting into if you're having a poor onboarding experience and it's feels a bit Antiquated well you probably know what's going to happen when you enter the doors that's exactly right perception is everything that first perception is so huge in my mind there's there's not really when we do fail at one of these progressions or we're trying thing innovation it doesn't necessarily work out it's not necessarily a problem I view it as progress as long as you can learn from that failure and take that learning into your next Innovation cycle your next agile cycle and Y and adjust accordingly then you've you've adapted as an organization and then you can become truly agile y yeah I think failing fast is it's almost mandatory like if you're not failing you're not pushing yourself hard enough sure yeah you're staying in your comfort zone you're staying in your comfort zone but we all yeah we all got to make mistakes you know that's we're human right and um we all will but yeah as long as we can grow and continue to move forward again progression is everything progression is everything so let's bring it to a close you're extremely ex exciting to talk to and fun to me but I I I'm curious as an another Innovative mind in this where do you where do you view this going so if we if we meet again in in five five years let's say at the next knowledge be knowledge 29 right what would you think wow that's such a good question all right you put me on the spot there I don't know but things yeah it's they're definitely going be a lot different than we are now I remember when I first started working um and came into the service now ecosystem like experience wasn't even a thing portals weren't a thing you know onboarding wasn't a thing like none of that existed right so now when you take that I don't know I think in five years we're going to probably Leap Frog 20 years when you think about like from a technology perspective sure or maybe even much further beyond that I think it's going from a much more kind of singled dimensional experiential things to really exploring all the multi-dimensional aspects that life has to offer and I think that will come heavily into everything that we do from a business perspective I love it I love it what do you think that's what I want to know you're this you're the Innovation office of service now what is the future of service now in your mind yeah I think a lot on this I I think that it will be so seamless to have these assistant bots in our world that we will just realize that they are a part of everyday life so we'll have an assistant for what we do in work and that assistant will talk to a bunch of other things within our work to help us schedule things help us put together presentations to help us tease out what if scenarios that's a big one that I think about is it's that seamless connectivity right it's all intertwined and and leaders out there are trying to make business decisions of where their companies are going and once they do it they're going down that route but that what's really cool about AI is we can start to say hey here's 10 different ways that this scenario can play out tease those out for me run back the productivity metrics on what that would look like based on some historical analysis of how how our company's operated and give me the best output based on that data so give me give me some suggestions as the leader to then direct the company to help to help that thing really really grow in in a transformational way yeah absolutely I think connectivity is is key again I think like every on the kind of digital transformation scale people will be so much further ahead of where we were before yeah because um again all those things that we get bogged down in and and work every day that that we don't want to be doing you know it it's going to open up our mindset to to just do so much more um with everything that we we have you know we can connect with today that's also where I'm excited about is these these Technologies are going to learn so much about us so right now I think I learn well a certain way I think I can learn by listening to a podcast for example and absorbing some of that information but as this technology starts to learn about us it may know that oh actually Spencer you're a visual learner and right here's another podcast that supplements what you just heard oh my God you're spot on what's happening in that world where you can get that much more intelligent on the subject okay now you're in the visual realm maybe it helps to hear it in another context so we're going to put it in the tone of another CEO that talks in a different way of how more along the lines of how you talk and so then it just starts to build this information that gives you such a tailored approach to grow as an individual which allows you to provide that much more value to whatever organization or whatever project that you're working on so you just beautifully described what that was thinking in this multifaceted like much more kind of three-dimensional world you taking us to the metaverse going back but you you truly describe what I was trying to describe not so well so thank you for putting it into no we're there we're well I don't know we could probably go another couple hours could I would love to actually I think yeah me too we'll we'll definitely do a round two of this I really appreciate your time and your bright mind it's it's really fun to talk to another Innovative Soul yeah well you are amazing thank you Spencer so much thank you so much SE and thank you to all the listeners out there please subscribe and share if you like what you heard today and please join us for the next one and the next one and the next one in the next one and we'll see you on the next Innovation Today podcast [Music]