(rock music) In a connected world where every experience matters, the heart of the digital economy beats stronger and smarter. You understand the pulse of innovation. You're not just participants in this digital journey. You are pioneers, change makers, creators, problem solvers, driven by the same goal, to build the infrastructure and services that connect and shape the world. ServiceNow brings AI to all corners of TMT, empowering you to revolutionize experience, unleash productivity, and unlock value. With pre-built AI-powered workflows, we ensure that nothing slows your stride. Join us on this journey. Let's innovate together. Powering tomorrow's digital economy today. (upbeat music) Please welcome ServiceNow's general manager and vice president of Telecom, Media, and Technology and Manufacturing, Rohit Batra. (audience cheering and applauding) - Hello and thank you for being here. Good afternoon. Everybody's had lunch? Everybody's excited about TMT? All right, my name is Rohit Batra. I run the Telecom Media and Technology Vertical for ServiceNow. I'm here to talk to you about digital transformation and business transformation within the TMT Vertical. First of all, this is my fourth knowledge event. I'm extremely excited by the conversations that we've had with our customers, with our partners, about the discussions and transformations that are happening in the industry. And I think it's quite a pivotal moment in TMT. And what you'll hear from us and what you hear from the speakers who are gonna join me on stage in a few minutes, is really about how they're actually looking at this transformation in this very pivotal area for TMT. So first and foremost, when you look at digital transformation, digital transformation is all about change. It's about how do you change and break down silos into your systems, your processes, and your teams. Make sure they can all work together for an end-to-end view and end-to-end customer life cycle that you wanna deliver. However, the reality of this is the fact that those silos make it extremely hard to deliver this capability. That's the world that we live in. And what really makes this world compounded is if you think about the new products and new services that we are launching, that number of silos continue to expand and make it even more difficult. But there is a reality on how you can get over this, and that's the vision of ServiceNow for TMT. When we look at the digital transformation in ServiceNow, it's the ability for us to connect all the different business organizations in a single pane of glass. It's looking at your customer service organizations, your IT teams, your network organizations, all working together into a single way on how you're gonna address the challenges of your customers, your agents, and your suppliers and your partners. But technology is one element of this transformation. There's more to do than just technology. And when you think about tech business transformation especially, you wanna bring cross teams together. And that's where we think that AI plays a very important role. AI is the catalyst on how you can bring together business organizations and IT organizations, all of them working together. Now, you may be a part of any of the three roles that are in here or any other three teams. You could be part of the chief customer officer or the customer office organization. We are looking to how you innovate and create new experiences for your customers, but make sure that your cost to service continuing to be either lower than what is expected or continue to grow down. You wanna deliver that through innovation. When you look at our chief operating officers, what you're looking at is how do you provide business transformation and business processes across the value chain of the customer, but making sure that it's lowest amount of manual intervention that is required and it's all automated into the system. And if you are a CTO or a part of the CTO organization, you're looking to how do you bring network and IT services together, make sure you're addressing to the SLAs that are given by the customers and you're delivering against them. That's the world that we wanna live in. But regardless of where you sit, you wanna make sure that when you're thinking about delivering to a particular product or delivering to a particular process, you're actually running across all the different business functions in the organization. Whether it's in the customer organization, whether it's in the IT organization, the operations team, or the network team. You're trying to connect this entire fabric of the process to deliver against the customer journey. That's what we are trying to achieve with our TMT strategy and vision. All of this built on a generative AI solution, which is powered within the platform. You heard from CJ today, all the new innovations that we're building into the ServiceNow platform and verticalizing that specifically for a TMT vertical. We have specialized products that we've delivered over the past four years for TMT, whether that's in the domain of network inventory and project management specifically to help you roll out your network into the market. Or it is in the domain of service management, whether that's service operations or sales and auto management going all the way from CPQ to order decomposition and delivery or in the pace of service management. Technology and telecom service management capabilities rendered through the ServiceNow applications specifically for your industry. And then last very closely thing linked is the field service management product. How do you look at field service and technicians as they go out to do either do installation or repair and bringing that entire connectivity from field service technicians into the field, to the agents that are enter your call centers, the customers who are actually getting the services and your partners who are supplying portions of the service itself. But if we laser this down into three key pillars, the three key components that we look at is customer service, operations experience, and network experience. We are gonna focus on these three domains and talk about what ServiceNow is doing in these domains, but specifically through the eyes of some of our key customers. So first and foremost, we'll talk about customer experience and I'd like to bring on stage, Debika Bhattacharya chief technology and solutions officer from Verizon Business. Thank you for being here, Debika. - Oh, thank you for having me. - So first and foremost, chief technology and solutions officer for Verizon business. Tell us a little bit about your strategy, your role, and how technology is solving that for you in Verizon. - Yeah, so first of all, I love the topic that we have here, putting AI to work. At Verizon, we've been working on AI for a very long time, what we call traditional AI. So when we think about AI and our strategy, there's really three components to it. Consume, sell, and also enable. So as we think about consume, these are the use cases that we've been implementing internally and we've been doing this for a long time and adding generative AI to it. But as we think about, you know, for example, how do we differentiate our network? You know, we have a digital twin where we do what if scenarios, customer loyalty. You know, there's a lot of use cases that we are experimenting with internally. That's the consume side of it. The sell is, as we start embedding generative AI into our products and solutions, we do have a lot of analytics products. So, you know, adding to like copilots and other cases that are embedded in our products. And then finally, which is really very exciting for us, is if we think about AI and generative AI specifically, there's a massive amount of data that gets transferred and transmitted, and the network is right in the middle of it all. So, and we built compute and storage into our network a few years back. So it's a very exciting time with our AI strategy within Verizon. - Awesome. Because we are a knowledge event and we at ServiceNow, we'd love to understand from you, I share with you on the role that ServiceNow plays into that strategy that you have. - Yeah, no, it's a very exciting time. So currently we are working with a number of different partners, like with ServiceNow, we actually started our journey a few years back, which was, you know, we started small, we started with an at your service, it was a software fulfillment use case. And then we implemented knowledge management and now we are working towards, we are all in now. So we are working towards service transformation using TSOM and then, you know, also for case management, TSM. You know, we are working with actually integrating our two main tech stacks, which is wireless and wire align. And, you know, using ServiceNow as the ITSM across both those techs and decommissioning some of our legacy systems. And then also using a ServiceBridge to connect to our enterprise customers who also have ServiceNow so they have a native experience. And then expanding it across multiple areas like product management, where, you know, the task orchestration is really important across multiple stakeholders along with, you know, business finance, etc. So lots of great opportunities with ServiceNow in Verizon. - I think what you mentioned about ServiceBridge, which we'll touch upon in a minute, but I think what I really like about the way we've been working with Verizon and your teams has been not just is it a transformation for your own organization, but also transforming the value that your customers are receiving as part of being the ecosystem of ServiceNow and Verizon, isn't it? - Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things, you know, you talked about customer experience. And normally, when we think about customer experience, we think about either the interaction you're having with the customer care agent or maybe, you know, with a digital interface. And both of those are true and real, but what really matters is the experience across the entire journey, the lifecycle of the solution that the customer is using. So I'm in the B2B side, so we have a lot of complex technology solutions that we offer to our enterprise customers. So we need to understand like, what is the current environment, you know, how do you integrate into that? How do we migrate you know, to the next technology or solution? If there's any hardware involved? You know, is it backwards compatible? Is it future proof? So there's a lot of aspects of customer experience that is outside those traditional views. And that's what, you know, in my organization, we are focused in to ensure that there's a frictionless experience end to end. And I own parts of product, I own parts of the design and solutioning as well as the operations enablement that helps us provide that end-to-end customer experience. So great partnership with ServiceNow as we do that. - Thank you, Debika. Thank you for you and your teams for being such great partners for ServiceNow, constantly providing us input to help us improve our products and positioning into the market. Really appreciate you being here. - Good, thank you. (audience applauding) - So Debika talked a little bit about ServiceBridge and I want to give you a glimpse of what ServiceBridge, the investment that we've made in ServiceBridge and how that's evolving in the coming versions. So ServiceBridge is one of the core cornerstones of innovation for TMT. And as we look at this quick video, we'll show you what the journey of ServiceBridge is gonna take us to. So let's roll the quick video, please. So as you look at the demo, we've got customer like provider of Boxeo and Alectri as the customer. Within a few clicks, we can now onboard customers who are also in ServiceNow onto the provider's instance. The few clicks will allow you to have OAuth integration between the two customers, making sure that the provider can now share data with your customer, including turning on services like order management, which will then allow you a catalog of services and products that will be published on a consumer's instance. If I'm the consumer, Alectri as a customer, can open up a quick form, we'll look at the entries that are being required, publish will submit the request. Automatically, the order gets sent into Boxeo, who will now be able to look through a single dashboard, all the list of orders that are coming in, being able to open up the order, track the progress on what needs to be done, and being able to deliver against it. All the while this is updates are being made. Constant feedback has been provided back to the customer through the progression of the lifecycle of the order. So service, which continues to get a big amount of our investment, and we continue to make sure that it becomes a cornerstone of our solution for both telecom and for technology customers. The three key areas that we are focusing on is to continue to help simplify the setup between your providers and your consumers. Making sure you can seamlessly connect your entire ecosystem. The ecosystem that is made up of you, your customers and your partners into an integrated solution. We also wanna make sure that not just this is for cases and for customer requests, but also for ordering. Where you can now publish your catalog of products and services to your customers so they can very simply order your services through their catalog of ServiceNow. And then to make sure that throughout the journey of the task, that you're constantly providing visibility and transparency into the progression of the task to your customers. That's the vision of ServiceBridge and that's how we are where we are investing. Now let's move over into the next domain. The next domain, we are gonna focus on operational experience. This is one of the key focus areas from ServiceNow, historically, our for core strength. And to be able to talk about more around operations and operations experience, I'm gonna bring on my next guest, Annadurai Elango. EVP of Core Solutions from Cognizant. Anna. - Hey, Rohit. Thank you. - Thank you for being here. A long journey all the way from Bangalore. Of course. - Appreciate you coming here and participating at Knowledge. So now let's talk about operations and the role of technology in the operations domain. We'd love to get your view around what that plays and share your vision around it. - Absolutely. So first of all, thank you for having me. It's a wonderful event and great to be here. Before I get to respond to your operations question, little bit of a context setting on Cognizant. Cognizant and many of you know, is a global consulting and services firm headquartered in New Jersey. Globally operating across all continents and then delivering to all industry verticals. Just to put some numbers in perspective, so 350,000 employees or consultants actually, you know, working out in every time zone that you can think of. So that gives you a bit of the diversity that we are dealing with, both in terms of customers as well as the employees. So obviously, when it comes to operations, you know, internal operations. So all those complexities actually need to be really handled very well in order for us to remain efficient and effective. So in that context, my unit, by the way, I run some of the core technology and operations practices like the cloud and infrastructure security data and yeah, and IoT. That's basically everything other than the application now stack. Internally, my team runs the Cognizant internal IT. So we treat them as our client zero. Whatever capabilities that we actually take to our external customers, we actually use it to, you know, apply it on our own internal operations. So to speak, we drink our own champagne, or eat our own dog food as you would like to call. So that basically means I need to practice what we preach to our external customers. Meaning bring in all kinds of, you know, practices, best practices, the platforms and tools and accelerators to actually bring in that make the efficiency and experience the center of everything that we do for and our customers. And to that extent, we partner with our internal CIO, Neal Ramasamy, and try to help them modernize, keep up with the technology. You know, movements, we helped move nearly 80, 90% of their workload onto the SaaS and cloud platform. So that is actually a big modernization that helped with the efficiencies part of it. At the same time, introduced a significant amount of the traditional lean automation, self-service, self-heal, etc. to actually just to modernize that operations part of it, to bring in that de efficiency. Now, what is interesting is that we use ServiceNow as the underlying platform along with certain other ecosystem of, you know, technology tools and platforms to actually bring in this level of efficiency. I'm happy to share that all of this over the last several years has helped to improve the efficiency of the productivity by almost 60%, you know, over the last three years. Okay, so that's a significant, you know, move. Absolutely. - What's most, you know, interesting is the last year or so, we've been infusing a lot of gen AI into everything we do. There's no conversation goes without actually speaking about the gen AI. And we were one of the early adopters. You know, we incorporated gen AI into all our functional areas, right from our HR to procurement to legal, to even the, you know, recruitment teams starting to use that. Obviously we apply gen AI for our tech for tech, which is our modernization, developer productivity as well as the running the operations. So ServiceNow has been in the front and center of our modernization effort. So we introduced the gen AI even before (indistinct) came in. We integrated with certain other third party, open Azure services, etc. with our ServiceNow instance to actually just to bring in that experience. So I think overall, it's pretty good in terms of how things are actually shaping and evolving. We use, you know, tools like Microsoft Copilot, you know, GitHub, M365 for developer productivity, personal productivity and so on. I think the real value unlocking will happen over the next, you know, year or so that I'm really, really confident about. - Thank you, Anna and you're absolutely right. I think your team has been a great customer, a great partner of service, our technologies, especially in the technology domain, that technology provided domain where we are seeing a lot of our growth. You mentioned 350,000 odd employees, lots of customers across various time zones. Clearly you get a lot of requests around innovation and the need for innovation from your customers. Tell us a little bit about how you're looking at those requests and how you're using operations as a domain to drive that into your customer base. - Yeah, so I think it goes without saying, we have close to about 2,000 odd customers that we deliver. If I just take one sliver of that, you know, from an infrastructure cloud, data center, workplace, and the security operations, we probably, you know, cater about 800 odd customers. Their needs are obviously, you know, diverse and you know, you know, very different. There's a lot of custom services that happen. But nevertheless, in order for us to actually kind of bring in some amount of standardization in how we deliver what we deliver to them, as well as bring in consolidating all our, you know, best practices that we learn from different, you know, engagements. We try to put what we call is the whole platform strategy. You know, while we may be winning a many services deal and we throw X hundred people to that, but we want to augment, substantiate that with what we call the service delivery platforms. I think it's not coincidental that all our delivery platforms happen to be centered around ServiceNow, of course, using a lot of other tools. But I would want to, you know, call out two specific platform that we use in the intercept type. The neuro IT operations is born out of such a need, right? We have always had something called Cognizant Automation Center, which kind of brought in the whole stack, right? From monitoring to even management all the way to how do you run the operation, all the way to the execution orchestration implementation of, you know, self-heal and automation and so on. But with the new advent of AOPs, you know, things like Moogsoft bringing in observability capabilities. Now with the gen AI capability come in, we introduced what we call as a neuro IT operations. Neuro IT operation is more of a A first, you know, lead with the AI, anything and everything that you could actually address through the A part, you won't actually deal with that so that you are not completely automating out all the issues and things like that but rather, you wanna eliminate. You don't even want those things to actually come in front of the customer or the service availability and so on. So Neuro IT you know, along with the previous avatar of the CAC, Cognizant Automation Center, we implemented that to over 80 customers, right? The results vary, but anywhere from 40% to 60% throughput deficiency, a significant, you know, improvement in the MTTR. The time to respond, time to identify problems. I think those are very important characteristics, right? Now, what is even more interesting to me personally is in the screen, that on target managed services. Many of the customers don't know, you know, in the front end and what this is about. The same neuro IT operation is actually intended to be a much larger customer's dedicated operations, very specific customer specific going into that. But I also have several, you know, hundred, you know, mid-size customers and they don't necessarily have the ability to afford the whole stack, bring in the power of all the leading, you know, AIOps and observability and so on. So I used to have three major instances of ServiceNow, Each scattering to roughly about, you know, 100 customers. You know, from North America due to GDPR requirements in Europe. There are another cloud operations that we are actually delivering only to hyperscaler, cloud ops, etc. So three instances driving, you know, operations for about 300 odd customers. Used to be connected through the traditional ebonding methods, right? So now, thanks to you and you know, ServiceNow, so we recently consolidated all the three instances and you know, now we now have upgraded to the TPSM. And what's really, really, you know, you know, pleasing to me is that in the last six weeks we have onboarded 155, you know, customers out the TPSM with the ServiceBridge actually helping in a big way, right? So now, there's another 100 clients are actually lined up to actually move in. So keeping fingers crossed, but the power of the TPSM is actually coming in very handy. The time to onboard a new customer is really, really shrunk. You know, I'm talking about few hours, not actually few days to actually onboard. And the reduced cost, obviously. Less instances. I have multiple shared services team coming together, etc. Really, really thrilled to actually see what the power we can get out of it. More importantly, the analysis for TPSM is something that is still not done there, but I'm really looking forward to get there. - Well, Anna, thank you so much. You've been an outstanding customer, a great partner for us to innovate together, take to the market. A good round of applause for Anna, please. Thank you for being here. - Okay, thank you. - Excellent. Thank you so much. - Thank you very much. - All right, so Anna talked a little bit about operations experience, talked about now and summarization. So let's look at a quick video that will show us what that capability looks like. Let's roll the next demo, please. So here, you'll see a very quick example of how we are using Now Assist into our technology product using summarization so that you can look at what the quick summary is of a case, but then not only to use the open up analysis so that you can now look at a conversation to generate resolution notes. The ability for you to look at all the different information that's there in your activity stream and then generate resolution notes so that it's very quick for an agent to understand what actually went on with this case and to be able to decipher what's in there. Not only is it important for the agent to look at this resolution notes, but also to be able to then turn it into a communication that can send to the customer. So just looking at a very quick prompt that says, "Formalize this message and make sure it can be framed into an email." Now Assist will generate the entire email structure and body for them so that you can quickly copy it, draft it into an email and send it out to the customer. So that's what we are doing with operations excellence in the case of both telecom and technology customers. So essentially, our focus really here is to supercharge the agents using Now Assist. The ability to reduce as much manual work as possible, create content dynamically and quickly so that you can now generate knowledge articles and convert tribal knowledge into reusable content. And then being able to use that content to be able to deflect cases so that your customers can get better value in a very short amount of time. So with that, let's focus on the third domain, which is gonna be network experience. Here, you're gonna rely on me, we don't have a customer to talk about this today, but network experience is one of our newest investment strategies. We talked about last year if you were at Knowledge, you heard us talk about network inventory. One of the new products that we had launched into the market last year. Focused on how you build and plan your network and design how your network is gonna be leveraging all the services that you're launching into the market. Well, we've actually invested further into that earlier this year. We made an announcement of an acquisition that we made of a NetACE technology through Atrinet. Atrinet is a company at space out of Israel. They actually do came out of the R&D division of Nokia. They focus largely into the, into how network discovery and activation capabilities are built across every layer of your network, whether that's transport or core or any other part of it. So the acquisition of NetAce is coming into ServiceNow is allowing us to further go deeper into the network, understand more into how we can basically discover network topology and manage that into a ServiceNow platform into a CMDB. And then also use the integration downstream so that we can provide a full closed loop automation from discovery, network management, service management and auto management down to activation. We continue to also invest in our network inventory products. So we'll take a quick look at a quick video that will talk about the demo of our investment in network inventory. Can you roll the third video please? So here, you're gonna see the landing page of the dashboard for network operations. Looking at any one of the change tasks, which will actually be a network change. We can now provide visualization for your circuits. You can see the location from A to Z, but also, you can see the circuit over a period of time. You can look at the inventory list of all the different racks that are in there. The rack visualization combined with utilization of power and efficiency. But also you can do edit of your racks. You can now drag from your catalog, the equipment that is there, drag and drop it into any of the rack units. And on the backend, this creates a workflow that will automatically get generated. So a series of tasks can be conducted including moving off your asset from a central location into the data center setting in dispatch through that location, doing installation, testing, power up, and then wrapping up the whole process. All of that is a part of a network inventory solution. And our focus on network operations is based on three pillars. The ability for you to provide an entire end-to-end network topology. The topology built through discovery of the network as we get in from the, from the acquisitions and replatforming of NetACE. But then being able to provide visualization and management of complex circuits from entire logical physical and virtual networks. And also to be able to then also share with you the utilization of the resources at every layer so that you can now plan and build your network in the most optimal fashion. So that's our focus But if you combine all the three domains, the customer experience, the operations excellence, and then the network operations domain, our vision is faced is based on five key strategies, five key pillars. Number one, customer engagement. We looked at a little bit about customer engagement through the lens of ServiceBridge, but our move and our investment in customer experience is essentially going all the way on to the left by delivering not just the ServiceBridge, but also CPQ and continuing to invest in front end operations for a customer. Making sure we can modernize the experiences that our customers can get, your agents get throughout the lifecycle from lead and opportunity management to order management and service delivery. Customer success is a brand new domain, especially for technology customers, it's a new capability that we are launching in a Xanadu release coming up in August. Customer success is all about once you onboard a technology customer, how do you make sure you're monitoring the adoption, the success of your contract that you're signing with your customers? ServiceNow is a technology company. We ourselves do this today. When we sign a contract with a customer, we wanna make sure that a customer is onboarded successfully, but we also wanna make sure that every step of the milestone that we have with a customer, we are ensuring that you're delivering to your outcomes, to your objectives, making sure your contract is delivering to your business outcomes, and also making sure your adoption of the products is in the right capacity. That's what customer success is. Under the module that we are launching as part of a service management domain. Service management continues to become the cornerstone of ServiceNow for our TMT customers. We continue to invest in making sure that we are aligning to industry standards such as TMT Forum from a telecom industry, and also MEF. Network operations, as I mentioned, the visualization capabilities that we're launching in network inventory combined with discovery and activation help us loop the entire end-to-end fully automated solution that we wanna provide to our customers. Providing level four automation from discovery to the time of management of your network, order management and orchestration assurance, all the way down to activation. And the last bit infusing generative AI throughout the life cycle. Generative AI into domain of customer service. So how we can create deflection of cases using knowledge management and knowledge articles, how we can make agents more productive by summarizing cases, summarizing incidents, making sure they have access to the knowledge in the right place. And then also at every level of the operations domain. Those are the five key pillars of a strategy. And with that, I really wanna thank you for your time. Thanks to both of our speakers that were here to share about the vision of Verizon and also from Cognizant. And for next steps, please see us at the show floor here, look at the demonstrations from our teams. Please attend the technology roadmap session that's later this afternoon to look at what we are investing and get further details into our innovation coming up in the next few releases. Customers, Equinix is gonna be sharing today on their transformation and also connect to the panelists in the service ecosystem for ServiceBridge. But thank you for your attention this afternoon and hope you have a great rest of the conference.