[Music] hi and welcome to another episode of the service now Enterprise agility podcast I'm Fred Champlain your host and agile evangelist at service now in our strategic portfolio management business unit and today with me is James Ramsey who is a product management director in strategic portfolio management today we'll chat about the role of Enterprise architecture in AI transformations so welcome James you've been working with Genai since it was introduced on the service now platform assisting customers with their AI transformation strategies what can you tell us about how EA is key to AI Transformations well hello Fred and thank you for the invite so I think F first and foremost um as you mentioned I've been working with customers around Ai and generative AI over the last uh two plus years and it is by by far the most um popular topic I have talking with customers everybody wants to talk about AI everybody wants to do Ai and thinking about it from a transformation perspective those that have been successful in AI are are planning out how they want to transfer transform planning out and trying to understand how it's going to um impact their organization both from a change process perspective but also in terms of how people are going to do do their day-to-day jobs so there's a number of things really common common thought of threads that that I see um I mean firstly I think and the important thing often when people talk about right we're going to do an AI transformation they're thinking not thinking in the immediate terms think maybe we're looking in 25 through 26 but really everybody needs to think about it this is this is here and now you know organizations are expecting to have a an AI strategy and be able to deliver on it you can see pressure coming top down with an organization where some somebody on the sea level suite is asking right what are we doing about Ai and then that Pain's being passed down the organization to uh the rank compile in terms of what they need to do in terms of actually showing some value back to the organization in actually having a use case that's delivering value back to the organization that's right James and and I I think my sense is that um organizations Enterprises uh have been spending the past you know a year and a half or so really understanding gen Ai and and many companies have had AI um including service now before gen AI hit the scene uh AI itself has has been underway for for um sometime and and so for Gen though we're we're transitioning now kind of from that exploratory and experimentation learning stage of of real deep Innovation and now we see our customers moving more towards actual implementation so when we think about Enterprise architecture uh and now we think about okay how are we going to take these these uh learnings and and the opportunities we have uh where do they fit in our landscape right with with our our Enterprise architecture uh with our customer Journeys uh with our business architecture where do we set these for for Best Value so James as you think about that and and you know that strategic Innovation that comes with that um what do what do you see you know Gardener's been out to say clearly that 70% of digital Transformations um are subject to failure um what are your thoughts around that yeah well I think you hit the nail on the head there to be with you you've got this as I said this this Dash we need to do something with AI and there's lots of cool technology and you know organizations are having like you know success in terms of experimenting around those Technologies and are achieving some real results but as you said the the shift has now moved from lots and lots of experiments to right if I'm if I'm going to start Under the Umbrella of s the business transformation how I'm going to then best leverage AI across the organization you know conversation now look in terms of well how do I start and then how do I how do I show that value and and back to that that g step my my key perimeter on all of this is you need to treat AI the roll out of AI in organization just like you would any other strategic initiative and as Gartner mentions High proportion of digital Investments are likely to fail because organizations are taking that strategic portfolio management approach in terms of connecting where they're going to invest in a back to strategy but then looking in terms of ensuring as they Define what that strategy is connecting to the execution and the delivery processes to ensure we we're actually delivering on that strategy and without SPM you not going to be able to achieve that and that's what pulls into this this view then from from an interi architecture perspective because if you think about SPM it's all about strategic planning defining that strategic road map and then executing on it but fundamental to that strategic planning activity is the role of Enterprise architecture so where through strategic planning that is then through giving the strategy Vision to our Enterprise architects who are then looking at planning in terms of where we are today and modeling where we need to go tomorrow and now from an AI perspective that's increasingly looking at how we're going to map and leverage AI Technologies in that future estate it's fundamental that the EA Community are tied into that strategic planning process and again that's the benefit of of Leverage in that strategic portfolio management framework [Music]