Chris Bedi, ServiceNow’s chief digital-information officer.
ServiceNow
Chris Bedi is ServiceNow’s chief digital-information officer. “We know we’re early innings, especially with gen AI, but we are pushing on it hard.”Bedi’s insights are part of Business Insider’s year-end leadership series, “Looking Ahead 2024.”
For the cloud-software provider ServiceNow, this year’s advances in artificial intelligence have opened a lot of doors.
The software-as-a-service provider is “aggressively pursuing our ambition to absolutely be an AI-first company,” Chris Bedi, the chief digital-information officer at ServiceNow, told Business Insider. “We know we’re early innings, especially with gen AI, but we are pushing on it hard.”
The $140 billion company’s cloud-based offerings include service management, operations management, and business management. And Bedi said he knows that if generative AI, or gen AI, is used correctly, it will save hours of work and help bolster the careers of workers using it.
Part of integrating and understanding AI is training ServiceNow’s 22,000 employees. The company had its first AI learning day recently, which brought the whole company together. It included panels of both internal and external speakers to “demystify it a bit and give a learning path,” Bedi said.
While ServiceNow focuses on gen-AI solutions and use cases, it also measures employee satisfaction. “Do they feel like it’s actually additive to their job or is it kind of a nonstarter?” Bedi asked.
“Humans don’t necessarily run to the technology — they sometimes run away from it,” he said. “We’re trying to move fast while we’re bringing our human capital along.”
Bedi said teams involved in IT, HR, and customer-support operations don’t feel threatened by generative AI. “Their sentiment is around 64% of them believe it’s helping boost productivity,” he said.
The teams that heavily rely on gen AI are seeing “it’s freeing up 25% to 30% of their time, but we’re using that time so they can serve our clients better. So they’re actually viewing it as a career progression for them.”
The challenge that ServiceNow and all companies face is around fast innovation, “but also we take care of governance, safety, and ethics” around AI, Bedi said.
ServiceNow wants to “create better experiences because we all know experiences done the right way can drive the right behavioral and economic impacts.” The company also said, “we shouldn’t have any decision made without an accompanying AI-based recommendation,” Bedi added.
Bedi’s insights are part of BI’s year-end leadership package, “Looking Ahead 2024,” which digs into vision, strategy, and challenges across corporate America.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are you looking forward to most for 2024?
I’ll use one word: innovation. I think that there is so much technology capability available to CIOs and CTOs around the world, and just using all of it to innovate in a way that serves customers better, drives the company forward, frees employees up from the toil they’ve been in. That, to me, is going to be really fun.
What is your biggest concern for 2024?
I’ll be the broken-record CDIO and say cyber. It’s just not getting easier [protecting against cyber attacks and data hacks], it’s getting harder. And so that’s one thing, but also data [can also be manipulated] which then change algorithmic outputs, data labeling, wipeouts — stuff like that. I worry about threats which are yet to emerge.
What is one thing you think you got right in 2023?
We started experimenting and doing stuff with gen AI super early. And it’s yielding benefit now because we’re alive on like 15 things across five or six departments. So jumping on it early.
What is one thing you think you got wrong in 2023?
I would say underestimating how quickly gen AI would progress. It went a lot faster than I thought. It’s amazing to think that it was just last November, December. And the speed has been amazing.