Hyperautomation technology speeds digital transformation

Transcript

Sabrina Polin: Hi, I'm Sabrina Polin with TechTarget and I'll be talking with Yoav Boaz of ServiceNow about the digital acceleration in light of the pandemic and the technology needed for it. To read more about digital acceleration in the enterprise, click the link above or in the description below.

The pandemic was a big reset for companies, underscoring the urgent need for digitization and whetting the enterprise's appetite for digital transformation. According to a 2021 Gartner survey, 70% of CEOs want to make their organizations more digital. But, IT resources are stretched and talent is scarce. Yoav, how are companies and, in particular, their CIOs going to accelerate their digital efforts?

Yoav Boaz: Thank you, Sabrina. So, what we see with the CIOs we're talking to, they are kind of squished between two demands. One, from the business, they need to accelerate their product delivery. They need to deliver superior customer and employee experiences. On the other hand, they do have budgets that are limited and so on. And the way they approach it, they understand the need to break the silos between the front, the middle and the back offices in order to do that.

ServiceNow identified three imperatives for digital transformation by the CIO. One is around velocity. How do you deliver the goods that you do deliver faster and in much higher quality? How do you measure that, and how do you improve over time? The second is intelligence. How do you automate some things that are manual today, or people are busy in doing, and how can you avoid that -- and you're leveraging here technologies like machine learning and AI, hyperautomation, and so on. And the third is experience, because this transformation has to be visible to your end customers. Otherwise, they wouldn't know that you even did that.

So, I'll give you an example from an industry. I'm sure, Sabrina, you like to eat pizza, like myself. And if you look at the last few years, at the performance of Domino's Pizza compared to Pizza Hut or Papa John's, you will see something remarkable: They outperform their competition just because of the customer experience. When you order online Domino's Pizza today, you can see where the pizza is -- whether it's in the oven, or maybe it's been prepared and maybe it's on the way. And you can do that over phone, over text, over web, even over Slack. So it's an omnichannel experience that makes you want to buy more pizza with Domino's. And if you look at their stock performance over the last three years, then Domino's Pizza almost doubled their stock price while Pizza Hut and Papa John's made about 20, 21% increase respectively. So you can see how something like digital transformation connecting the back office, even for a pizza place, to the front office and deliver that superior experience to you as a pizza lover can make the difference for the company and make them grow dramatically over the last three years.

Polin: So, there's also been a lot of hype around hyperautomation and robotic process automation, in particular, as a gateway. How do you define hyperautomation? How does it work? And what are the types of technologies that are needed?

Boaz: Sure. So, for us at ServiceNow, as we deliver the platforms, hyperautomation means that you break the silos between the different discrete automation capabilities that you have within the technology stack today.

And let's take an example of a loan process. If we take that process end to end, I can easily share how hyperautomation can help them. For example, the interaction with a customer -- it can be done through a virtual agent. So I can sit on my, whether it's my phone or my web browser, and get a bunch of questions from a virtual agent that will ask me all the relevant questions and will take me to collecting all the information that suits what they need in order to produce the loan. Then you can take AI and cluster similar answers to what I gave, maybe two answers you gave, or someone else. Once the loan officer gets in, you have a lot of orchestration, collecting information from the different third parties -- the lender, the credit bureaus, the underwriter -- both ways, through RPA technologies and orchestration. It's also involving integration with a lot of systems. Then once you compare the offers, as we said today, to produce to me the right offer and so on, you can leverage again AI and predictive analytics. What happened in the past with customers like myself? What did they choose, and why did you choose that? And what happened with their loans? And to communicate with all the stakeholders, it's a lot around orchestration and collaboration. All of this can be automated, or a lot of this, with hyperautomation. And not to mention on top of it, this is a business process getting along. And on top of it, what you can run is what we call in ServiceNow process optimization and process mining.

So, we had an end-to-end business process. The question is, can we optimize it? Did we collect all the right information? How do we categorize all the information along the way? What are the bottlenecks? So, think about the plethora of areas that technology can be used in order to make your life as a consumer and a future homeowner much, much better. So, bringing all these together is hyperautomation, and everything is built into our platform and we deliver that to customers to build their solution on top of.

Polin: What do you think digital transformation is going to look like in five years?

Boaz: So, as our CEO says, it's a race with no finish line. The minute you adjust yourself and you deliver the digital experience, the bar is getting higher and higher. And I can give you a few stats. As an example, out of the Fortune 500 companies, between the 2000s and 2010s, 25 of them dropped out of being in the Fortune 500 -- meaning 25% of the companies that we have today, roughly the Fortune 500, will disappear. And the reason they disappear: They cannot imagine and reenvision how they can do business differently. We talked about omnichannel experience, right? I want to interact with you as a customer in different ways and keep contact as you interact with connecting the back office, the middle office and the front office to deliver your superior experience.