BT & ServiceNow’s View on AI, Platforms and Telecom Evolution

Romit Ghose:

It's really to go after those high value problems which have remained unsolved for generations now that we have a unique opportunity to solve. And we're giving our customers that layer of comfort with risk and security and governance on top that our system integrators can bring together for them. And the sky's the limit.

AI success is built on blended teams

Romit Ghose:

The customers who are most successful with their AI deployments today are the ones where the product managers, the engineers from product, the system integrator engineers and business analysts, or the customers on in-house staff are indistinguishable. They work as a common unit. And because the technology is moving so fast, my organization's roadmap is rapidly evolving. So I think it's too much to expect of either a system integrator or even the customer to stay abreast with that on such a rapid scale. The technology moves fast. We include it, adopt it, and react to it instantly. And it is important that we therefore are there on the front lines with our system integrator partners as well as with our customers to actually take it to fruition. So we're seeing more and more of this and truly the telcos which are adopting this model and are working really, really closely with us are the ones that are most successful.

Value is created where technology meets real work

Samad Masood:

What's your view on this managing quite complex set of relationships, technologies, what would be your advice to peers and other telcos, what have you found works best?

Hena Shamim Jalil:

I would proudly say that actually the service implementation that we've done together as a team has been one of the big successful transformations in BT and that's a testament to how the teams have worked together but also that focus on the outcome and the value that we've been talking about. The amount of time that ServiceNow colleagues or Infosys colleagues have actually sat with our agents understanding the problem, kind of understanding the roots of the problem and then trying to solve rather than wait for requirements to be given and fed to them. The world has moved on. It's not about writing boring requirements and getting somebody to deliver it. It is about how can we as a team drive value for customers and keeps coming back to that.

The shift from fixing problems to solving systems

Hena Shamim Jalil:

I think when you have a very siloed mentality where you've got a problem and you're trying to fix things tactically a bit here because you need to hit the numbers and essentially different aspects of problems that you're solving separately. Or what you do is then step back a bit and holistically say, what's the big problem we're trying to solve and look at things end-to-end. And I think that's the big jump that needs to be made as a frontier telco.

Stop fragmentation. Build platforms. Scale relentlessly.

Samad Masood:

For those who are sort of approaching this, what would you say your recommendations would be to what would you stop doing, and what would you scale?

Hena Shamim Jalil:

So I would say stopping trying to solve siloed problems and the old ways of sorting things out, it doesn't work anymore. AI is a massive tool that we've been blessed with and I think we need to leverage it to, as much as possible. So that's like stopping the ways of the old. And then what do we start? I think we've done a lot of focus on building platforms and ServiceNow is a classic platform which we have leveraged to drive maximum value, but then how do you then deal with all the complexities around it whether it's monitoring tools, how you put dinotrays on top, all of those things need to come together with a very strong platform foundation that you are really absolutely focused on. So that is really important. And the last piece around that is scale, because it's okay to have a great platform, but if you don't have scale and adoption, it doesn't drive the value.

AI becomes real when platforms orchestrate everything

Samad Masood:

What's the kind of functionality that most people are turning to ServiceNow?

Romit Ghose:

Well, even before the AI storm hit all of us, ServiceNow had emerged already and established itself as an operational platform of choice for a lot of telcos to manage network management, customer service in the front office, and bridge it all together. Functions like order management, quoting, etc. as well have burgeoned on the platform. But as AI became ubiquitous and the need for us to essentially not only incorporate it, but make our platform that AI-powered, AI native platform came about, I think it felt like our abilities and workflow are, I hesitate to use the word domination, but our proficiency in being able to orchestrate work end-to-end on a single platform, on a single data model, it's really started to shine in this era of AI. It almost feels like we've been preparing for this moment for the last 20 years in ServiceNow. We have always had a very conscious strategy of making sure that whenever we acquire a piece of technology, we harmonize it with our data models so that our customers and our system integrator partners don't have to deal with a Frankenstein mess of data and processes. And that is also holding us in great stead.

So we're able to very quickly turn around AI-native business outcomes for our customers today. We're seeing projects, agentic AI projects in critical functions like complex case management go live in a span of a month from soup to nuts. And it's got a lot to do with how we've harmonized our data model over time, how we've stayed open in terms of interoperability in talking to other systems in the landscape with sometimes a zero-copy connector, sometimes an iceberg format of data management. So that is why you're likely hearing about us a lot.

AI value compounds only when built for scale

Jinu Koshy:

So what I've seen this year one, we are talking about laying the foundation. And that's what we've achieved within Infosys. Lay the foundation, and as we look at it, get the data right.

Make sure that as we get into year two, the business case for the year two, we're looking at doing the ROI at something of the order of 20 to 30% of mean time to resolve kind of benefits. These are orders of magnitude.

And then as we go into year three, we get higher order benefits as well.

Efficiency funds growth, but growth drives transformation

Hena Shamim Jalil:

I think telcos historically have focused too much on cost consolidation and not enough on growth. And I do think as we leverage some of the partnerships that we have built as well, it's also, for example, all our service agents are capable of selling as well, which has not been the case previously. That's a massive, you know, workforce that we've created by the efficiencies that we have done. So focusing on understanding your customers, serving them better, always returns to much more outcome and growth, in my opinion.

The future runs on customer-centric operating models

Samad Masood:

What are your views on the steering layer at that top, like how you oversee responsible clients, ethics, orchestration? How are you tackling that?

Hena Shamim Jalil:

I think for us it is about how do we set up an operating model of the future service. So it's not about just implementing technology, but it's how you reimagine your service operating model in a fashion which is organized around customer events and life points and respond to that a lot better than just solving point problems for them. And what we have been working with working in the B2B space, is in partnership with our business stakeholders, how do we evolve the service organization to leverage best value out of the two?

The winners will be those who stay ahead of what’s next

Hena Shamim Jalil:

We don't know the challenges of tomorrow. And it's really important that we are in a good position with this platform thinking and that sort of thing. But with AI coming in, what does next year look like? I mean, Jinu went on about year one, year two, year three, and I was thinking, what's going to happen year four? And that's something we need to stay 100 steps ahead of.