- ServiceNow said its GenAI product for customer service is the fastest growing product in its history
- BT’s business-to-business group is trialing the product
- So far, the GenAI app is helping reduce BT case summary times by 55%
BT has been working with the IT management company ServiceNow for a few years, consolidating network management onto ServiceNow’s platform. But recently, BT has been working with ServiceNow on some generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) applications.
The initial GenAI apps are being developed and trialed in BT’s business-to-business group, but the British service provider has plans to extend GenAI to its consumer business and also for internal employee use.
Alex Bell, CIO for business-to-business service at BT, said there are 56 tools that BT uses to track customer engagement. “When a customer calls in, we capture details of that case,” said Bell. “What’s happened in telcos is they’ve grown organically, and each product can have a different way of connecting with customers.”
“We’re moving all that into ServiceNow and super-charging it with AI,” Bell added.
ServiceNow’s GenAI application — called Now Assist — will be able to read through a customer’s case and quickly summarize it to assist a human customer service representative to solve the problem.
“Our customers will contact us via voice, email or chat, and that information all gets stored in a case,” explained Bell. “Sometimes those cases are complicated. This is where GenAI is coming into the picture, understanding the language that’s coming in to interpret what’s going on in a case, understanding what the customer is after. Gen AI is reading the case, summarizing it, here’s the problem, here’s what we can do. This is all about augmenting and improving service.”
In the initial rollout to 300 agents, Now Assist reduced the time it takes agents to generate case summaries by 55%, and it also reduced the time it takes to review complex case notes by 55%.
Amdocs is doing something similar with GenAI. It’s created a smart agent for customer care, which it’s trialing with several telco customers. Amdocs says when a customer calls with a question about their bill, it can take up to 15 minutes for the customer service rep to review their bill history and come up with an answer. Using the Amdoc’s Amaiz platform, that time can be cut down to 30 seconds.
Rohit Batra, GM and VP of Telecommunications at ServiceNow, said Now Assist is the fastest growing product in the history of ServiceNow.
“Now Assist can sit on top of legacy systems such as Amdocs or Salesforce, while the core business logic continues to remain in legacy systems,” said Batra. “Over time, you can turn off those other systems and move to ServiceNow.”
Bell said that BT is about mid-way through its rollout of Now Assist within its B2B business. That rollout will be completed by 2026. And then BT will move forward with rollouts to its consumer business.
Where’s the data?
ServiceNow has built a large language model (LLM), collaborating with Nvidia and the open source group Hugging Face. “We’ve now trained that with our ServiceNow-related information,” said Batra. “We continue to keep that training updated based on feedback and getting more data into the platform.”
The LLM is kept in ServiceNow data centers. “Everything happens in our data centers,” Batra said. “We believe our strategy is unique. The data never leaves the data center. It never goes across the public internet. The strategy is extremely secure.”
There’s a movement afoot for companies to build LLM’s that are specific for their needs. And ServiceNow is following that trend. Batra said, “It’s a small, large language model.”
ServiceNow’s pedigree
ServiceNow’s core business has always been service management. Its first app was IT service management, which helps IT departments track incidents, create tickets and solve problems. About 85% of the Fortune 500 enterprises use ServiceNow for IT.
In the telecom realm, ServiceNow is working with BT and also Bell Canada.
BT uses ServiceNow’s platform above its network monitoring systems. “We’ve got very capable network monitoring systems, alarms, and other systems monitoring the IT estate,” Bell said. “ServiceNow acts as a layer above all those.”
