Orica has emerged as an early adopter of generative AI in ServiceNow to deflect IT service desk inquiries to chatbots and self-service, certainly one of 35 potential use instances in IT operations.
Orica’s Bradley Hunt (proper) at ServiceNow World Forum Melbourne 2024.
The maker of explosives and blasting methods joined the early entry program for Now Assist, a group of generative AI instruments that may increase a ServiceNow occasion.
Orica’s capability to get up to now was two years within the making. It had a decade-old ServiceNow occasion that, whereas useful, had “drifted” from its out-of-the-box state over time, supervisor of DevOps and regional apps Bradley Hunt instructed the current ServiceNow World Forum Melbourne 2024.
“About two years ago we made the decision that we would reimplement ServiceNow, and we undertook a 12-month re-platforming journey with Thirdera to get us back to that greenfield out-of-the-box position,” Hunt mentioned.
Thirdera is a ServiceNow companion owned by Cognizant.
Moving off the older occasion, and to a largely greenfields one, meant that Orica might implement quite a lot of newer features.
“In the last 18 months, we’ve done everything that you can imagine,” Hunt mentioned.
“We’ve rolled out digital agent, lifecycle occasions for HR and authorized service supply. We’ve completed cloud discovery, occasion administration, rolled out about 10-to-15 integrations and three customized apps.
“But more importantly we were able to start our AI journey.”
The firm’s preliminary foray into AI concerned utilizing Now Assist to hook up with an exterior giant language mannequin (LLM) run via the Azure OpenAI service.
“We built a few little proof-of-concepts within ITSM,” Hunt mentioned. “They were custom but worked well and proved that there is value in this.”
When ServiceNow launched its personal Now LLM, Orica switched to utilizing that.
“We managed to make use of [a ServiceNow accelerator] program, and in six weeks we rolled out incident summarisation, resolution note generation and AI search [powered by Now Assist],” Hunt mentioned.
“Two weeks later we rolled out virtual agent [capabilities].”
Hunt mentioned that worth realisation from these preliminary use instances proved a blended bag.
“Some areas you see more value, some less,” he mentioned.
“Resolution notes and summarisation, whereas actually cool for Orica, there wasn’t numerous tangible value financial savings or worth from that. It saves a couple of minutes right here and there, which is superior and the groups prefer it.
“But different areas that we didn’t count on like summarising dwell chats, that’s our most used [generative AI] ‘skill’, and AI search is a fan favorite for patrons.
“Being able to search, ‘How do I reset my password?’ and have the summary there, not needing to click on knowledge articles, that was really big.”
Having demonstrated worth, Orica then introduced in Thirdera to “turn on all the other Now Assist skills for us.”
This included a information era talent, which makes use of incident information to robotically create a information article.
While nonetheless very early days – Orica had been utilizing Now Assist for simply two months in manufacturing on the time of its presentation – Hunt mentioned that worth realisation and outcomes have been “very positive”.
“If you look at virtual agent [alone], the deflection rate [has gone] from 18 to 94 percent, [which] is just a massive increase,” he mentioned.
“Success charge has doubled, so folks are actually finishing extra flows and so they’re deflecting extra tickets, and meaning they arrive again to the digital agent, and utilization per thirty days virtually doubled.
“If you combine that with higher success, higher deflection, more chats, it’s just a massive benefit to the service desk.”
Hunt added that about 75 % of digital agent engagement is initiated via Microsoft Teams.
On AI search – which reduces time spent trawling information base articles for solutions – Hunt mentioned it was “a bit too early” to know deflection charges.
He mentioned, nonetheless, that Now Assist had aided in lowering imply time to decision (MTTR) of incidents throughout the board.
“We’re two months into this, [and] we’ve dropped a day already [from MTTR]. That’s across all incidents,” Hunt mentioned.
Hunt’s group is making use of a particular Now Assist dashboard in ServiceNow to know “which skills are being used, in what regions, and what teams are using what skills over time.”
He estimated that it could take one other six months to a yr to have Now Assist working as Orica had envisioned.
The firm plans to make use of language help capabilities within the instrument extra, because it helps 12 languages throughout its world operations.
It additionally needs to enhance its deflection charges from service desk brokers to the digital agent or AI over time, and doubtlessly broaden Now Assist into extra components of IT operations past IT service administration.
“It’s all well and good service management, but can we take it to other areas of IT operations? Can we do alerts and event management and summarisation of those? Can we do software asset management? Can we start taking Now Assist to the other areas of IT operations to help them out?” Hunt mentioned.
Ry Crozier travelled to Melbourne to attend ServiceNow World Forum Melbourne 2024 as a visitor of ServiceNow.
