foreign the oldest podcast is brought to you by all this International supplying your expert Ai and digital transformation staffing needs across the U.S and Europe today you are listening to our servicenow Series where we interview the best and brightest of the industry to share their story advice and views on the exciting world of servicenow and digital transformation [Music] hi everyone it is Mark Kelly here Chief Christmas officer and co-founder of all this I hope everyone is doing really really well today I am delighted to welcome Cali Alexander to our podcast today Kali is customer Advocate at glory fast Kelly thank you so much for joining us on our podcast today I'm delighted and excited to be here mark thank you for having me so can you tell us a little bit about you and your journey into the world of servicenow interesting Journey so I am what I would one would consider to be a midlife career pivoter I spent a lot of my time in education I've taught everything from first grade fourth grade trigonometry even I've taught yoga even my first job was as a my very first job when I was a preteen was as a tutor as a 10 year old or 11 year old or so I used to teach or tutor Young Elementary students I later went on to teach yoga and teach teachers how to teach yoga and let International yoga retreats as a mother of three young children a single mother and three young children I always wanted to be the type of mother that was available to her children as like the soccer mom the karate mom the dance mom really wanted to be available to my children in the same way that my mom was available to me and I found that teaching was the way to be able to do that my children can go to the same school that I taught at and it worked out pretty well for a Time then I transitioned into teaching yoga so that way I could be able to be a little bit more available because they were all going to different schools and as my my youngest child started to get later into her high school years I said okay I know that I'm going to Career transition into Tech but I didn't quite know in what Lane in what capacity I just know that that would be the Avenue for me later on a really great mentor was going through a servicenow implementation and she said hey I know that you're looking to Career transition and knowing how your brain works I think servicenow will be the path for you and at that time servicenow was offering free training for their servicenow administrative fundamentals course and they were also offering a free voucher to take the system admin administrative certification upon successful completion of the course I dived in both feet and I was just I there was no turning back I spent hours I would set myself up on a schedule to study from 3 A.M to 5 a.m before while the house was still quiet and then I would study again at the end of the night another additional two hours and I just studied and studied and studied and eventually things started to make sense and I really started to love the platform and all the functionality and I was looking for a way to get in front of employers because I knew that I could do the self-paced learning through the wonderful now learning portal that servicenow provides but I couldn't figure out how to get in front of employers so that's when I started to start a LinkedIn Journey where I started showing my learnings through live stream video directly on LinkedIn to hopefully catch the an employer's attention and so that's how my journey began and I ended up getting a great job at Glide fast Consulting Elite service now partner of the year two years in a row and I couldn't be happier great story and I loved how intentional you were about as your you your kids were growing older you were able to position the private parents you wanted to be and actually add the most value there as well and then how conscious and intently were in terms of moving into the tech industry and taking outside of the box and the diligence then so obviously your why was so ingrained that it just made sense to be able to put this into practice with the studying that you did and showing that it can be done right and uh it's obviously very very difficult and challenging to to do that but you but here you are now um as well so for people that don't necessarily know much about knowledge we we we were at knowledge 23 we didn't see each other out there but we're at we're at knowledge quite recently tell me about your experience Elvis how did you find you know meeting different people going to the keynote where Bill was uh what was your what was your takeaways listen I say this and I truly mean it knowledge23 my first knowledge conference it was absolutely electrifying from the moment that I stepped into the Venetian Hotel there was a buzz it was almost like as I was approaching the Venetian Hotel you could tell that it was just slightly off the foundation you could tell that there was something really amazing that was taking place inside and again like I did with my learning I just dived right in two things that I wanted to accomplish at knowledge and one of them was to see the keynote addressed by servicenow CEO and chairman of the board Bill McDermott and the second one was to meet people to get some face-to-face time with folks who I had either communicated online with or I had heard of and to meet new folks but to tell you a little bit about the keynote address one of the things I was really happy about was hearing how Bill McDermott doubled down on his commitment to rise up and that's the Bold ambition to skill up one million people on the servicenow platform by the end of 2024. now we've heard of rise up before in the ecosystem but to really hear him take that stage and say look this is not just some lip service but this is what we're gonna do and this is why it's important one of the things that he pointed out about that initiative which I think is really important for us to to underscore here is that he also talked about how the partnership with he later announced with Nvidia but how generative AI in particular is going to allow for the creation of more jobs more interesting jobs within the servicenow ecosystem and how that's going to allow for the creation of these super applications so I'm really curious and really enthusiastic to see what these super applications will look like with the partnership with Nvidia with the use of generative AI in a later address or in a later interview he did he did it with Jensen Wong I believe his name is he is the CEO of Nvidia and he they did that interview right on the East the knowledge 23 event floor he talked about they talked about how generative AI is the now the present and the future for service now so that was really exciting to be there for that grand announcement we have these little pivot Points within history right and I think that generative AI not only is it top of my tip of tongue for folks but this is an inflection point that's going to be really important for how we how we navigate our world so I'm excited that servicenow is at the Forefront of that yeah what's really interesting is is here you look at like open Ai and how they've been able to use chat gbt is they've now given an interface for people to utilize this technology that was there already but now people can come up with different case studies and actually bring those case studies to Market through different types of plugins and one of the ones that I saw was on Starbucks in terms of how in that live demo by the CEO was looking at creating code during that you know creating a new feature a saving between 60 to 90 minutes but that code was just being generated and then you also had the Starbucks employee being able to liaise in a variety of different ways where they could summarize some of the issues from a customer complaint into one small paragraph making it easier than to respond in real time or when the person wanted to collect their coffee at one hotel but actually pivoted to say actually I'm changing plans I want to collect in a different Hotel how they could start use all these different types of services and really having a problem worth solving being applied and because you know maybe argumentatively before you could look at AI being used for problems that didn't nest and everything needed to be solved but now these case studies were in business are allowing people to be more successful and on yeah like you're truly inspired to see what's going to come down the track and what where's this value going to be ahead from speaking even the guys at Microsoft they were talking about the co-pilot they have with PowerPoint where you got to sit down oh and you're going to go write in your presentation or prepare me a presentation on this topic or provide me inspiration ideas on this topic and then it will create this presentation and show you ideas if possible the art that are possible and so it is a particularly exciting point so me like you didn't intend any uh sessions per se but we were kind of going around on the floor interacting and meeting people at the stance engaging seeing what the community was like what what type of insights did you take from that yeah I I got a chance to meet a ton of people there was that electrifying energy that I mentioned at the beginning of our talk was embedded within that event floor I got a chance to not just talk to my colleagues that I work with at Glide bass and get some face-to-face time with them but I got a chance to even see uh and talk to my mentors people like Rob for Doric I got a chance to talk to Chuck tomasi and his wife Donna tomasi I got a chance to spend some really great time with guy fast CEO Mark Michael Lombardo and talk a lot about like what's next for Glide fast which I was really excited about Glide fast was also hosting Glide Fest which is our all hands on deck event simultaneously in Las Vegas so that was very exciting to be able to be a part of both of those events both knowledge as well as Glide Fest but in terms of some of the takeaways I want to just kind of point out here is that similar to what we're talking about here is that everybody is very interested in what is next and what this means for servicenow and generative AI we you mentioned about how with the Starbucks situation where they could take a particular customer concern or a customer complaint and then kind of create a one line or a one sentence synopsis you know we're in a time where we're talking about those kind of a fantasy times and bringing them to actuality where you're like oh if you dream it you can achieve it but no this is not just some type of an idiom or some type of platitude but we're talking about actually taking things that we can imagine and actually giving them feet they can get grow legs and actually walk and make it a huge impact on where businesses land in this present day moment and so that's what was a lot of the conversations that I was having on that event floor was like wow this generative AI is something else and also there was still talk as well about rise up because if you notice throughout the event floor you saw these huge posters of people like Corey Wesley you saw uh Ebony acabala and some of the other faces of the rise up program what I find exciting about that is that you saw a diversity of people you saw a range of different people and you saw that hey if if they can do this then then I can do this as well that I feel like I'm empowered to also build my career and to really you know leave my footprint within the servicenow ecosystem so those are some of the conversations that I was having and I'm actually glad at least for this first go-rounded knowledge that I spent the time actually having those conversations on the event floor many of the workshops that I wanted to attend as as you know you know they quickly fill up I did not know that I needed to have a game plan and registering for the workshops I did not know that you know as soon as those work that Workshop schedule is available that I needed to right away complete the form but I'm glad that it worked out the way that it did yeah yeah it's it's it's funny how you got to mention those insights so they were there were some very very important to me and what I what I took away as well if I added just one more to that I think it was also that when you're interacting and engaging with people they were so happy just to share their experience of using the platform about how they'd benefited from us how they'd been able to to kind of take away some kind of monotonous work and then be able to do more higher value work and and feel like they're kind of challenging their creativity that was really nice to see and listen to in terms of how people are looking to succeed but also the the optimism around the platform about what the future held about how their careers could go and I feel that you know you mentioned people like Wesley um and how they're used you know it's a really nice really nice opportunity to show role models and how they actually got into their position and telling their artistic story and I think you know their stories were also authentic that people could kind of gravitate towards that and kind of see you know depending on what who you are in your background anything is is possible it's just trying to have the mindset that you know if you want to do this you can but here's a few different ways you can go about it but everyone's story is is different from from my perspective I think knowledge hit hit the mark in terms of the content uh the way to meet different people and allow people to actually share stories but it was just really really nice to see a lot of people in the room who wanted to come up with Creative Solutions to the challenges that they were having from a business perspective but what was very interesting to see was at the start of the conference they talked about servicenow.org from the not-for-profits and how those how you could drive that success and how important that was and I found that particularly interesting and you had a gentleman I think it was ND Netherlands later on in the conference who who was going blind and you he he keynoted at the start to share his experience about how excited he wanted to to get his message across and meet everybody why he could still see so there was there were so many little things that were put into place that I thought very powerful conference I like what you said about servicenow.org I thank you for bringing that up I was really inspired by the stories that were shared by the president of servicenow.org whose name slips my mind I believe her first name is Vanessa however but I just wanted to shout her out because it was some really inspiring work that she was talking about during her talk talking about how these non-profit organizations and agencies are empowered by the the the the power of service now so it was really great to hear those stories you also mentioned about the optimism on the floor and I thought this was really cool and you probably will remember this as well throughout the event floor you would see in these big bold face letters the word yes and these bright green letters throughout the event floor so eat optimism is definitely a word that kind of floated throughout the entire event space and a number of levels either whether it was just actually having the word yes on the event floor or in those conversations about people's Journeys about you know people's business challenges about how people are not just having these challenges but how they're using these how they're using service now to overcome overcome their business challenges so and you're very right on the money when you talk about how servicenow knowledge23 hit the mark in that level where do you see my final course where do you see the the platform evolving to what where do you kind of if your future goes look at this wow that's a really great question when I look into the future where do I see servicenow you know what I I really believe I believe that service now is going to be something that we're going to see early on in young people's lives in terms of career paths so for example we see folks that are going through college and then they eventually come to service now but I think that the way that we're that the way that servicenow is growing so rapidly I think that we'll start to find that you'll find high schoolers talking about servicenow as a career path at that stage in their lives and building upon that early on so it's not something that they later come to because maybe a career counselor or maybe a program that is for post uh post-senior year postgraduate work I think people start to come to service now at an earlier stage in their lives yeah I definitely think there's something in that Kelly Alexander thank you very much for joining us on our podcast today thank you so much for having me Mark [Music] thanks for listening to this episode of the oldest podcast if you enjoyed today's episode don't forget to subscribe rate and review we are available on Apple podcasts Spotify and any Android podcast of choice you can also head over to our website www.aldis.com to listen to more podcasts view our open roles and stay up to date with industry news thanks for listening and stay tuned for more great episodes coming very soon foreign [Music]