[Music] the Aldis podcast is brought to you by Aldis International supplying your expert Ai and digital transformation staffing needs across the US and Europe today you are listening to our service now Series where we interview the best and brightest of the industry to share their story advice and views on the exciting world of service now and digital transformation [Music] hello everybody it's Mark Kelly Chief customer officer and co-founder of ald this I hope you're doing well wherever you are in the world today I'd like to welcome you to the AL this service Now podcast Series today we're excited to have Greg aldana Greg is service now global area vice president of creative workflows special solution Consulting and here is our distinguished guest today and we're going to engage with Greg on the foref font of service now's low code creative workflows app engine highlighting his role in strategic grow and goto Market strategies and you're going to expect to gain insights on fostering synergies across sales marketing development and understand how Greg is steering the low Cod app engine development platform business to new heights so you got to tune in for an enlightened discussion on the Innovation and Leadership and genuinely I think we could have probably 10 episodes with Greg on the podcast because there's so much to delve into so Greg thank you very much for joining us on the show today firstly oh well thank thanks for having me Mark it's my my pleasure to be here and like you said uh I think this is I get to talk with you for for a half hour about my favorite Topic in the world so this is great brilliant so Greg firstly just tell me a brief overview about your role I I know I kind of talked about it there but if you might just go into a little bit more detail fantastic yeah well um I so so I work for service now and and I've been here for the better part of seven years um I lead service now's uh pre-sale solution Consulting team for an area of the company called Creator workflows and that really is is service now's portfolio of low code application development tools you know called app engine all of our Automation and integration Tools around um you know our integration Hub to connect with systems with apis or RPA Technologies robotic process automation all of our document intels and now what everybody's interested all of our generative AI text to code text to flow text to app technology and so really what pre-sales and what solution Consulting is is really the technical consultative arm of sales you know we're a software company when you go out and you sell software and you know we we have companies with with long-term contracts they want to get into technically how will this work what is it capable of how should I architect this so we get to go out and have those very deep business and Architectural conversations with our customers our most strategic customers um you know before during and after the sale you know I always I I laugh mark because the term pre-sales is like well we're supposed to come in before the sale well in this day and age with subscription based cloud-based software where does the pre and the postales stop the the you know the the postales is really just the pre-sales for the renewal or the upsell and so it's it's it's it's a Non-Stop job but it is fun because we really get to partner and and collaborate with our customers in this it's not like us telling them what to do you know I learn as much from my customers as they learned from me so um it's a dream job I love it here so you know what that's that's a great point because the cheese is always moving and everybody is a teacher the kind of teacher studenting is kind of thing of the past right this is this is kind of a separate a separate area because there's just so much information there's so much data and the things are changing so quickly that it's it's very very hard to to to keep up it it it it really is and uh you know I do a lot of traveling for for the company you know you know in this kind of global role in fact I'm going going to Tokyo this weekend um I probably meet with about 200 to 250 cios and CTO and different Business Leaders a year in different Industries and in different countries and different cultures and that's really critical um to learn what's what are the trends what are what's going on in different Industries and different markets where can you kind of share best practices from one area of the world one industry with another and I get to take all of this information back and I share it with our investment team with our product team I have a meeting this afternoon our quarterly product review where I'm going to share a lot of that Insight you know by by staying in touch with customers and really talking with them on a weekly basis you stay very close to what's going on in the industry in the market and where Trends are emerging very quickly and one of my early mentors taught me that Mark was you know don't none of this iory Tower leadership where you sit behind a desk or you sit behind a zoom or or a teams meeting get out there and I that is kind of My Credo like you've got to be talking with three or four customers every single week or you're not doing your job so yeah Greg how is hyper automation driving transformation in those different Industries you're experiencing hyper automation is is really it's an interesting concept because you know I think um you know every few years Gardener comes up with a new term for digital transformation this is the new term um but I think it is very appropriate for what's going on here right now um with the term hyper because the pace is is has has steadily you know since covid was introduced and people were remote working digital transformation the pace has increased and now with the introduction of generative AI you know we just got into to hyper mode so I think that's very apropo but we really kind of view hyper Automation and like there's really basically four pillars to it it is you know digitizing things that are manual and so digitizing processes whether you're using low code tools to to create custom things or you're using prepackaged Solutions and then it's really about Automation and then within the digitization automating all of these tasks that you have to perform in order to get work done um and whether you're using chat Bots and you're using virtual agents and and you're using all kinds of different RPA Technologies to automate tasks then there's the intelligence piece you know and if you almost kind of picture this cycle going from the digitization to the automation now to underlying intelligence generative AI machine learning artificial intelligence to take those digitized and automated processes and use intelligence to make them even more effective and perform even optimally and then finally you have to start the cycle over again with process mining tools and process optimization and looking for different ways now that the data is digitized and it's automated and it's intelligent now we have to look for ways to improve it and constantly look for new areas of optimization and new areas of digitization because hyper automation is it is a cycle it is it is a journey it is not a destination you never get to check done um and I think we're service now really uniquely fits into the space is that we we provide Solutions in all of those areas so what I see happening in in different Industries and you know I'll take public sector for interest and I'll start their government you know I used to work for the government and and this is an area where there is so much manual work being done historically papers and and and all kinds of uh uh physical mailing and and and even I would put email as manual work and it's still primarily used as a major workflow tool so I was on stage at our at our knowledge conference in Las Vegas our Global conference a few months ago talking with the USDA um about their hyper automation journey and about a process a compliance examination process and that's the Department of Agriculture so USDA if you're outside of the United States um and a compliance examination of exam in farms and and and the underwriting of it that used to take six weeks like for for 30 or 40 years it took six weeks and with Hyper automation they took it down to 30 minutes and you've got to think about the impact of that so it's not just taking manual processes and digitizing that's a big part of it it's eliminating you know non-value added tasks it's connecting people in systems that were never connected before it's updating Legacy Technologies main frames to you know to low code and cloudbase but you have to look at the impact of not just cost savings and Time Savings but cultural differences now and this is where I really try to guide people in in in hyper automation it's not just a technical problem or a technical issue like there's a million we solve the techn technology challenge there's enough technology out there to meet all your needs you have to worry about the cultural aspects and think about how that's going to change the life of those employees they can now do more work in a week than they used to be able to do in a year you can't underestimate the impact of that which is which is which is incredible right when people hear those examples they're thinking hell you know because because they're so used to doing things in a in a certain way yeah so is there any particular and I I love the way we've gone into Industries but is there any particular kind of administrative duties that are particularly good to automate for that kind of hyper automation yes and then building on that question if we go back to the industries is there any other particular industries that you're seeing as you know particularly primed to take to that next level um yes yes and yes so I mean there there are definitely very typical processes that lend themselves very well to to Automation and Hyper Automation and if you think about what's at the core of the majority of work and I put that in quotes that people do inside of companies across all Industries retail manufacturing Financial Services um you know telom how often in a work work environment are as I need someone to look at this and review this and approve it and give me your input well that sounds like a series of tasks and it kind of sounds like a workflow because it usually has to go in a certain order I need this person to take a look at it give me your input then I need this person to take a look at it and give me your input and usually what do people do in business to do that they email you a document take a look at it email it back I'll make the changes email it back email it back email it back it's like a pingpong bow you know in the olden days and in some federal agencies and in some governments you know they still physically you know walk it around that is perfect for a workflow or for a digitized workflow to kind of set up a digital version where something gets automatically routed and you can see the status of that workflow at any time and you can see who you can set up where it's got to go the order the time you can put in an SLA very easily hey I need this back by that they it's can automatically be automated and using you know a lot of technology like process optimization or process mining you can start to examine that workflow of of asking for people to review and approve stuff and saying hm this person approves it 95% of the time we're going to start skipping them and just send them the exceptions like you can start to optimize that work so th I mean every Department inside of every company Finance Logistics it HR marketing has been endless series of requests approvals and tasks that need to be routed around to be people I mean endless I could give you thousands of examples of different areas but that I mean that's primarily that request and approval and tasking every department has dozens and dozens and dozens of tasks that need to be automated very well we you think about that from the customer experience because we've got we've got the internal customer experience improving yeah and then we have the external customer experience improving because everyone's expectations have now increased you know I always yes reference Netflix as it works everywhere all the time consistently you might have a challenge on what you watch on any given day however you know you know it works and there's a variety of different examples like that what are what are now the expectations for internal customers and external customers and how is service now helping the that well it's it's a great question and it's actually something that I spent a lot of time talking about to to to to different audiences and businesses um expectations are off the charts people now now you know for a long time in the 80s and the 90s the technology you encountered at work was far more advanced than what you had in your personal life you went to work and you got to work with the most Advanced Technologies and tools you could be way more effective then in the 2000s you know post.com and introduction of iPhone and mobile um it switched The Cutting Edge technology and experiences you started popping up in your consumer life and you came to work and you're like I'm I'm I'm back in the dinosaur age what is this and so the the expectations have flipped now and with the Aging Workforce like I look at my 17-year-old daughter like she's going to come into the workforce her whole life has been digital everything in her school and her consumer life the Netflix the Ubers um she doesn't even ask to borrow the car because she can use Uber now she's got an Uber account the expectations are off the charts people are coming into the workforce expecting that everything is digital everything they're like wait am my person life it is at school and Academia it is why shouldn't it be at this Fortune 500 company that makes billions of dollars what is going on here and so you saw this with the Great reshuffle and the great reorganization and and the great resignation of people leaving companies where the experiences and the digitizations weren't that great my daughter is not going to understand coming to a company and being handed a piece of paper and having to send uh an email to an inbox and wait for a response she like she's building low code apps and and high school and so where service now comes in is the expectations for great experiences like uber and Amazon are at a Paramount now but when I meet with cios and CTO that's one of the first things they always say Greg I'm trying to create the Uber and the Amazon for not only my customers but for my employees and I always kind of laugh at that Mark because I I dig into it I hear it twice a week from every digital officer and CIO I'm like well what do you mean by that you know some pretty colors on a page you know fancy modern UI because the last time I looked at Amazon was actually a pretty dated interface looked like something built in the 90s but what makes Amazon a great experience is the Simplicity two clicks package is at my door Uber two clicks car is at my door but under those two clicks marks there shipping systems fulfillment systems Finance systems inventory systems tracking systems as a consumer you're not exposed to any of that complexity you're abstracted from it but but you come to work and you're exposed to all of that complexity I often joke with CIO if amazon.com was the typical Enterprise experience probably take you about six seven weeks to place an order because you'd have to log into all of those systems individually first you'd have to request access God knows how long that would take you and then you would have to log into the inventory system the shipping system you'd have to contact all those different departments on your own the owners has put on you as the end user to connect all of that and that's what service now provides right here to help with those experiences there's not a lot of software out there in the ecosystem that allows you to provide not only the great UI but then the underlying workflow and Integrations to connect all those systems as a seamless workflow so that's what service now is really bring to the table that's different than Microsoft or Salesforce we're bringing these Uber and Amazon connected experiences internally to the Enterprise and and from the customer perspective they don't really care about those complexities about the ship fulfillment to shipment the customer services support for them they just want their their item for example shipped to them in the in the oneclick basket which which adds so much value to them so from a metrics perspective yeah or return on investment and we're trying to go on that Journey from that CIO CEO's perspective how do you start to quantify some of these things yeah it's it's it's a good question and I mean just to just to your last Point really quick customers do expect to not have to deal with with the complexity and think about all of the bad experiences you've had with companies it's usually you contact customer service oh you got to contact a different department Mark you're like what why should I have to do that why can't you just do that for me so people are using service now for their external customer service to do those connected experiences and those self-service experiences as well but to speak about the return on investment because it's a very important um aspect to this and and service now takes a very unique approach to this um you have to proactively manage your Automation and and and track it and monitoring it and set those kpis up front and so if you're going to automate something with a low code app or you're an integration or an RPA bot or a chatbot or chat GPT or whatever it is you have to Define up front what your benchmark is and some people do that by time some people calculate well the time is worth this many dollars so here's my coefficient for every you know for every minute saved or every time this routine is done I I save $30 I say $50 and so service now allows you to monitor how often you're doing these things so you can in real time not not a quarterly report not not I've got to go and get hire a data scientist to figure out how much time we saved you need to build that into your automation up front so you can see where you're getting an investment on and very often um what I will advise customers on you can automate things so quickly today might only take you a few hours you have to monitor it and if you only need it for a few months like the co apps great you have to monitor it so that you could retire it so I see I see people measuring the impact in the cost Savings in term of Time Savings dollar savings from retiring Legacy licenses I don't need as much software anymore um better sales because my customers have to spend less time getting self-service um work Workforce productivity is probably the biggest thing if I could describe in one sentence what what service now does it makes the workforce more productive I mean I think one of our former CEOs once said oh I get it Salesforce is for sales service hours for work we actually take and make your Workforce more productive think about that USDA example I gave you 6 weeks to 30 minutes think about how much more productive that employee is they're not doing all the these non-value added administrative fluff tasks they're concentrating now on value added tasks that only a human being can do um so I I I would say that that's probably the the biggest thing Workforce productivity and now in this environment that's critical so if we take into kind of ethical considerations because with the automation people one of the biggest concerns within within AI that we hear regularly is my current role how how it's going to change how you know is there a matter of Years or or months before my role actually be done away with yeah how do you take it out from the ethical perspective or kind of you know make people feel more peace in mind I've been hearing this ever since I was a child and and I think you know I'm a student of History if you go back to the Industrial Revolution like oh we're we're going to all be automated out of jobs you're not going to be automated out of a job ever what's going to happen is your job is going to change and what you're capable of achieving at work is going to change I get this all the time especially in government Greg are you here to automate me out of a job because I've been doing this job for 20 years I've got a pension coming like I can't lose my job I'm like no your job is going to change and I we do take those ethicals we like it's technology in service to people not people in service to technology and so take for an instance um an HR department I was working with and I said so now that we have automated with intelligence the way that you can actually do and and we can do a lot of self-service people don't have to you don't have to email people the 401K forms and the direct deposit forms they can just go into a portal now and they can pull it down self-service and automated now you have the time you're not doing that anymore your job isn't eliminated now you have the time to use artificial intelligence to mine through data and look for CH Trends hey how many of these employee complaints lead to lawsuits or lead to people uh quitting now I want to come up with an employee retention program to help you know take care of these things proactively you didn't have time to do that and you didn't have the the tools or the intelligence to do that before now you do you know it's it's it's almost like you know Steve Jobs said many many years ago I love this quote of his is that like they did a study where they measured the the the land speed or the speed of the fastest animals on Earth and then they ranked them just using their natural abilities and I think human beings were like 14 the Condor was I think number one but then they added into the study let's see a human being using a bicycle and then it became the fastest you know animal on earth just using a bicycle it was amplifying their capabilities it didn't stop their capabilities it took their capabilities to that next level it made them way more faster and productive and that's how you have to look at artificial intelligence machine learning as a lifelong developer I'm not scared that developers aren't going to be needed anymore because of texted code what a developer can build now you can build a sophisticated system in hours that used to take you months and years you're that much more productive instead of building one app in a year hey maybe I can build a 100 apps in a week like the your your role and what you're going to be able to accomplish is changing and it it is really evolving um and I think to speak to some of the ethical concerns around the Privacy um I think we're taking a very very we're taking a stand in this area that service now is not really using external large language learning models we're using internal domain specific models that we've developed BAS on our data and you can be protected on your own instance where your data is not shared with anybody so I think a lot especially a lot of governments and a lot of regulated Industries are like hey I can't throw my data in to open Ai and have it out there in the the Sea of things I would caution some of those customers will do have employees using Google search because that that's being captured too but anyway um we've developed models and we will only ship functionality around generative AI that uses an internal large language learning model where you don't have to share data with external sources which is very unique you've been listening to Greg Alana at the helm hyper automation is set to revolutionize industry practices and the future is now because it is helping to streamline administrative tasks and enrich customer experiences service NES applications demonstrate the vast potential of this technology improving workflow across sectors and organizations are aiming to leverage such Innovations using guidance from leaders such as Greg to establish clear milestones and navigate the ethical landscape awfully monitoring key performance indicators remains crucial to this and we will be evolving as we go along Greg thank you very much for joining us on the show today thank you very much Mark my pleasure take care [Music] now thanks for listening to this episode of the AL this podcast if you enjoyed today's episode don't forget to subscribe rate and review we are available on Apple podcast Spotify and any Android podcast of choice you can also head over to our website www.al this.com to listen to more podcasts view our open rolls and stay up toate with industry news thanks for listening and stay tuned for more great 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