Kamolika Gupta Peres, Vice President & Managing Director, India/South Asia, ServiceNow, discusses the innovative approaches to automation, AI, and talent development, underscoring their commitment to driving enterprise transformation in 2024 and beyond.
As we enter 2024, the enterprise IT landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, driven by emerging technologies and changing market dynamics. In this context, understanding the key trends shaping this landscape and the strategic positioning of solutions to address these trends is crucial for businesses looking to stay competitive.
In a recent conversation with CIO&Leader, Kamolika Gupta Peres, Vice President and Managing Director, India/South Asia, ServiceNow sheds light on the accelerated use of Generative AI (GenAI), the growing importance of agile and scalable platforms, the dominance of industry-specific solutions, and the emphasis on digital transformation strategies.
CIO&Leader: What are the key trends shaping the enterprise IT landscape in 2024? How are your solutions positioned to address these trends?
Kamolika Gupta Peres: According to the latest forecast by Gartner, India’s IT spending is projected to total $124.6 billion in 2024, an increase of 10.7 percent from 2023. Some of the key technology trends that we foresee are:
- Accelerated use of GenAI: GenAI will increase customer support agent productivity through case and chat summarisation capabilities. This can surface case-relevant knowledge instantly and act on customer requests directly while reducing customer effort and increasing satisfaction. ServiceNow is already working with many customers on various GenAI applications, and the results have been impressive.
- Agile, scalable platforms gain importance: Organizations will prioritize investments in scalable enterprise computing platforms to consolidate IT spending and increase the pace of digital transformation while staying within budget. Solutions that deliver out-of-the-box integrations, turn-key use cases, and the ability to build innovative applications with low and no-code tools will help achieve higher value, improving agility and scalability across the enterprise. The ServiceNow one platform, one data model, and one architecture is uniquely positioned to achieve this.
- Industry-specific solutions to dominate: Different industries have unique needs that aren’t always solved by one-size-fits-all platforms. In 2024, the biggest growth will come from modern solutions that can verticalize and cater to the specific challenges, opportunities, and expectations of different industries across finance, manufacturing, telecommunications, and the public sector. ServiceNow has been building industry-specific know-how and solutions to support the specific needs unique to each area.
CIO&Leader: What are your top priorities for 2024?
Kamolika Gupta Peres: Businesses driving large-scale transformation across diverse industry sectors will play a decisive role in India’s rise towards India’s $1 trillion digital economy. ServiceNow assists organizations in expanding their national footprint in India or growing fast globally and driving scale without disruption. ServiceNow is focused on supporting the Manufacturing, Telecom, Financial Services, and Government/Public Service sectors. Enterprises adopting ServiceNow operate faster and are more scalable than ever before; Wipro & Cognizant are just a few of the many organizations building $1-billion businesses with ServiceNow’s platform.
CIO&Leader: With the growing importance of digital transformation, what strategic initiatives and product offerings can your company provide to help organizations stay competitive in 2024 and beyond?
Kamolika Gupta Peres: Traditionally, business processes have been automated and embedded across enterprise technology systems, from finance, human resources, sales, customer support, and beyond. Over time, these systems have become disconnected, siloed, and complex, as they offer limited flexibility and adaptability and lack the intuition and empowerment that users have come to expect from consumer-grade internet applications and sites. ServiceNow’s unique advantage is that it brings one platform, data model, and architecture to make work work better for people.
The Now Platform enables our customers’ digital transformation from non-integrated enterprise technology solutions with manual and disconnected processes and activities to integrated enterprise technology solutions with automation and connected processes and activities. ServiceNow combines cognitive AI technologies that allow enterprises to create enhanced and predictive client experiences. It also offers seamless integration with various tools and platforms, allowing firms to centralize operations, thus improving visibility. It provides unrivaled customization and flexibility, ensuring it corresponds with a firm’s aims and objectives. The biggest differentiator ServiceNow brings is that we don’t force customers to make a choice between existing and future systems. Instead, we enable one digital blueprint and build trusted digital roadmaps to drive growth and build cost efficiencies simultaneously.
CIO&Leader: How are your solutions adapting to support automation and AI? What innovations can we expect in this space in 2024?
Kamolika Gupta Peres: AI is essential in bringing value to our customer’s digital transformation efforts. Most enterprises today struggle in this “last mile” of AI, trying to connect the predictions from disparate, external AI tools to the platform where work actually happens. With the Now Platform, ServiceNow extends AI and automation capabilities to every aspect of the organization, with enterprise search, more sophisticated chatbots, text interpretation, answering inquiries, and summaries being just a few examples. Because we understand how customers use the Now Platform, we can apply AI to their individual content, chats, and logs and use our understanding within a customer’s context to extract their purpose and come back with an intelligent next step to kick off a workflow on the backend. The latest Now Assist in Virtual Agent feature on our Now platform empowers businesses to elevate the customer experience through generative AI-powered conversational expertise in 15 minutes or less for fast, more relevant self-service. It also helps customers fight modern threats through features like ‘Zero Trust Access and ‘Third Party Risk Management.’
Every year, ServiceNow launches two platform upgrades along with new services and applications via ServiceNow. We are excited about what will roll out in 2024, especially in the area of GenAI, where we continue to share gains from our own internal use and various instances we are working on with customers.
CIO&Leader: The talent gap in IT remains a concern. How are you supporting CIOs/enterprises in addressing the skills shortage, and what initiatives are in place to foster education and training for IT professionals in the coming year?
A recent study by ServiceNow and Pearson found that 16.2 million workers in India need to be upskilled and reskilled in AI and automation to be relevant in the next five years. Digital talent transformation has become a core priority for organizations. Addressing this need, we have introduced the global Rise Up initiative to upskill 1 million individuals by 2024. ServiceNow is working hand-in-hand with academia and has partnered with 17 Indian academic institutions, including Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women (Delhi), Chitkara University (Chandigarh), Sathyabama Institute of Science & Technology (Chennai), DY Patil International University (Pune) amongst others to equip students with the relevant digital skills, boosting their employability quotient. Additionally, we have partnered with FutureSkills Prime, a MeitY nasscom digital skilling initiative, to train 5000 learners across India. In 2024, we aim to expand our network of partnerships with relevant stakeholders across the globe toward developing a highly-skilled, future-ready workforce.
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