Gartner Symposium: Why ServiceNow wants to be seen as the AI platform for business transformation

ServiceNow and Rimini Street have expanded their partnership to enable organisations to use older enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as a starting point for enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.

Using a single architecture and single data model from ServiceNow with Rimini Street’s third-party enterprise software support, the offering is being positioned as a way to enable organisations to innovate across procurement, finance, supply chain, HR, customer service and IT.

The partnership with Rimini Street represents a major step in the company’s strategy to evolve from case management to delivering AI-enabled workflow management that can coordinate and orchestrate systems of record in business, and also improve by learning from the data these systems hold.

During a presentation at the Gartner Symposium in Barcelona, Hartmut Mueller, chief transformation officer at ServiceNow, described the company’s platform as “connecting all systems of record and connecting [their] metrics to the value stream”.

In other words, if an AI can learn from the data held in traditional enterprise systems, it can figure out how to improve the business processes these applications power.

AI without new enterprise systems

Business and IT leaders need to justify the cost of new platform investments, and this is where the partnership with Rimini Street has been positioned.

Speaking to Computer Weekly during the Gartner conference, Eric Helmer, chief technology officer at Rimini Street, said that in the past, the chief information officer (CIO) role has traditionally been back-office. “People were expected to keep the lights on, run the business of IT and firefight,” he said. “The new role of the CIO is in the front office.” This implies their actions have a direct impact on the organisation’s bottom line.

“Today’s CIOs are expected to be the ideas people, and they are expected to figure out things like artificial intelligence and come up with revolutionary ideas that will be game-changers for the business,” he added.

However, as Gartner warned at the start of the annual European conference, it’s easy to lose a lot of money on misguided AI initiatives. A Gartner survey of 300 CIOs conducted in July found that 90% believe managing costs is limiting the value they can get from AI. Moreover, as every enterprise software provider AI-enables their products, Gartner expects a large proportion of IT budgets are likely to be spent on these products. 

But ServiceNow, in collaboration with Rimini Street, is trying to offer a different approach, which relies on the third-party support provider’s track record in keeping ERP systems from the major providers running, even after mainstream support has officially ended. These older systems of records remain useful, if not essential, data sources for machine learning to improve ServiceNow’s understanding of how the business operates.

Helmer said the partnership with ServiceNow helps IT departments make more use of existing enterprise IT assets. “If the value of an ERP system for AI is the data it contains, then the version of ERP you run becomes irrelevant because you already have the data,” he said.

While ServiceNow is often seen as a company specialising in case management, Helmer said it has a raft of tools focused on IT modernisation, which sit on top of existing IT assets. These, he said, can be used to modernise the user interface, automate workflows, and run AI and predictive analytics. “GenAI capabilities can be achieved in a matter of months, instead of years,” he claimed, since the ERP system does not have to be upgraded to the latest AI-capable version first.

Bill McDermott, chairman and chief executive officer at ServiceNow, described the enterprise systems deployed in businesses as 20th-century systems that hundred progress. “ServiceNow’s partnership with Rimini Street gives customers a more unified, intelligent platform to maximise their existing software investments, for faster paths to transformation,” he said.

The fact that ServiceNow can be applied to manage business processes just as it’s used in case management offers a way, according to Helmer, to route and automate workflows between various line-of-business applications, which means IT leaders do not need to go through the cost and disruption of an enterprise application modernisation programme to get the benefits of AI.

Switching software maintenance to third-party support has traditionally been regarded as something only a few brave IT leaders embark on.

Being a premier sponsor at the Gartner Symposium, alongside the likes of AWS, PWC and SAP among others, is perhaps an indication of where ServiceNow sees itself in the corporate IT landscape. If it’s successful at offering an AI platform for running and optimising business processes, there may well be a compelling reason not to upgrade to the latest AI-enabled enterprise system and rely, instead, on third-party support of an existing ERP system.