technologyreseller.co.uk 21 Q&A delivery managers who would start building packs on the first of the month. By about halfway through the month, they would have built the packs. They spent the second half of the month going out, doing the presentations to customers. At the end of the month, they’d have two or three days to catch their breath before having to do it again. They would do this for about 20 customers. With our reporting framework the same SDMs can serve 100 customers and wrap everything up by the middle of the month, enabling them to spend the second half of the month on the day job, as it were. That’s a phenomenal efficiency gain. TR: You mention Chat GPT. What impact do you expect AI to have? AV: It’s really interesting, isn’t it? This is the second AI revolution for me within the ServiceNow platform. ServiceNow has had AI ingrained within the platform for at least five years. And what I really like about the way ServiceNow approaches this is they concentrate on a deliverable ROI for their customers. In the first AI revolution, we had things like natural language understanding. ServiceNow developed really tuned AIs that would understand the context of what a customer is emailing in, log the ticket appropriately, with the right categorisation and the right priority and assign it to the right group based on what they’re doing. I know firsthand the benefits of that because that used to be my job when I worked at Adapt: the email comes in, you set all the fields on the form and you pass it on to the right person. It could take half an hour per email, or it could take a minute per email. Now the AI can do it better than us. With ChatGPT and the large language model evolution, what ServiceNow has very astutely recognised is that an assistant to help your workers will get you the most ROI. If you’re still logged on trying to work on tickets for your customers, having an AI assistant saying ‘Well, last time we saw this issue, it was fixed in this way’, you can take a two-hour piece of work for an engineer and reduce it down to five minutes. With that kind of efficiency gain, the ROI speaks for itself. The whole industry is making huge investments in AI, and ServiceNow is no different. Reading between the lines of recent gains in the ServiceNow share price, ServiceNow is being seen as one of the more competent capitalisers on their investment in AI and I think we’ll see that in their Q3 results. They spent a lot of money with NVIDIA, but they’re actually getting those returns and not many California-based companies can say that. TR: When people say POPX is very interesting but it’s not for us, or not for us at the moment, what are some of their objections? AV: The most common thing we hear is ‘we really like your model, but we’ve already gone down this path’. Another is that products like Connectwise are a mile wide, albeit an inch thick, so they can tick a few more boxes in terms of providing a full product suite. What’s really exciting about ServiceNow’s most recent release, Xanadu, is that it greatly widens that product portfolio. It adds some of those missing modules that cause folks to say ‘Well, I can’t get off Connectwise because ServiceNow doesn’t do these modules yet’. But honestly, most people we speak to end up really liking our model. One of the things we hear is, I wish I’d heard about your model years ago. TR: What are your plans for the next few years? AV: Firstly, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the MSP market here in the UK. We’re about to sign our 12th customer out of an addressable market of around 800, so there’s plenty more growth to be had just by continuing to do what we do but for more customers. We’re obviously looking at other markets, such as the US or Europe, and further out we’re looking at how we can take what we do for MSPs and apply it to other verticals. In the short term, I think it’s about capitalising on the AI revolution that we’ve got going on at the moment and using that to win as many customers as we can.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=