ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today from all around the globe. My name is Jordan Waechter, and I lead Product and Solutions Marketing for Field Service Solutions here at ServiceNow. We have an engaging conversation plan for you today, and you're going to get to hear from Xerox on how they transformed their field service operations. We're going to dive into some current customer experience trends. And we're also going to discuss some topics such as AI, augmented reality, even talking about how Xerox is working to achieve those operational efficiencies. I have the pleasure of being joined today by John Perry, who is the VP of XDX Service Delivery Technology at Xerox. Xerox has been a strong ServiceNow customer that has transformed their services using ServiceNow Field Service Management and also Xerox company, CareAR, for augmented reality. I'll let you share a little bit more about yourself, John.

Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here. I've been in the service delivery and customer experience space for about 2 decades now. I work in the field. I manage our client experience centers and most recently now, I'm doing IT work to transform the business in that service space within our Xerox Digital eXperience Group.

That's just fantastic. And I know that within this experience, you have a lot of end-to-end customer touch points and deep, deep background within customer experience. So our audience globally is greatly going to benefit from you being here with us today. Thank you for your time.

You're welcome.

So with that, let's go ahead and jump into our agenda. So today, we're going to talk about why seamless service experiences matter to these customer service organizations; and we're going to discuss some latest research from ServiceNow that's going to discuss all of the pressure that current leaders are under within this space, spanning into topics like AI and even how to improve agent experiences, all of this is ultimately going to lead to how Xerox unlocks their service efficiency; and into a live Q&A with John himself. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. ServiceNow recently had hired an outside firm to conduct some primary research. And ultimately, our objective was to better understand the key preferences, the challenges and the opportunities that we're currently existing across the customer experience. In order to do this, we interviewed B2B customers, B2C customers; over 6,400 people responded across 9 countries. And we are proud to say that the report is already available in 8 languages and a link will be provided not only in the resources on your side tab, but also at the end of the webinar. For this research, we really wanted to be able to capture more of a global perspective with a customer base that would span across geographies. So this included the United States, this was Japan, France, and other countries with a goal to gain that deeper understanding of the customer experience, the agent experience and CX leadership challenges. What were their needs? And what were their preferences? And what was really interesting about the statistics in the report was what they showed was that there was a really great importance around what the customer experience is. We wanted to understand, are customers more likely to abandon a brand or evangelize a brand based on their experience and how important is delivering a great experience for them. And what we actually ended up learning was that the impact of delivering a great experience was actually much greater than having to recover from a poor experience. So although 69% of customers would switch a brand based on their core experience, they actually gave a lot more credit to having a great experience. And that makes sense. Fundamentally, if you're quickly able to understand the problem, if you understand the history and the background and you're immediately able to solve my problem without having to switch me between multiple agents or people in order for me to receive my answers, then the resolution is quick and efficient. So I'm going to pause there. And John, I'd like to bring you further into the conversation. I want you to talk to us more about the customer experience at Xerox. What have you found to be most important? And what has your organization prioritized?

Well, I think one of the key things for customer experience is being able to create a connection with the customer and have that experience when they contact us to be personal and relevant to the problem they have. What we don't want to do is spend time doing administrative functions in front of the customer, trying to look up their data. We want to -- when they engage us, we want to know who they are and we want them to feel like we know who they are. So that's a big part of the challenge and opportunity we have with AI and with ServiceNow, for example. We also want to bring relevant experience to the -- knowledge to the customer about the problem at hand that they're calling about. So with tools like CareAR or other AI assistance, we can get to the problem quickly, show them -- have them show us the problem versus having to describe it. We also don't want them to essentially be an expert in the problem -- in our industry. We want them to be able to show us the problem so that we can solve it for them and they can get on doing what they want to do in the business they have at hand.

That's great. It sounds like there's a major focus also on the efficiency and productivity time, right? It's eliminating some of the guesswork in your customer interactions and it's boosting this productivity by streamlining those processes, but at the same time, Xerox is able to effectively provide a connected customer experience. You're giving the end-to-end experiences. .

Exactly. So I think the key thing here is that we have people who are good at talking to customers, good at problem-solving, good understanding issues and getting to the answer. And that's finding ways to make that possible for them versus taking care of working between systems, doing administrative functions, doing other things that are not connected to solving the problem. To the degree that you can allow employees to do what they're good at and talk to customers in ways that customers want to be spoken with versus doing other ancillary tasks, that's where you can get gains in customer experience, customer satisfaction, and you can get gains in productivity because less time spent doing administrative work allow us more time to solve the problem in less time on the phone or less time in front of the customer working. So it gets you -- lets you get on to the next task.

Absolutely. I think that that's a great reflection. And even myself as an employee, this is outside of the customer experience. I think about when I'm having to what we call the United States swivel chair, moving between applications. And half of the time in order to even get work done, the same as with the customer experience trying to have that issue resolved. A lot of times, it is not a one-stop shop. So the more that you can provide that experience not only for your customers to directly reach what they need, having you be more intelligent in how it does so, but also your agents are empowered in those same ways.

Right. The last thing you really want on it with a -- working with a customer is spending time hunting for answers. You want to be able to understand the issue quickly, bring relevant experience or relative solutions -- relevant solutions to the customer so they can answer the problem. We've all had experiences where we've been on a phone or been in a text chat or been with somebody live, and they're spending a lot of time looking for answers. And there's this awkward silence or you start talking about the weather or other things that don't -- that aren't really why you called. And it's all an attempt to find a solution. The faster you can understand the problem, either visually or through textural experience, the better you can come up with a solution. And the better the solution comes back to you in a conversational way, the faster you can work with the customer and address the need they brought to you. Or get them -- or have them -- get them engaged with the right resource that can really solve the problem if it isn't -- if they've gotten to the wrong place in the organization.

And John, that segue is really perfectly into some of the reflections and insights that we had found throughout this report. And all across the board, what I am hearing is that it is not just about one part of the experience, we're thinking about the customer experience, the same as we're thinking about our employees and our agents. And then we're also having to take a lens and look what our service leaders are being challenged with. And when I'm hearing you speak about the customer experience and everything that Xerox has set up from using CareAR, highlighting augmented reality, which I know we'll be speaking to a bit more, you're really providing that end-to-end customer experience. So let's dive into some of these key revelations from the data and the insights that was rolled out. We've established that customer experience matters. But what we also want to understand is from the agent's experience, those that are on the front lines, and they're engaging with customers. And importantly, John, which really relates to you in terms of this conversation. For these customer experience leaders, these are the ones that are in the boardroom. They're setting the strategy for the business, and they're having a great impact on operations. So as we were viewing these research insights, how is this pressure showing up for you as a leader at Xerox? And what can you share with our audience about the challenges, your approach and how you're elevating both the customer and the employee experience?

Thanks. So I think that there's historically or traditionally things that oppose each other. So we talk about investing in customer experience, spending more time with customers, having people available to talk with customers. And that's to make that experience better. At the same time, we have to make the business more efficient, save money, become more profitable or reduce cost, invest in lower pricing to customers. So you're always finding that -- those 2 sides. Can I spend more time doing things with customers? And can I find ways to do more with less? So you try to find or we try to find ways to do both. So make sure that the time that people spend with customers is impactful; that we can understand their issue as they engage us, understand that quickly; allow the employees that we have doing that to do the things they do best, which is engage customers, understand the problem, give them solutions and less time keeping track of the work that they do. So with tools like AI that we're working with ServiceNow and ourselves to invest in, working with opportunities for video conferencing or video integration with CareAR, that allows us to understand things faster and make sure that we understand the client issues sooner and the client experience sooner. And then with automation, find ways to capture what happened in the case or what happened in the experience and keep track of that without having the agent spend time or the field service engineers spend time keeping track and keeping notes. So if you win both sides there, if I can quickly understand what the customer wants and make it relevant to the customer, if I don't have to interrogate the customer because I already understand what's happened in the past and then find a solution effectively, that allows me to spend less time with the customer. But that time is of high quality, and it allows me to take more events and have more service events to take care per employee, which allows us to then save money and become more productive. So we win both ways with good technology, with good insight and less time spent keeping track of activity.

Very, very well said, John. And I know that, that's impactful for our audience and others who are leading service organizations. I'm a big fan. I've got a quote that I say. And it's, "If the glass of water is half water and half air, isn't it always full?" And when we look at things like the customer experience, the employee experience, your field service operations, reducing costs, it's not a zero-sum game. And that's why these leadership decisions and thinking outside of the box, looking at various strategies and even as we review the top trends that we're hearing through that customer feedback globally, it only expands on why it's so important for leaders to stay on the forefront of the changes that are happening using tools like augmenting and automation and AI in order to not only enhance your business operations, but also improve the overall experience. And John, it sounds like you're really talking about providing the right tools, being able to augment. And these points that you've made about doing more with less people, I'm sure, really resonate with many of us, especially service leaders. So how are you using creative solutions to help empower your agents?

Well, so CareAR is a tool that we started flipping about 2.5 years ago within our business. And it starts with the client experience upfront. So they can use an application we call CareAR Instruct. That can step them through, with video content and video verification, through solving basic issues on a piece of equipment. So they can dial in or use the application, look for a problem and it steps them through the solution with video content to make it easier for them. And if that doesn't work, then they can then -- when they call us, we can interact with them through CareAR Assist, which allows us through the client cell phone and our desk to view the problem together. And one of the powerful things about CareAR Assist is that your -- both the client and the agent are looking at the problem. In the past, we've done some video work where we look at each other like a video conference like today. But that doesn't focus on the problem. So CareAR assists us, it allows us to see the problem with the client and actually annotate things that can be fixed. So look at this. So you can circle a lever. You can write in text to help the customer step through the problem-solving. The beauty of this is it makes the problem relevant. I don't have to teach the client vocabulary. I don't have to guess what the client is telling me if I -- typical of a voice communication. We're looking at the problem together. And the agent can determine this is something I can solve or this is something that I need to send on a technician on site for. So that saves the client time, that saves the agent time, and allows us to be more productive and have a much better experience. We've all worked in situations where an agent takes you through a bunch of problems and steps, only to have no solution. By seeing it visually, the agent knows immediately, yes, this is something I can solve, or no, we're not going to spend any more time, let's move on and get the right resource to you. This is all built into ServiceNow. So it's an easy integration for the agent to capture the activity. And when they do have a problem [indiscernible], they can take a video image or an image of the machine in its current condition, attach that image into the case and that flow -- that integration flows to the technician so the technician see the issue before they arrive on site. It doesn't rely on the agent making cryptic notes or having to write detailed information. The image content gives that visibility to the problem, which is much more effective than text. And when the technician goes on site, often or sometimes, the technician needs help. And in the past, they have to create logs or download files or get on the phone and talk to somebody. We can now do this through CareAR. And the field technician can bring all of the expertise we have to bear within the company to that site to solve the problem effectively without having to guess and it allows us to make fewer repeat visits because we can solve the problem right there without having to bring other people up back to solve the problem. And again, this all is integrated into our ServiceNow application, both in CSM and in our field service management application through ServiceNow. So it's an integrated experience for the agent, it's an integrated experience for the technician, and it passes through using CareAR.

And that sounds incredible, because really what you're saying is that me, Jordan, as a customer, I don't have to be an expert in fixing, let's just say, my printer. I could even be working with you, showing you that they're live, and you can tell me, you can annotate. Jordan, pull that yellow lever. So as you mentioned, you're not asking your customers to be experts, but at the same time, through this transparency, you're gaining better visibility as well for when you actually need to dispatch a technician and what they might need when they're arriving there on site.

Exactly. I mean the last thing we want to do is make a customer an expert on our products. We want the customer and the client to be able to get on with the thing that they're good at, the thing that they came to work to accomplish. Spending time with us just trying to solve a problem and spending a lot of time and teaching them vocabulary they don't need is a waste of their time and often, a waste of our time. We want to understand the problem quickly, get them on to do with their -- they came to work to do, so they get a productive day, and we can have a production experience ourselves.

So John, as you're moving on from that process, let's talk a little bit more about the relationship with CareAR and also, how do you measure success? What are the KPIs? And how are you actually doing more with less people?

That's a great question. So we have more KPIs than was probably good for our health. I think that's the nature of contact center and field service environments. But just using CareAR, for example. When we do use CareAR, we monitor how many times we can solve the problem without having to send something on site, we call remote solve. And we get about a 9% improvement on remote solve when we do use CareAR than when we don't. So video impact has a direct impact on our ability to avoid sending somebody on site. We also look at what our customer is willing to make the change with us. So adoption of any new tool and particularly this new tool, we've got about a 49% uptick. So we offer this to a client. And again, we're asking them to use their cell phone to help us with this problem and capture video content from their phone. And we get about 49% uptick on this, which I think is a really good experience, especially with about 2.5 years of activity here. And then -- and when we do, do that, do they like it? So we measure customer satisfaction. And 92% of our customers say, this was a good experience. And how can it not be when you can actually see the problem and collaborate together? And by the way, when we do avoid sending somebody on site by using CareAR, we aren't sending a technician. They aren't getting in a car or a truck or a vehicle to get there, and that reduces carbon emissions. And so from an environmental standpoint, it has an impact there. So here are some of the KPIs we've measured and some of the success we've had using CareAR in our environment. On the operational efficiencies, just to jump there for a second, that's a really important piece for us. And again, there's 2 pieces to that. One is we watch -- when we're -- how many times we go on site for the same problem or a series of problems on a piece of equipment. The more we go back on site, the more inconvenience for the customer and more expensive it is for us to provide service. And we also look at when we are on site, how long are we there? Are we within the target? Using ServiceNow FSM, we can get good live information on that. We've informed the technician of how long we expect them to be there for this kind of a repair. And there's a countdown clock inside the application that prompts them when they're getting close. One of the interesting things about field service is that just like most of us, we know the next thing we're going to do is going to solve the problem until it doesn't. And then I think of the next thing we're going to do is solve the problem. And it doesn't take very long for you to make a short visit extend to a very long visit. Using ServiceNow, we're able to prompt the technician and create escalations within the application without having -- so the technician is prompted and has to -- and needs to react to an extended visit. That allows them then to say, now I use CareAR to bring in an expert to help me solve this problem. Acknowledge the fact this is taking too long. So the beauty of ServiceNow, we believe, is that it gives us more relevant information faster. It can guide people through a solution or make them aware of things that are getting out of balance of where we think they should be. That's a very powerful tool for us. The data we get that's live and interactive and allows us to react in a moment, it's been very helpful to us.

It sounds like that communication is real time, John. And so those updates, that's really the power of the larger platform is that they're being able to communicate back with their field service teams, and I imagine also with the customers. So you're looking at the customer experience, the agent experience, the field technician experience while that underpins all of these leadership priorities that folks like yourself are looking to achieve for the organization.

Exactly. And there's -- and just thinking about that experience. No client wants us to come back a lot, and no client wants us to spend a lot of time there. They want us to get in there, repair effectively and move on. And really, our employees don't want to make repeat visits. They want to get their work effectively and move on. And the prompting we can get and the visibility we can get to performance in a live environment makes it effective for everyone.

Agreed to that, John. And that brings us back to the next topic, and I'm going to resurface some of those key revelations. And we're really focusing here now on topic 4 and 5, and they're all around operational efficiency as you were discussing. So I want to talk more about AI. How are you thinking about AI into your service organization? What are the immediate benefits and what are the long term?

So we -- this is an example, I think, of the win-win I was talking about before, where there's the -- we want to do something that's good for the customer and also drives productivity. So we look at reliability in our business, so efficient staff utilization. And we measure that by how many hours per million prints that we spend working on client equipment. We break that into 2 pieces. One is how many times do I visit a client per million prints? And we also look at how long we spend when we're there, how many hours per visit do we have? And the combination of those 2 things gets you to the total hours you spend per million prints. Those 2 pieces that I talked about, though, if I'm going to the client every day to fix a piece of equipment, that's a really bad client experience, and it's very expensive for us. On the other hand, and also if I spend a lot of time in the client's office, that's also not good for the client, and it's not good for cost in our business. So we try to find ways to bring tools to bear and techniques to bear that allow us to see the client, I'll say, less often, but when we're there, we're very impactful and effective in making the fix, we don't have to come back. So that reliability metric is important to us. And tools like CareAR and features within ServiceNow and some AI work we're doing is allowing us to monitor and manage that in a more effective way. Just from a data element alone, within ServiceNow, we're able to -- at the FSM module, we inform the technician of how much time they just spent on a call, what the target time is, and we also alert the technician and other people in the organization that we might have a call that's extended. One of the interesting things about field service is every technician knows the next thing they're going to do is solve the problem. Just like all of us, the next thing I do is get to solve this thing. But then when it doesn't, they think the next thing they do is going to solve the problem. And you get in this kind of -- you can spend a lot of time. But within ServiceNow, we can prop someone to say, maybe this is the point where you need to reach out and get some help. And that's where they can use CareAR to bring in an expert, bring in the wealth of expertise that we have across the -- really across the planet to that experience to help the field technician become more effective and make an effective solution in an efficient way. That's how the ServiceNow and CareAR can work together to allow us to meet that reliability efficiency metric.

Great points. And I really -- what I'm hearing from you, John, is that it's so much about providing the right tools. It's also augmenting the workforce. It's helping to remove these barriers; remove manual, non-impact tasks for these agents; and then also better empowering them when they are their on-site that if, let's just say, they do steps 1 through 4, and now this appointment is going to go 20 minutes over, they're able to communicate that back with their field service team. And they're doing all of this between CareAR and the hands-on assistance that that's providing ServiceNow field service management that's automating those entire processes end-to-end. And so this is really providing that holistic experience, which is just extremely impactful when you look at oversight transparency and especially as you were speaking to how you measure your KPIs, how do you optimize the organization. These are all different categories that our service leaders are thinking about as they're planning these strategies. And you mentioned AI. So I want to bring us back to the top 5 revelations from the CX Trends as we were discussing them and really focusing on those final 2, which is really all around operational efficiency, if we speak to it. So let's talk more and discuss how are you thinking about AI, how do you see AI incorporating into your service organization, the short-term benefits and long-term promise?

I think there's just 2 pieces -- or 2 big things that we're thinking through and working on. One is how can we make the agent and customer experience more relevant? So traditionally -- so we've just in the last 1.5 months, we moved all of our knowledge articles and knowledge management into ServiceNow, for example, and what we're going to be able to do very shortly is create -- in the current experience when a client sees us or the agent sees us, here's the problem and here are 6 articles that may solve that problem. What we'll be able to do is now use AI to review all of those articles and find the relevant article that makes the most sense and present it in a conversational way. And that will bring -- will make it much more relevant, much more impactful for the client, easier to understand and you spend less time searching the articles yourself to find the answer. So how can I bring the problem to bear in a more relevant way and easier way to follow through? The other piece is trying to be more predictive. So to be more predictive both from a -- what the client is going to see, but also what we think may fail soon. So knowing what -- we have connected devices. They speak to us and tell us, give us telemetry. We have service experience, service histories with the equipment. We know how much volume the customer is producing. And the idea would be, can we -- based on what the machine is telling us, based on the volume they're running and other machines in the same condition, do we think that parts or products will fail? And can we predict that failure? And that gives us an interesting opportunity. So if I knew for sure that next Wednesday a product would fail, what would I do about it? Now right now, I know I have products that are already in need of a repair, and I'm sending -- we're sending people to go take care of that. So when I send a person today -- or could I use that to plan for an event next week? Now we're early in the journey here, but the more predictive we can be about failure and then more predictive -- more instructional we can be about what resolves that issue, it allows us to be better prepared to go on site. And again, it allows a better customer experience because we're showing up prepared for the event. And we are more effective because we don't get there and have to go away and come back. So that's how we're thinking about using AI, both from a large language model perspective and from a gen AI perspective and using tools like CareAR and ServiceNow to help us down that journey.

John, that's really interesting. How are you thinking about generative AI from the client perspective and looking to take that into the future with Xerox?

So if you look at question 1, where clients feel disconnected, and 44%, that's a pretty big number. Generative AI, we believe, can allow us to get better customer intimacy. So when the client contacts us, we can bring up relevant information about that client, what the client's past experiences have been and present that to them so that we can know them. A big opportunity for us is one of customer contact. So they feel like we know them. And we think generative AI can provide cues and information and present information to us, to agents and to field technicians better so that they can have -- they can anticipate what the client experience has been prior and that they know what the client wants before we get on site. So I think that's where we want to go. That's where we're thinking about going with gen AI, especially as we can get better data and better data about clients. We could be more intimate given the very connected experience.

We have spoken about so many topics today, and I can't thank you enough for your insights that you've shared with our audience all around the globe. John, I want to give you the opportunity, if you just had 3 key takeaways for our audience today, what would those be from Xerox?

Well, I think, as I've mentioned it several times, what we're trying to find ways to do is satisfy customers and make people as productive as they can be and to do that by allowing them to do what they're best at. People are more productive, we believe, or I believe, when they can do the things that they have skills in doing and get joy out of. And that makes clients happier as well. We want to have a connected customer experience. So we want to -- video support is a great way to connect with clients to make it very personal and understand the problem and make it be relevant with the client. And then we want to do more with less. And again, the idea here is to take advantage of being more effective with clients and taking administrative burdens away, and tools like CareAR and ServiceNow allow us to do that.

John, I thank you so much for this time being here with us today. I know that our audience thanks you on behalf of ServiceNow. We are going to drop some assets in the side or on the bottom for the guests. Please be sure to download, type your questions into the Q&A. John will be here to be answering them as well. And we will also have additional lead behind such as the CX Trends Survey report in the generation AI era and also Xerox's story. So with that, let's move on to the Q&A.

So getting started with the Q&A here. We've had a lot of great interaction. It's been so wonderful to see everyone joining from Santa Clara; I see Barbados; there was Michigan, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta; we've got Canada, Southern New Mexico, Boston. Thank you so much, everyone, for being here with us today. And of course, very great thank you to John joining us from Xerox. I mentioned in the beginning, you have been a long-time customer of ServiceNow. It's been so inspiring to hear from you not only about the Xerox journey, and of course, you're very decorated background of experience many, many years in industry. And so you've seen a lot of technologies evolve, too, in that time, John. So we just really appreciate you sharing that knowledge with us here on a global scale and just making it packageable and not only talking about the ServiceNow relationship, but also even introducing things like AI, which we have a couple of questions about that here in the chat and even talking about Xerox company, CareAR, and what you're doing with augmented reality to help provide that seamless customer experience. So John, does it work for you? Should we go ahead and jump into it? We've stretched our legs. Our audience is still with us. All right. Well, we'll give the audience for as long as you give us questions, we'll go ahead and take them here. We've got about 15 minutes left. So John going in first. So I'm going to start with the AI question because I feel like this is a topic that is new, it's evolving. And I like to think that things are not -- it doesn't go from order, disorder, order, again. The way that innovation works and life in general is that it goes order, disorder, reorder. And AI is a huge revolution in that. I mean, my goodness, remember the time when the steam rolled. Was it like going to be something that put everyone out of jobs? And then the Industrial Revolution. And sure, some jobs shifted, however, hundreds of thousands of jobs were created. So I want to talk to you about where you see opportunities for AI, and generative AI is the question, and how are you providing customer service and support in this new AI world? Our audience wants to know.

Well, go ahead, go ahead. So we have a number of places we're using AI and I mentioned a little bit of it on the -- previously on the discussion. But with CareAR, for example, AI allows us to do visual verification. So I can point the application at a device, it recognizes the device. And then as we -- as the customer or client tries to explore opportunities to fix an issue or going to address an issue, the visual verification validates that, please open the front panel. And if you open the front panel, it validates, then in fact, that's happened. That takes a lot of math and a lot of AI to accomplish those things. And that can step the customer through to a successful resolution by doing that visual verification. I also mentioned that we're using generative AI to diagnose problems, not just look at the machine itself, but the machine's history, the telemetry it's providing back to us centrally and devices like it. So combining all of that information together to say, machines in this space with this use pattern with these auth codes or this data is providing back, this seems to be the kind of problem that's there. And then based on the solutions we provide in the past from thousands of machines, say, this appears to be the best resolution for that issue at the present time. And so all of that takes information that a technician or an agent or a customer might need to bring back quickly a diagnosis or the problem and a solution in a conversational way. So we don't lose time trying to figure it out or spend as much time trying to figure it out. We spend more time giving the customer the machine back so that they can do the work they want to do. And I think, by the way, just to keep going down that path a little bit. I mean we spend a lot of time at doing that because we want -- we find that the best field service engineers and the best agents are not necessarily the most technical people, they're playing technical. But they understand the problem is not, for example, that there's a nylon roller on an inverter. The curl is preventing the paper from passing through the device in our case. But they know that the real problem is the customer needs a document to take the presentation or to complete a contract. They have work to do, and they can't get it done. So this allows the best field technicians and the best agents to be empathetic and understand the problem and then go back and get information about how to best solve the technical issue that can resolve that so they can get on with their job. So AI, I see not so much as a way to replace human activity, but to make -- allow people to be more human when they're talking to clients.

That's the big part of it is that it's how we as humans and technology exists. It's about our unique intersections. And ultimately when I'm thinking about your service technicians or even the customer experience, it's a really enlightening conversation to think, "Wow, I could actually automate and remove the things that naturally aren't my favorites about my role." We all have that. It doesn't matter if you're 40 years vetted a professional or if you're early in career just starting out. And John, it's interesting, and I kind of -- I want to ask this as well, just kind of in the fly. How are you even seeing people who are earlier in career adopting? I feel like people like that are being raised on more modern technologies being born with the iPhone. I was a young lad when the iPhone came out. But ultimately, I know that the same button in Microsoft Word is a floppy disk. We are now dealing with generations entering into the workforce that would say, "John, what's a floppy disk?"

It's interesting. When we deployed CareAR for the first time, it was new to us. And CareAR, for example, you are talking to a client to use their phone to download an app, to point at a machine and then you can collaborate. So fairly -- today, it might seem like a fairly straightforward thing. The annotation is interesting. What we found that the 2 groups that were most effective with that technology where the people who are new to the role and the people who have been in the role a long time. So people who've been here for multiple, multiple years who are using CareAR and the people that were just brought on, they could adopt it quickly. So they were able to -- the new people were able to learn the role using the technology, so it was a natural way to progress. The people who have been around saw the advantage. And I think as I mentioned before, they saw that as a way to diagnose more rapidly so that they could get the client on to solving the real issue at hand to getting them back to do work. It was the people kind of in the middle who had been around in kind of a middle tenure that seem to have the most trouble adapting to the new technologies. So we worked with them. And one of the things we found to help them was to play the -- to role play, but more importantly, play the role of the client. So if I'm a client using the application, they saw then how -- what the client would go through and how they could help them to solve the issue. But I think -- I appreciate the fact that there was a time when we didn't have e-mail. Can you imagine that, no e-mail. You had to -- when I wanted to communicate internally, I would put a piece of paper in an envelope and write my attendee and I put it in a basket, imagine that it would get delivered overnight to someplace else in the building. But now e-mail changed how we work everywhere. And I think -- and today, I can't imagine writing something down and putting in an envelope to send to this person down the hall. But that's what we did. But today, other applications are changing that rapidly. And I think from my standpoint, being in a position to say that these are a natural progression of where we're going. That I used to have a pager and then I had a phone and then I had a laptop and then I had cloud applications that talk to my laptop and I was connected. And now I have gen AI. I think looking in that context, it isn't so radical. It's just -- I've had big changes in technology throughout my career. And I think younger, new employees who come in kind of expect that the world is going to be different in a few years than what they've had in the past. So it's got overexcited. It's very exciting.

It is. And I think that's the reminder as somebody in the workforce, I have around a decade of experience is that I even remember when I had my first career, a couple of moons ago, and they implemented dress for your day. And that was insane. I mean I was working out of New York City, Manhattan, where men were in suits, and it didn't matter that it was muggy outside and 85 degrees. That was how we had to dress for the day. And so you just look at how culture changes, technology changes, we change. Again, that order, disorder, reorder, it does not go back to the same that it was. So I appreciate you sharing some of your perspective on that. And just talking about that innovative technology, there is a question here talking about knowledge articles and how it attaches into QR codes and the knowledge library. And I know that Xerox recently moved everything into the knowledge library with ServiceNow, which is super fantastic. And one thing that I just wanted to say that is worth mentioning is that ServiceNow uses that predictive intelligence to auto-attach those relevant knowledge articles to each work order. So now you're really cooking with gas when you're thinking that your field technicians are enabled with these knowledge articles in real time. We've talked about AI, and we have the launch of Now Assist for field service management that's pulling in those generative AI capabilities. So now you're having things like work order task decrease. So not only is it saving time for my technician, but even when I -- if I was putting on my service leader hat, and you're looking at all of this operational excellence that you're trying to achieve these efficiencies, again, make customers happy while reducing costs, do more with the same amount or less. And I think to myself, that is such a great tool for this as well because also it's just taking a prompt, it's taking data. So as clean as the data is that goes in, as quality as it is, is as clean as the data that's going to come out. And so I think that, that's really fascinating even when you're thinking about the size of Xerox and how many printers are in your inventory and not wanting things to be overstocked or understocked or having truck rolls that go out over something that could have been solved in that 9% that are solved through augmented reality using CareAR and how much that even allows using something like AI to pull in the proper data. So if it was 4 light bulbs that were replaced, it's 4 light bulbs and the AI is just pulling that. So there's no room for error of, oh, I was on 6 work orders today and a couple of different job sites. I think it was 3. Okay. Well, now I put in 3 and I've got that inaccurate number. So I'd like to illuminate, and John, you are the same and you're a thought leader in this space. You're leaning into technology innovation and not steering it, welcoming it, being I think we respect it, we don't fear it.

Exactly. I think -- and I think that's an interesting point you're talking about that -- about the data accuracy and the data needs for them. So our machines talk to us all the time. And not everything they tell us is helpful. So -- and someone who's been around, a field technician or an agent, would know what's meaningful and what's not. And they know that by experience. And the promise of AI is to help us separate the wheat from the chaff and get to the real meaningful information that's there, that is salient that we can provide. The other thing you talked about, we just moved all of our knowledge into ServiceNow. And we're really looking forward to combining that with Genesys and with CareAR. But the idea here is that when a client engages us based on what the client is telling us either through chat, through a virtual agent or through a chat with a live human or voice that we can understand quickly is -- are they -- we can direct them to the right place. So they may have an issue with an invoice, but they call it a maintenance line or they're in a maintenance chat. We can recognize with intent analysis and get them directed to the right place. And then I think -- and once we -- they're in the right place, can I instead of giving them 6 articles to read and click on to see if that's right one, we can, using AI, read those articles, come back to them with a summary of that and present it back in a conversational way, either with a human or with the AI itself. So those are the kind of changes we're really looking forward to. But again, it depends on the data. And if the data is pointing in the wrong direction or [indiscernible], that's where we need to continue to refine the technology and make it better for us.

Very, very well said. The human experience on the back end of that is the keyword to me. And I'm never sad about some of these problems for 2 factor authentication. Yesterday, I had to trace a train around the track to the proper letter. And they were 2 separate things, and I thought, wow, we've come a long way from just picking out the bicycles or the bridges. And ultimately, that's because this is how intelligent this is becoming. And there was an interview with the CEO of NVIDIA just a couple of weeks ago, and he mentioned everyone wanting to go into computer programming and how great that was. However, he said, "Actually, if we're doing our jobs right, that train was this 10 to 20 years ago." It's all of our -- not discouraging not do what you love, be passionate, be on fire, be a software engineer or a computer programmer. But his key point was, ultimately, if we've done our job effectively enough from this first wave of AI, right, traditional AI into the second wave of AI, you won't have to be a professional coder because we're making things more accessible to everyone, every business, every industry, whether you're field service, whether you're workplace services, whether you're transforming your IT tech stack in CMDB. So with that said, the IT tech stack in CMDB, we have an additional question from the audience that says, have there been any unanticipated benefits or outcomes stemming from the integration of ServiceNow's field service management solution with Xerox's technology stack? And how has this synergy influenced future collaboration efforts?

Well, so that's a great question. And I think that there's 2 answers to that question. One is the immediacy of data and the ability to interact and see things happen in the moment remotely is probably, for me, I wasn't ready for that. I didn't expect it to be so powerful. So being able to see -- we have -- we came from a platform that you essentially have to wait overnight to find out what happened today. And now we can see things in the moment, and we can react to them in a moment and we can inform people in the moment of what's happening. So just the presence of data to allow us to respond, to take care of customers faster and take care of customers or identify something that needs to be addressed sooner has been a very profitable thing and to inform us in an automated way of when those things might be happening. So for instance, if a field service engineer is on site longer than we would expect, they are prompted and it's prompted externally so that we can bring in experts, for instance, using CareAR to say, let's collaborate on this problem. Let's just see if we can find this before it becomes an extended event. That's the first thing. I think the other piece is the way that we can find out about work with other, I'll call them, business towers. So it's a pretty simple thing. At the end of the day, rate fix is fairly simple. And so my wife asked me what do I do? Well, people call us and we can't fix it on the phone, we send somebody and they go out and fix it, and then we take the next call. She says, why do you work so many hours, and that's all your job is? Well, the point is all of that involves, for instance, a customer calls us, we know that customer is. We need to talk to the contracting system to understand entitlements. If I send somebody there, I need to -- and I use parts, I need to recognize that parts have been used and talk to supply chain because it's parts transaction. I need to do inventory, I need to do accounting. I need to do financial work for cost transfer. So it's moving across towers that becomes challenging. So the finance team does a wonderful job with what they do. The accounting team does a fine job with what they do within their place. Service delivery does a great job within service delivery, supply chain, et cetera. But the real challenge comes in working across those towers to make the workflow between supply chain and service delivery and supply chain and the contact center and a cost transfer through finance to keep a P&L whole back to service delivery so we can account for the cost. Those transactions, working vertically across those horizontal towers, is very complex. And most business problems we have today around efficiency, I believe, are going across those towers, not in the tower themselves. And we felt with ServiceNow is the ability with the workflow functionality in there, it makes it easier for us to work across towers that we can build -- we can get people to the place or get the workflow to the place where the accounting engine works, where the supply chain engine works, where the service delivery engine works. But those connections between them, those workflow elements and data elements to be passed, ServiceNow does a wonderful job to build, to help us get those things done. And I was not expecting that to be as prevalent. And it's kind of a -- maybe other people knew that was going to be true. But for me, that was a revelation. I'm looking forward to further collaboration to extend that across other opportunities within our space.

John, well, I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you so much for bridging those towers for our global audience that's here with us today. And almost everyone has stayed with us all the way here until the end. So just thank you so much for being with us here today, John, everyone that's joining from around the globe. And if you want to learn a little bit more about this, it doesn't end here. You have a couple of resources that are right below the speaker view for you or the slide view for you. Be sure to check those out and download them. Everything from our field service use case guide is listed there. We also did a recent Forrester study on the total economic impact of field service management. Love the statistics that were available in there. And we're just talking about real tangible results. And John, you're talking about this partnership and the integration to the technology stack, that truth is that it kind of is a domino effect. For those who have ever played dominoes, you flick one and you realize, oh, just giving the example of onboarding an employee. "Oh, wait, they need hardware in their laptop." So I need hardware asset management. And then we need to make sure that we understand what applications they have and have proper visibility into our CMDB. And by the way, we need to make sure that workplace services is welcoming them, and we are assigning them a desk because they're a hybrid employee. So now we need to make sure that they have workplace maps. And so there's just so many different caveats, and that's why I really think that having leaders like yourself in the executive circle and the leadership chair and even those of us just influencing without authority, right, influence without authority. That's great. That's fantastic. And making sure that there's a seat at the table for these conversations to bridge those towers. So be sure to check out the CX Trends Report, view additional success stories, including Xerox's on our website. And if you are so lucky enough, I know that John, you and I will be sharing a good handshake, hug, high 5, those besos depending on where you're from.

Before we're meeting you face-to-face. Yes.

And we will also have Xerox discussing with us there, live at Knowledge. You'll be able to catch John out on the show floor as well as many of his other colleagues. Thank you for those that have also joined us here today. So be sure to register, it's going to be a really great year. 2024, we are back in action bigger, better than ever. If you were at 2023, just you have -- there's just -- there's even more that's coming. I'll leave it at that. And with that said, and if you ever miss a webinar, just remember, you can always catch any of the ServiceNow webinars on demand. We have a great library of resources available there, so you can catch this Xerox webinar, share it among your colleagues, your friends, and we really appreciate you tuning in with us today. And with that, thank you so much. I'm Jordan Waechter, John Perry from Xerox, and have a really wonderful day and evening, depending on where you're at. Cheers.

Thank you.