During the ServiceNow Knowledge17 event in Orlando, Florida, earlier this year, a lot of the buzz was around the new applications the ServiceNow platform was expanding into with new capabilities like machine learning and “internet of things” solutions. Chris Pope, vice president of strategy at ServiceNow Inc., shared some insights into how the company has restructured itself to tackle these new markets and drive more value to its customers.

“A lot of the challenges come from the sales and field guys that came up in ITSM [information technology service management]. It’s a different selling motion talking to HR [human resources] or Customer Service people who often sit truly in a business environment and are not familiar with IT,” Pope said. “So for us, it’s been about growing that organization … we turned the company upside down and went with more of a business line structure, which aligned the product teams and the field.”

Pope spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during ServiceNow Knowledge17 in Orlando, Florida, earlier this year. (* Disclosure below)

Looking ahead

Pope described the upcoming machine learning offerings from ServceNow, which he sees as the big next strategic move for the company. In order to drive innovation into all of the new verticals, a lot of the heavy R&D takes place at the platform level so that it can be applied as a baseline across all applications, he explained.

“It sits in our platform business unit, where the guts of the core and where the orchestration engine is as well. Whether it’s IT, HR, customer service, it doesn’t matter; it’s in the guts of the platform. This means each has to figure out how to leverage the capability … and then because it’s in-platform, if you come along and build a new app on the platform, it also has AI capability with it. That is a step change in what people can do and not another thing they have to go and figure out; it’s all there in the box.”

Pope also acknowledged that machine learning and artificial intelligence technology is only as valuable as the use case it is applied to, and ServiceNow is actively exploring new ways customers can start to integrate the company’s new offerings.

“We ran a hackathon with a large customer, and they looked at attrition whereby they linked annual survey data, performance data, as well as system data, for things like on-boarding or off-boarding. … They were able to predict within a certain tolerance if you’re a happy employee. but you just had a bad year,” Pope stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge17. (* Disclosure: ServiceNow Inc. sponsored this Knowledge17 segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither ServiceNow nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE