As the new CEO of ServiceNow Inc., John Donahoe (pictured) is tasked with moving the company through a new growth phase. The software platform provider has dominated in help desk solutions for the information technology sector, now setting sights on other departments within the enterprise. From human resources to marketing, ServiceNow wants to enable digital transformations across entire organizations with seamless solutions that improve employee experiences first.

“Technology is driving strategic change at every company. Call it digital transformation, call it a tech transformation … I think it’s an enormously exciting opportunity for the people that are our traditional customer base,” Donahoe said. “I’m thrilled about … how many companies are saying that ServiceNow is a strategic platform of choice going forward far beyond just IT. That’s just something to really build upon.”

Donahoe sat down with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s roving news desk, following his keynote presentation at this year’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2018 conference. Chatting with co-hosts Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), Donahoe shared impressions on his first year at ServiceNow, the best practices for C-suite leaders driving digital transformations, and where artificial intelligence and machine learning fit into the company’s immediate objectives. (* Disclosure below.)

Enduring in the era of rapid transformation

Donahoe’s keynote outlined the attributes of an enduring company as being purpose-driven, innovating and executing, investing in talent, and having a will to win. For ServiceNow, a primary area of focused innovation is automation. Known for automating the redundancies of business operations in IT, ServiceNow doesn’t shy away from the sometimes controversial topic.

“If you look at where automation is really going to have the biggest impact, it’s not in any given job, it’s actually the third of all our jobs that are repetitive, administrative and redundant,” said Donahoe, based on the data he’s studied. With this horizontal view of integrating automation, ServiceNow takes a long view on the impact this trend will have on jobs.

Recognizing that automation will in fact replace some jobs while also creating new ones, Donahoe sees opportunities within his own company. Thanks to automation, the role of administrator at ServiceNow no longer requires a background in computer science. Instead of migrating the jobs, Donahoe wants to migrate employees’ skills.

“How do we migrate the skills migration so people have the skills for the jobs of the future? We’re looking at ways of, how do we help retain people to have the skills to create one of the jobs that we’re creating through ServiceNow administrators?” Donahoe said.

AI and beyond

Another area of interest for ServiceNow is machine learning as it applies to artificial intelligence. Following a handful of key acquisitions in recent months, ServiceNow has been rebuilding its acquired technology into its own platform — and then putting it to work internally.

“We want to be the first user,” said Donahoe, going on to provide a use case for an AI-driven chat bot that helps route support calls to the right person. Based on technology from the acquisition of DxContinuum, the intelligent chat bot addressed an 11 percent time gap where customer support representatives were burdened with the “grunty” work of categorizing incidents in order to properly route calls.

“Within two weeks the machine was categorizing the issue and routing it more accurately than a human can. Our customers’ problems are getting solved faster, and the 11 percent of those resources, who are engineers in our case, are focused on solving customer problems, not doing what felt like an administrative task to them,” Donahoe said.

In line with ServiceNow’s approach to drinking its own champagne, Donahoe lists role models as crucial to a business’ successful digital transformation. To this end, Donahoe encourages ServiceNow leaders to ” be more articulate about what best practices look like … so anyone in any organization can go to their boss and say, ‘Oh, this is the best in class. We need to emulate this, and here are the returns we can get,'” Donahoe explained.

“Employee experience is not just an HR issue. Employee experience is not just an IT issue. You need a powerful team of … functional leaders,” he furthered.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the ServiceNow Knowledge 2018 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Neither ServiceNow Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE