ServiceNow Inc. said today it’s combining artificial intelligence-powered recommendations with expert guidance and support to help customers get a return on their investments in digital transformation much faster than they would do so otherwise.

The company believes there will be big demand for the help it can offer, pointing to growing discontent in the enterprise over the value derived from millions of dollars of investments in recent years.

In fact, companies have invested more than $3 trillion in digital transformation initiatives over the past three years, according to data from International Data Corp. However, the same study shows fewer than half of organizations have achieved their expected outcomes from those investments. As a result, ServiceNow says, companies are experiencing a stark “value gap” that has resulted from a proliferation of new projects that don’t work effectively together and the need to continue spending resources to maintain those new solutions.

ServiceNow Impact is the company’s response to that growing frustration. It’s designed to close the value gap by providing personalized recommendations for customers along with insights, premium technical support, role-based training, expert coaching, prescriptive guidance and more. The solution will be tailored for each company, its industry and its role, with an eye to accelerating time to value.

With ServiceNow Impact, customers will benefit from a personalized digital transformation experience with peer and industry benchmarks they can compare their own progress against, plus real-time tracking and AI-curated content and recommendations.

In other words, ServiceNow expects companies to benefit from its unique expertise to find a way to derive greater value from their digital transformation investments. It will help them to align their innovation strategies with business outcomes, offering prescriptive guidance at every step of the way, it added. Customers will gain access to what ServiceNow calls “Impact Accelerators,” which are goal-specific, fixed-scope offerings designed to help them achieve each new milestone they set themselves on the long road toward digital transformation.

Paul Greenberg, an analyst at The 56 Group LLC, said most organizations are keen to get more value out of new investments they’ve made in their technology stacks since the COVID-19 pandemic began. “ServiceNow Impact provides an innovative approach to value acceleration for its customers that raises the bar on the B2B customer experience in the industry,” he said.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said ServiceNow is trying to fulfill a voracious appetite for enterprise acceleration. Although companies are striving to become faster and more agile, he said they can’t get there quickly enough.

“So AI is a welcome technology to enable this transformation,” Mueller explained. “ServiceNow’s proposition is to mix AI with human expertise through its new Impact offering, and we’re eager to see if adoption of the platform will be successful.”

ServiceNow reckons it has already helped out a number of early adopters and achieved some very promising results. For instance, ServiceNow Impact has already been employed by the State of Montana to overcome talent shortages.

Chief Information Officer Kevin Gilbertson said the state struggled to hire enough developers during the early days of its digital transformation. “We needed to significantly grow the number of people that were creating applications,” he said. “ServiceNow Impact is an extensive personalized enterprise program that will help in getting critical roles filled and provide technical training for a seamless experience.”

Image: ServiceNow