BONUS: AI governance - how business can adopt AI safely

Katie Prescott (0:04)

Hello, I'm Katie Prescott and welcome to this special episode of The Times Tech Podcast, which is brought to you in paid partnership with ServiceNow.

Since we launched this podcast a couple of years ago, we constantly discuss the twists and turns of AI's development. The tech is developing at such a rate of knots, and that has huge implications for all of us, trying to understand its potential, trying to use it, trying to make the most of it. But when it comes to businesses, one of the biggest issues that we hear about is navigating this very rapid pace of change. Leaders frequently say it can seem overwhelming in terms of implementation, making sure spending is in the right place, getting the best outcome for the company, making sure everyone is on board with it, but also we keep hearing time and time again, it's an enormous challenge in terms of governance. So today's podcast in partnership with ServiceNow is going to focus on that issue of governance, looking at how companies can avoid the pitfalls thrown up by AI when it comes to legal issues, copyright, ethics, security, and embrace the opportunities safely.

To help us explore this, I am delighted to welcome Matt Higham, Chief Digital and Technology Officer for UK and Ireland at ServiceNow. ServiceNow is an enterprise software company headquartered in California, which employs 30,000 people, and essentially, it sells tech to companies to help manage their backend processes, anything from HR to IT support. Well, welcome, Matt. Thank you very much for joining us on the podcast.

Matt Higham (1:34)

It's a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

Katie Prescott (1:40)

Tell us a bit about your role at ServiceNow and what do you do?

Matt Higham (1:44)

So I tend to spend most of my personal time with the boards of organizations across UK and Ireland and global companies as well, trying to help them unlock the difference between hype and reality of AI, to help them overcome a lot of the challenges that they're seeing and really benefit from the true value of AI at pace and scale.

Katie Prescott (2:03)

I talked a bit in the introduction about what governance means and what some of the pitfalls are, but how would you describe it?

Matt Higham (2:10)

So governance around AI really is making sure that you know what the AI is doing, what business logic it's executing and the value that you're getting from it. With trust and transparency throughout the entire process. Maintaining that both to your employees, but also to your customers and to the regulators.

Katie Prescott (2:27)

What sort of things are your clients worried about? When they talk to you about governance, so what are the big warnings or fears that they have about it?

Matt Higham (2:36)

We're essentially shifting our business operating models from very human centric. What we're now moving towards is agentic AI that is able to make autonomous decisions, which is really removing the agency from the human. So we have to have oversight to make sure that when it takes those actions, that those actions are done in an ethical, moral and regulatory correct way.

Katie Prescott (2:57)

So that's the governance side. You want to make sure that the AI is not going rogue, essentially. But companies obviously want to use it to make themselves more efficient, perhaps take people out of the loop. How do you juggle that dichotomy?

Matt Higham (3:11)

I think that's the problem. We keep looking at this as a balance where actually it's a high dependency. If you look at governance, it helps you go faster, it helps you drive growth, it helps you build trust and transparency with your employees and your customers. I wouldn't use an organization's products if I didn't have transparency in how it was leveraging my data or making decisions based upon me. It would be very difficult. In the same way as the way with employees, yes, we are going to be taking tasks away from humans that are very repeatable, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the role disappears. We just move the role into a much more productive capability for the benefit of the organization, the employee and our customers.

Katie Prescott (3:49)

Can you give us a tangible example of where you've seen this working really well?

Matt Higham (3:54)

Yeah, at the moment, agentic AI unfortunately is really pointed at the kind of unsexy part of a business, so HR, finance, IT, and we're starting to see massive consolidation in that space.

So we're seeing cross-functional AI agentic workflows that are taking all of the pain points out of kind of legacy homegrown processes and create incredibly smooth, frictionless employee experiences for things like onboarding into a new company or a customer experience to understand if something happens in the supply chain, what the effect is on that customer journey and whether they're going to get their product on time. There's thousands of use cases in those things. We're seeing it in health now where it's allowing the NHS to be able to increase the operational efficiency of being able to book appointments. We're seeing lots and lots of use cases that actually just remove the friction from everyday life.