Disintegrating the Org Chart: ServiceNow’s Jacqui Canney

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
We hear a lot about using agents for workflows. One company has 80,000 active workflows and believes it's making innovation, employee experience, and other aspects of its business better with AI. Learn more on today's episode.

**Jacqui Canney** (0:15)
I'm Jacqui Canney from ServiceNow, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:21)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, exploring the future of artificial intelligence. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I've been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 13 seasons of podcast episodes. In each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policymakers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.
Hi, listeners. Thanks again for joining us. Today I'm talking with Jacqui Canney. She's the Chief People and AI Enablement Officer at ServiceNow. She leads all talent strategies for the company's rapidly growing global workforce. We've known each other for a few years, and I'm glad the timing finally worked out for us to talk with our microphones on. Jacqui, thanks for joining us.

**Jacqui Canney** (1:19)
Thank you. Thank you, Sam, for having me. I'm really excited for this conversation.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:23)
Could be fun. Well, let's start with ServiceNow. It's huge, S&P 100, but some listeners might not be familiar with all that the company does. Can you give us a bit of background?

**Jacqui Canney** (1:32)
Sure. I'll start with what our purpose is, which is to put AI to work for people. At that core, we are the AI platform for business transformation. If you think about automated workflows, you think about the ability to drive your business results, it comes down to how you direct work, and our platform is literally built on AI, so that we can help companies in, I think it's now 80 billion workflows that we manage, that produce either better service, more analytics, all the things that companies are seeking to do with their organizations. I was a customer of ServiceNow, so that brought me to really be excited about working here too.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:13)
You really led with AI right there. How did that happen? We're just relatively few years into this whole AI world. How do you have 80 billion? I thought for a second that just seemed like a huge number. How do you have that many workflows using AI already?

**Jacqui Canney** (2:27)
We have a very innovative company. It's 22 years old, I want to say, and was built on how to help people experience work better. Fred Lutty, our founder, built the first workflow for a colleague who was struggling with the swivel chair, getting work done and Excel spreadsheets, etc. At our core, innovation has been something that we've always tackled. And you've seen the movement, like analog to digital, prem to cloud, cloud to mobile, now this conversation to AI, and ServiceNow has had these amazing engineers and product leaders who've been thinking about this for a long time, a long time before even people talked about, like, chat GBT.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:08)
Maybe give us an example, like, what is one of these 80 billion and how does artificial intelligence involved in that?

**Jacqui Canney** (3:16)
Yeah, so I'll take one in my area that I see a lot. When somebody gets hired to work here, there's lots of steps to onboard people, and that can be a lot of conversations, it can be different managers, different departments. But with our onboarding platform, you say, hey, this is the person that's starting, this is the kind of computer that they want, this is the kind of cell phone that they need, this is the training they need to have happen, the proof of identity so that it could be paid, that they get paid, that they show up, and they're feeling productive before they even start on that day. And then what happens post that onboarding? Because there's follow-ups reminding a manager, hey, so-and-so started 10 days ago, why don't you check in? Or so-and-so got their first kudos, a recognition, like why don't you check in and see how they're doing? So it's an automated workflow that takes the guessing and makes the manager and the employee really feel a relationship right at the gate that's personalized.

**Sam Ransbotham** (4:11)
So I guess in that process, then, where was artificial intelligence? How does that fit into all those steps?

**Jacqui Canney** (4:17)
So you can have an agent, you know, if I say I want a MacBook, it makes the order, the agents get the order done, the agents get the order shipped to your house, it's agents working in the background while people are able to focus on what they need to, which is welcoming this great new employee.