Orica has emerged as an early adopter of generative AI in ServiceNow to deflect IT service desk inquiries to chatbots and self-service, one of 35 potential use cases in IT operations.
Orica’s Bradley Hunt (right) at ServiceNow World Forum Melbourne 2024.
The maker of explosives and blasting systems joined the early access program for Now Assist, a collection of generative AI tools that can augment a ServiceNow instance.
Orica’s ability to get to this point was two years in the making. It had a decade-old ServiceNow instance that, while functional, had “drifted” from its out-of-the-box state over time, manager of DevOps and regional apps Bradley Hunt told the recent ServiceNow World Forum Melbourne 2024.
“About two years ago we made the decision that we would reimplement ServiceNow, and we undertook a 12-month re-platforming journey with Thirdera to get us back to that greenfield out-of-the-box position,” Hunt said.
Thirdera is a ServiceNow partner owned by Cognizant.
Moving off the older instance, and to a largely greenfields one, meant that Orica could implement a number of newer functions.
“In the last 18 months, we’ve done everything that you can imagine,” Hunt said.
“We’ve rolled out virtual agent, lifecycle events for HR and legal service delivery. We’ve done cloud discovery, event management, rolled out about 10-to-15 integrations and three custom apps.
“But more importantly we were able to start our AI journey.”
The company’s initial foray into AI involved using Now Assist to connect to an external large language model (LLM) run through the Azure OpenAI service.
“We built a few little proof-of-concepts within ITSM,” Hunt said. “They were custom but worked well and proved that there is value in this.”
When ServiceNow introduced its own Now LLM, Orica switched to using that.
“We managed to make use of [a ServiceNow accelerator] program, and in six weeks we rolled out incident summarisation, resolution note generation and AI search [powered by Now Assist],” Hunt said.
“Two weeks later we rolled out virtual agent [capabilities].”
Hunt said that value realisation from those initial use cases proved a mixed bag.
“Some areas you see more value, some less,” he said.
“Resolution notes and summarisation, while really cool for Orica, there wasn’t a lot of tangible cost savings or value from that. It saves a few minutes here and there, which is awesome and the teams like it.
“But other areas that we didn’t expect like summarising live chats, that’s our most used [generative AI] ‘skill’, and AI search is a fan favourite for customers.
“Being able to search, ‘How do I reset my password?’ and have the summary there, not needing to click on knowledge articles, that was really big.”
Having demonstrated value, Orica then brought in Thirdera to “turn on all the other Now Assist skills for us.”
This included a knowledge generation skill, which uses incident data to automatically create a knowledge article.
While still very early days – Orica had been using Now Assist for just two months in production at the time of its presentation – Hunt said that value realisation and results were “very positive”.
“If you look at virtual agent [alone], the deflection rate [has gone] from 18 to 94 percent, [which] is just a massive increase,” he said.
“Success rate has doubled, so people are now completing more flows and they’re deflecting more tickets, and that means they come back to the virtual agent, and usage per month almost doubled.
“If you combine that with higher success, higher deflection, more chats, it’s just a massive benefit to the service desk.”
Hunt added that about 75 percent of virtual agent engagement is initiated through Microsoft Teams.
On AI search – which reduces time spent trawling knowledge base articles for answers – Hunt said it was “a bit too early” to understand deflection rates.
He said, however, that Now Assist had aided in reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) of incidents across the board.
“We’re two months into this, [and] we’ve dropped a day already [from MTTR]. That’s across all incidents,” Hunt said.
Hunt’s team is making use of a specific Now Assist dashboard in ServiceNow to understand “which skills are being used, in what regions, and what teams are using what skills over time.”
He estimated that it would take another six months to a year to have Now Assist working as Orica had envisioned.
The company plans to use language support capabilities in the tool more, as it supports 12 languages across its global operations.
It also wants to improve its deflection rates from service desk agents to the virtual agent or AI over time, and potentially expand Now Assist into more parts of IT operations beyond IT service management.
“It’s all well and good service management, but can we take it to other areas of IT operations? Can we do alerts and event management and summarisation of those? Can we do software asset management? Can we start taking Now Assist to the other areas of IT operations to help them out?” Hunt said.
Ry Crozier travelled to Melbourne to attend ServiceNow World Forum Melbourne 2024 as a guest of ServiceNow.