BT Group and ServiceNow are expanding a long term strategic partnership into a multi-year agreement centred on generative artificial intelligence (AI). The move will, according to the group’s press release, “drive savings, efficiency, and improved customer experiences”.
Following a successful digital transformation project to update BT’s legacy systems in 2022, ServiceNow will now extend its service management capabilities to the entire BT Group. The group will also adopt several of ServiceNow’s products, including Now Assist for Telecom Service Management (TSM) to power generative AI capabilities for internal and customer-facing teams.
Now Assist generative AI supposedly helps agents write case summaries and review complex notes faster. According to BT, the initial roll out to 300 agents saw Now Assist demonstrate “meaningful results” by improving agent responsiveness and driving better experiences for employees and customers. Case summarization supposedly reduced the time it took agents to generate case activity summaries by 55%. This, BT says, created a better agent handoff experience by reducing the time it takes to review complex case notes, also by 55%. By reducing overall handling time, Now Assist is helping BT Group improve its mean time to resolve by a third.
Hena Jalil, Managing Director and Business CIO at BT Group said that reimagining how BT delivers its service management “requires a platform first approach” and that the new AI-powered approach would “transform customer experience at BT Group, unlocking value at every stage of the journey.”
“In this new era of intelligent automation, ServiceNow puts AI to work for our customers – with speed, trust, and security,” said Paul Smith, Chief Commercial Officer at ServiceNow. “By leveraging the speed and scale of the Now Platform, we’re creating a competitive advantage for BT, driving enterprise-wide transformation, and helping them achieve new levels of productivity, innovation, and business impact.”
Does “unlocking value” mean layoffs for BT?
The company’s push towards generative AI faced criticism last year when the company announced plans to reduce its overall workforce by more than 40% by 2030. In May, BT revealed plans to cut 55,000 jobs. The majority of the expected layoffs will stem from the winding down of BT’s full fibre and 5G rollout in the UK.
However, BT chief executive Philip Jansen said he expects 10,000 jobs to be automated away by artificial intelligence and that BT would “be a huge beneficiary of AI.”
In general, the threat that generative AI poses to existing jobs has been mounting since the technology’s explosion into the mainstream. Results of a survey published in April found that C-Suite executives expect generative AI to reduce the number of jobs at thousands of US companies. Almost half of the execs surveyed (41%) expected to employ fewer people because of the technology in the near future.
Despite the fact this figure has more to do with the opinion executives have of AI than whether or not the technology is actually ready to start replacing jobs (it’s not — except maybe executive roles). What it means is that the people who decide whether or not to hire more staff, maintain their headcount, or gut their departments and replace human beings with AI think AI is ready to take on the challenge.
- Data & AI
