Adapting IT to Generative AI with Jithin Bhasker and Chris Tozier

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Ji Basque, who's general manager and vice president for App Engine at ServiceNow, and we also have Christopher Tozier, who's managing director for enterprise AppSec at nascar.

And we're talking about how, uh, well, a, we're talking about new low-code tools from ServiceNow, and then we're talking to talk about how NASCAR is using those tools. So gentlemen, welcome the show. Thank you back.

Thank you. Very happy to be here. Let's start with the tool jittin.

What exactly are you guys doing? I know you've had multiple low-code tools over the years, so what's changing, what's different and where does this fit in the spectrum of the portfolio? Absolutely, Mike.

Well, I want to take a step back and say this is more than a tool. This is a real notion and a transformation. We want to drive and empower every employee in an enterprise.

Uh, we all spoke about low code. You're absolutely right, Mike, in terms of the different offerings, releases, launches we have done, but we are now taking it to truly no code. And when, when I say no code, that essentially means anyone should be able to build an automation on an application using our ServiceNow platform and without zero scripting or coding skills.

And for that, we are launching a brand new innovation called Create a Studio, where it'll guide you through first step to the last step to be able to build applications with zero technical or developer skill. So imagine you're from a sales operations team and you want to build sales compensation tracker, and you should have the ability to build that using and create a studio with zero coding and technical skills, more or less. And what enables that.

Um, these days you can't walk down the street without somebody leaping out to tell you about their great new AI thing. But I'm assuming that there are some large language models and other interesting tech behind that. So how did we get here?

Absolutely. So I think we are bringing the power of two amazing technologies together here. One is the Creative Studio, which would be a ServiceNow platform offering.

In addition to it, we are also bringing the whole generative AI capability where with a single English language prompt, you will be able to build an application in few minutes. So the combination of this low code and this text to app or a generative AI capability is truly gonna revolutionize the way anyone will be empowered to build on our platform going forward. Chris, would you like to add something on top of it?

Yes, absolutely. When we started down this path a year ago, um, you know, we were, we are doing out, out of necessity here at nascar. Like I've always believed that we can't build a big enough IT organization in this world anymore to deliver everything for everybody.

And we're going to have to rely on our employee base who are actually our business experts, um, and their, and their skill sets to deliver. So we started down this path a year ago, and we kind of knew we were gonna take a few lumps along the way just because it's a new concept here at nascar. Um, but we definitely saw the value in the platform of ServiceNow at the time.

We saw the direction that they were going and we knew that we could grow with them. So, um, we have made progress in the past year. Um, it's been a little slow.

It's always a little slower than you wish it would. Um, we've have some very smart technical people who have, who have gone a long way toward delivery, but they can't finish the, they can't finish it right in the current state. They still require a little bit of touchpoint, um, around security and how they're actually delivering it to our, to our people.

Um, we're very, very excited about Creator Studio and where we're going. You know, we've always believed that ServiceNow was gonna get here, um, based on the conversations that we had. And so this is a really big, like, exciting news for us that I've been really waiting for because that will allow us to open up the, the tool set to a much broader group of people than just our technically capable employee base.

Um, so, you know, that's what, that's what we have our eye on with this release. Well, let me ask you a question about that, because historically we've had these low-code, no-code tools, and it's been some mixed bag of success, right? We get something that somebody can uses.

Sometimes it's not the prettiest thing in the world, and it's not designed to scale or secured. Um, so are is somebody behind the subject matter experts vetting these applications? What is the relationship gonna be and the role of the IT folks as we kind of go forward here?

And how did you navigate that? Yeah, Mike. So one of the biggest differentiation of our low-code solution in the market is all about the governance and the control we have built around our product, we call it App Engine Management Center, where, uh, it more or less gives you the ability to actually submit an idea, get it approved or vetted, and then collaborate with the right IT and the technical teams if need be at all, and then be able to, uh, get an approval and push it into production in this scenario of an absolute no code where you're even talking about absolutely simplifying that pipeline.

So it all the way from concept to idea to developing to public publishing, we'll go through a a a a funnel or a pipeline we have built within the platform so that we make it absolutely easy for someone to be able to get to an automation as fast as they can. As Chris said earlier, the, the personas we are really targeting in an is where someone who wouldn't know how to manage a classic SDLC uh, lifecycle, but in this case you can think about it as simple form they're submitting. And then with the help of our NO code and the generative ai, they have the ability to build an application in fume minutes and leveraging the Creative Studio as a harness on top of it.

And then once done it goes to the it, it web set makes sure you have the right security and controls in place, click done, it's published and ready to go. You're cutting down almost, I would say probably two weeks of a simple app building into maybe few hours where you are actually getting to the actual solution from an automation with zero coding, but at the same time, right level of governance and controls on top of it with create a studio and app engine together along with our generative AI capabilities we are launching as well. Chris, let me ask you, how did that impact the speed at which you guys are building applications?

Because historically, uh, there was a lot of iterations going back and forth between the subject matter experts and the developers and it, so has that all been condensed? Yeah, as an, as an organization where we've been in a learning curve with the existing tools, um, there's been a lot of back and forth that our, our developers, you know, our citizen developers have had to have with our team, our technical team, uh, just to make progress. So they have questions, they need a little help or a little nudge along the way.

Um, and we've definitely cobbled together the governance at the end of the process because the tool set didn't lend itself to a push button delivery, uh, like creator studio will. So we'll absolutely still leverage that approval step in there, but it makes that a lot smoother. What we're mostly excited about is really the ability for these developers let, let's say play that it'll give them a chance to play with their development and not have such a hurdle to just make progress.

So I think it will give them a little bit more time, it'll give them a much more natural way to try things out and tweak what they're doing, as opposed to asking questions like, Hey, I did something I didn't wanna do. How do I go back? Um, it'll give 'em a much more natural interface to play with the tool set to make it exactly what they're trying to do.

Um, so I, I foresee that it's going to be eliminating a lot of that slowness, uh, before we reach the true governance approval step. Mm-Hmm. Jin, what is gonna be the role of professional developers going forward?

If the subject matter experts can clearly build more stuff themselves, but, uh, there's still all these tools that we use out there, is there gonna be a shift in responsibility? How do you see this playing out? Yeah, I see it in two ways.

Uh, Mike one is where, uh, like Chris was mentioning, there are simpler applications which could be built by citizen developers, which may not necessarily require a lot of a third party integrations to come together so that you have a lot of data flow between different applications or multiple applications per se. It could be a simple request, uh, or fulfill a workflow. It could be a simple form or simple applications which you wanna kind of, uh, transfer, transfer the data between the two different departments versus you sending on an email or an Excel sheet or a PO or a SharePoint, right?

That is a simple application, which we think it'll be fully contained in a creative studio, like a format where you don't need a technical or an expert developer to be able to truly make it fully functional. Now, if you take that case and imagine you want to scale that simple application into a complex application where it now talks to different system, which could be different ERP systems or CRS system, that's where you need the two to be integrated, and that's where you would leverage a technical expert to be able to come in support making that simple application, which was built by the citizen developer and scale it to probably a medium to highly complex data transfer application is where you really need a technical expert expert to be coming in. Now, if you really think about the differentiation, another differentiation building on our platform again, is let's say you built a simple application using Creative Studio.

Um, you do not have to rebuild the whole application again, rather you can use the same application, open up the backend because it's all built on a single data platform and data model, and you can now integrate multiple advanced capabilities, which include third party integrations as well. So you never have to rebuild when you build something, whether it's a simple, medium or complex application on ServiceNow platform, which is one of the biggest differentiation which our customers tell ourself at the moment. All right, so I didn't dive And I would really, I would really like to add to that, um, from, from the IT delivery perspective at nascar, there are hundreds of, of examples of smaller automations that we could be bringing to the organization, but they kind of get filtered out in the prioritization process, um, because of the, a little, some of this burden of delivery, right?

So we tend to go for ROI projects, we go for larger projects that really require our focus. And so a lot of this opportunity kind of gets filtered out in there. But if you look at in totality, the, the sum total opportunity there is huge for an organization, um, where each one of those little individual things may not rise to the top, but in totality, it's a pretty impactful change for us.

So that's really what we're focused on, uh, in, in terms of the value proposition that was talking about Jittin. Do you think the concept of application development backlog is about to become something of the past? I mean, for as long as I can remember, every IT organization and a list of these things that they would, uh, someday never get to?

I mean, is that just all gonna go away? Wish that was the case. Um, I, but me too.

Yeah. Well, um, here's the new number, which IDC came up with two weeks back based on a later of research according to IDC, the number of application which is gonna be billed by 2028, raised from 750 million to 1 billion applications. The unfortunate part is, like Chris was mentioning in the beginning, we do not have that scale of growth in terms of highly skilled developers who could actually support building those.

So in the new world of high demand or digitization continuing to grow, there is no way you can avoid a no code or a low low code application in your strategic IT portfolio anymore. It is, it is a question about how versus, um, you know, why in terms of when can I start as the actual question in terms of when can I embed this as a part of the whole IT portfolio strategy? So fundamentally answering your question, Mike, like, um, the demand for digitization and building this application is continuing to, uh, grow on a hyperscale way, but we do not have enough developers.

And like, uh, the Economist survey, which I often quote in some of my, uh, talks is that, uh, they came up that every enterprise has an average of six to 12 months of an IT backlog, but no code platforms like create a studio will truly make it the hero who is empowering every one of the enterprise employee who could be a marketing operations team who would be a sales ops, any one of them to be able to build application, but with the right governance and control by giving access to a platform like Creator Studio to everyone within the company. Mm-Hmm. Chris, you've been at this for a little while.

What do you know now about all this that you kind of wish you knew going in? Well, I do think we recognized that we had a big learning curve ahead of us. Um, I, I, I think we needed to go through a little bit of that learning curve as an organization, uh, to, to really understand what we were doing.

Um, I think, you know, the big, the big thing I wish we had known is a little bit of a stronger idea of what governance really means in the, in the current, um, in the current delivery model. And that's something I hear from a, from a lot of customers. Um, I, I will second, like, the workload is not gonna go away, um, at all.

It, it is, I, I can't believe it's less than a year backlog for any IT organization, but our problem is, is, uh, you know, you have a backlog, but you never get to a lot of it because of prioritization of the following year and the next, you know, the next round of things you're business is trying to do. Um, so that backlog just a lot of times sits there and that's really, again, the opportunity you're going after, but it's growing, it's growing significantly for us as, as well. So, you know, I think we did the right thing by getting in early and understanding what it takes to do this.

So now I think we're gonna be able to really leverage this new tool and really take off running Jin. It's still early days as far as AI is considered in application development, but, you know, getting your crystal ball out, how smart can smart get, where do you think this is all gonna lead? Yeah, I'll go back to what I was sharing earlier, Mike, where, uh, there is a immense power when you bring these two technologies together.

The one is about the no-code platform, like a creator studio, then augmenting that with gen app generation, kind of a gen AI capability. So when you bring the two together, the way it's really gonna work is with the, uh, with the simple English prompts. You have the ability to build an application in few minutes right there on a platform.

And once it's done, you are now leveraging Creative Studio to be able to do the last mile, which is the last 20% of your application, fine tuning, polishing, editing, clicking and dragging, and dropping absolutely with no code. So when you bring the two together, and our customers itself says this, and I've heard this one of the customer talking to us about it, like imagination becomes the limit, not the, the, uh, the number of experts or not the technology. It's all about how well you can synthesize what the business process need to look like and how you wanna really prompt and ask in simple English that this is the pla, this is the automation or the application I would like to build, and it is live today, we are ready to launch it.

All right, folks. Well, you heard it here. It's a brave new world of application development, and it's not so much that anybody's gonna be replaced as much as well, maybe roles will shift here and there, but the number of applications we're about to build is gonna be mind boggling.

All right, we'll see you next time.