Embracing AI: Transforming IT Service Management and Innovation | swampUP 2025

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel, and we're back here and we're back live at Swamp Up in the beautiful Napa Valley. You couldn't ask for a better location. The sun has come out, you know, it's good for the grapes.

They say it gets a little cooler, a little warmer, the sun, the rain, you get good grapes, good wine. But we're here with really maybe the highlight of our panel today. Um, three, three of the VIPs of, of the, uh, event The man to my immediate le Actually, I'm gonna let you go last, okay.

Let me start to my far left, I wanna introduce you to Rahul Tripti. Rahul is the GVP and GM of the ITSM, something I'm a little familiar with business unit at ServiceNow. Rahul, welcome to Tech Trunk tv.

Thank you. Thanks for having me here. Give our audience needs, no introduction to ServiceNow, but give them a little bit of your background maybe and a little bit of what you're doing at ServiceNow.

Yeah, so I'm relatively new to ServiceNow. I joined little over four months back. Oh, Really?

Are new. And I'm running ITSM, which is the bread and butter, the largest business ServiceNow does. That's where ServiceNow was founded.

My background has been building products for a long time for large enterprise companies, but the interesting bit is I switched midway to being a practitioner myself. So I was running DevOps teams in the cloud space in my last startup before I came to ServiceNow. So I've been on both sides of the equation, building products and consuming products.

That's, and that, that's missing in too many of our vendors. As someone who speaks to vendors all the time, you, it's good to have that practitioner side to see what it is they, they're actually feeling. As that goes by, let's introduce Justin Boitano.

Justin is VP of Enterprise AI at Nvidia. Justin, welcome. Thanks for being on text on tv.

Thank you for having us today. Give us a little, maybe a little bit of your background. Yeah.

Well, I've, I've been in Nvidia now actually for 13 years. I guess a little bit of everything over that time, but, uh, you've Seen it come go. It, it's been, it's been, you know, quite a fun ride.

Uh, you know, watching us really reinvent how computing is done. Um, you know, from really the ground up. Uh, and I think it was, uh, when I first joined in 2008, we had just invented Cuda.

Nobody knew what it was. We were going around library by library, trying to port applications onto GPUs. People, you know, thought we were crazy, I guess in the early days, but eventually, you know, every, uh, overnight success is, is 10 years in the making.

Right? And so we've been working hard. That's exactly the biggest secret in tech, the 10 year overnight success.

Yeah. You know, we had Aon earlier, and we were talking about so many people think of Nvidia and they think GPUs and the hardware, but the real secret sauce here is Cuda and the software and the ecosystem with partners like ServiceNow and Jfr. And, and we had Sonar CEO here as well.

Um, and that's really the, the key that's driving all of this is as much as the GPUs do agreed to my immediate left, immediate left, this man needs no introduction to our audience either. I've had the pleasure of interviewing him for, um, 10 years, 12 years, something long time. He's the CEO co-founder of Jay Frank Shlomi.

Ben Hayo. Shlomi, welcome. Pleasure being here again.

Again, you, thank you very much for having me. So, look, I was in the keynotes this morning. It was an amazing keynote.

And as one would expect this year in tech, AI was front and center. We've been talking about it all day here. The thing about this is, look, all of us have been around the block.

We've seen technology waves calm and go flow and flow up and down. We've never seen something this disruptive across the entire breath of, of our industry, right? I, I think Satya Nadella maybe said it best, or the best that I've seen in that we are moving from becoming, you know how Mark Andreessen said every company's a software company.

Yeah. We were all software companies, but we're moving from software companies to intelligence engines. Right?

And what, that's a profound change in our business. Show me if it's okay, I'm gonna ask you to kick it off. What does that intelligence engine bring that to some of what we talked about today here at Swamp Up, agen, ai, the whole ecosystem, dev gov, ops, all of it kick us off.

So, Ellen, I, I, I think we will need two days to cover this, uh, And that some, But, uh, but I, I will touch the immediate things that we see in the market. And this is a, across the board, it goes beyond sectors. It goes beyond, um, company size.

It goes beyond, uh, geographies. What we see is a revolution, a disruption, uh, the changes, everything we knew about the day-to-day practice and a company like Jfr, we are not the native AI company. We are the infrastructure company.

We are the providers of the peak and shovels. We are not the gold miners. And therefore, we have the privilege to see from below the changes that are happening.

So one thing that we see happening across, uh, our portfolio is that consolidation happens not only in terms of technology, but also the inner organization, the CIO and the ciso, the compliance managers. The audit managers, all of them must collaborate in order to overcome the chasm, to bridge it, and to eliminate silos. Otherwise, they will stay behind.

The second thing that we see is that developers that used to build called, used to be called, used to deliver software. And then few years ago, they started to be security experts. And now they have to be release expert, and they also have to be AI experts.

0. They are changing the world for everyone. And the last thing that, uh, we see is that if we are not looking at the, uh, opportunity as coexisting, uh, providers, one of us will stay behind.

If we go together, we will change the world together. This is not a race. And, uh, and therefore I'm privileged, I'm honored to work with companies like ServiceNow and Nvidia, um, to give my customers a better experience, an experience that they expect a one platform experience.

Absolutely. Rahul, I'd like to come to you, right? So you think ITSM, is there any sector of our tech world that is more rule bound that you would think needs a little shaking up maybe, or, or maybe doesn't need a shaking up, but it's certainly getting a shaking up with ai.

If you don't mind, share with our audience a little bit of the profound impact that AI is having in the world of ITSM. Yeah. So I think it's getting shaken up.

And honestly, we, being the leaders in that segment, we would like it to shake up. Because if, the way I look at it is, it of yesterday has have changed. Now it is true truly a broker of services, right?

They're managing SaaS assets, they're managing cloud assets. So go on as the IT of yesterday. The service has changed from IT providing services to I want my self service, right?

So when Jensen was on stage on knowledge, he's like, his main thing thing was, I want my service now, right? That was his mantra. So people want their service now and management is no longer like, top down, let me tell you what to do, what not to do.

People are not used to that kind of thing. So we are gonna reinventing it. Service management and AI actually helps you really create that agility on top of the more fixed workflows, because now you can do more with AI to create value out the workflow.

So workflows can still exist. Like the example we gave this morning, compliance and regulation is still required because who wants to have an application that is gonna be breached tomorrow? Right?

That's at the same time. Does it take, should it take a week to get approval? No.

Right. So I think we are reinventing those ITSM processes and kind of integration with jfr, looking at the AI patterns and everything else, because the speed has gone whatever, 10 XA hundred x, right? So things that were taking weeks are taking seconds.

So that's where our head is at from an ITS Perspective. Absolutely. It's velocity.

It's velocity. Yeah. You know, talking about the profound change, if we, if I asked a hundred people watching this live right now, what is the AI company?

98 of them are gonna tell us Nvidia, but Justin, you know, this, and even Nvidia, I want to know who are the other two, who the other two, they, they're living somewhere who knows on a, on an island somewhere talking to a volleyball. But, but Justin, even Nvidia knows that as great as Nvidia is, and as they've led the charge help lead the charge here, you can't do it alone. You need partners like Jfr, like ServiceNow, like sonar, like, you know, so many.

You, I mean, one of the, the real strengths here is NVIDIA's ecosystem. Talk to our audience a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, I, I think that's, uh, well, a, a great point.

Um, you know, Nvidia forever, honestly, has been an ecosystem led company. And I think honestly, it's, it, it comes top down at Nvidia. Like Jensen realizes the power of an ecosystem for selling our physical hardware through OEMs and OEMs globally, uh, through infrastructure companies, uh, you know, uh, plumbing, the runtimes of these accelerators, uh, up to the AIOps applications and into the GSIs.

So we work across the entire ecosystem to try and provide acceleration to, I'll call it, uh, key, you know, workloads that we know are gonna deliver a lot of productivity or performance gains or, um, you know, really kind of transform the, the business, uh, if you would. Right? Um, and, uh, you know, this, this latest version of it, I mean, for a long time we did it in high performance computing to, to, uh, deal with F-E-F-E-A and, uh, you know, CAE and like the simulation, uh, of the physical world.

0 where it's the, the reality is it's a probably a $3 trillion industry, you know, a a trillion dollars in, uh, pure software that gets bought per year across enterprises and $2 trillion in services. That entire industry is being rethought now through this, uh, this new way of building software where you've got agentic systems that can break down problems, try and solve the problems on their own, and then reflect on the answers. And so there's, there's a, a tremendous opportunity, I'd say, for all vendors in this space really to, to ride that wave with us, uh, in the era of ai.

Agree. If I may add, add to it, uh, Alan, look at, uh, what Nvidia did, um, in, in the history of software, the first thing that they act was a community native company. They released their software as open source.

Yeah. Um, today, um, uh, Justin and his team presented on stage, like everything they build in order to optimize GPU with software is open source available. That's right.

For the community. Open source is not only we build it for you, but we build it with you, with, with the community. So I, I think it's really speaks for itself.

Uh, absolutely. We are looking at the improvements that software brings to the world of ai. Yeah.

com today, my mom rest it all used to always tell me, show me your friends, I'll show you who you are. Right? You probably all heard that.

Or similar thing from your moms, I'm gonna ask, you already said it, Justin, but Rahul, and then I'll come to you. Shlomi. What's the importance of your partner ecosystem in this brave new world of ai?

So, I think any, anyway, at the core of it, if you look at ServiceNow, it is only about workflows data. So that's what we have built our business on, right? Because enterprise has front office data, back office data, asset data.

And if you don't unify the data, then you can be d disparate systems on top of it. You tie it with a workflow. So now the third leg of the tool is AI for us, because AI helps you do your workflows better and faster, and there is no way we can own all the pieces of the workflow anyway, right?

There is the software supply chain that multiple players, including jfr, are there from a hardware perspective or from a software infrastructure perspective. Then we have cloud vendors, there are model vendors. So at the very heritage of the company, we believe that partner ecosystem is critical to it, because that's what our customers want.

They cannot rely on a platform that is closed, monolithic does not allow for partnerships. So I think it's the DNA of the company. That's why we are so excited to partner with.

We call it like any model, any industry, any infrastructure is what our ethos is from. Excellent. Yeah.

Shlomi, I, I believe that, uh, um, what our customers are telling us is the, uh, the honest, true and the pain that they experience. And they also know how to put the volume on this pain. Is it a major pain or something that we can handle?

And, uh, every time that, uh, that the technology company is coming with a piece of innovation, the second question should be, what's my ecosystem? And, uh, some people immediately ask the opposite question of asking, am I overlapping? Am I competing that we are running a platform?

We have, I dunno, thousands and thousands of thousands of logos in, in our joint portfolio. For sure, there will be some overlap, but if the one plus one equals more than two and our customers, um, actually ask for it, how can you go wrong? And when we presented apras the, um, the, um, dev gov ops solution we discussed today, we didn't present it as an ecosystem tool yet.

It was just an idea in the beginning of the year. And our enterprise customers stopped us right there and said, listen, the people who need to use AmTrust, the application owner, they're not coming to jfr. They're going to service now.

And, uh, when we started to, to walk with Rahul team, um, and we spoke with the customers, they actually echo that. And, uh, and what we've built together and presented on stage here today is just a representation of our, uh, of our customer's voice. Uh, I'm, I'm very proud to be part of a company that instead of coming as an arrogant vendor, telling them what is right for them is asking the, the customers what will be better?

How can I make your life better? I love it, guys. I gotta bring up a difficult one.

It's not on our list, but I've gotta ask. I talked to a lot of people about ai, as you would imagine, it's almost impossible to live up to the hype. The hype, the hype cycle is the right, and there are a lot of people out here who are starting to, you know, the ankle biters.

It's not everything we thought it was going to be. It's not. This is a lot harder than we thought.

It's gonna take longer than we thought. I think was the expect we set such expectations of it changing the world so quickly. And I said this, even if we stop developing AI right now, and we just said, okay, let's digest what we have, it would take seven years to fully integrate it into all of our ecosystems.

But what do you say to the naysayers who are saying, we're not going fast enough. It's not good enough yet, we may never get to the holy land to the promised land. It, Justin, you're, you're Nvidia and you're gonna go walk A day in my shoes.

It's moving really quickly. Yep. Is all I can say.

And I think, you know, in the, the early days of generative ai, uh, you know, people were kind of dabbling. They, they treated it like Java. It was a new technology.

They wanted to upscale themselves, but they didn't know how to apply it to their most pressing business problems. Um, you know, and, and we see now every enterprise really focusing on like, how do I reinvent the core of my business? Honestly, at Nvidia, we've done it ourselves too.

Like Jensen gave us the challenge, you know, double the number of chips that you produce, uh, every other year. So instead of doing a chip every 18 months, do it every year with a design cycle in between. And the only way to innovate at that pace without obviously exploding your workforce, is by using AI and infusing it into the, the business process of the organization.

So we're applying it, you know, to reinvent how we design chips, how we develop software, uh, how we engage customers, you know, through every business function of the company. And we're starting to see that in, in a big way, happen really across every vertical industry, from retail to telecommunications, to healthcare. Um, and so I, I think it's moving faster than you might think.

I think, uh, you know, en uh, enterprise in some regard has always been a slow beast. Um, it's always moved. The transitions have happened, you know, more slowly than than we would like.

Um, but in my conversations with CIOs, I think what they realize now is it's time to make that shift. Instead of reinvesting CapEx in standard data center infrastructure, take the leap to accelerated computing and, you know, and focus on building agents that address your core business. And, uh, people are seeing, you know, huge, uh, productivity gains and huge improvements to margins that way.

Excellent. Guys, I got one more question, and it's for Rahul and Shlomi. I want each of you to answer this question looking into this camera.

Rahul, you're gonna go first for all my friends in ITSM, and I'm very good friends with the folks at ile, my, my friends at people certain, uh, Demitrius and they're out in Greece watching this. But talk to all of the ITSM people out there who were worried, is this gonna take my job? Am I gonna have a career?

I just got into this profession five years ago. What is AI going to do my job? So I think my thinking is the train has left the station.

If you get on the train, you will have a job. If you don't get on the train and start kind of on the side kind of okay with naysay, I think you may actually lose your job. The reason is when I've seen the success is people who have embraced, they are having AI do the job they did not want to do in the first place.

Like summarization, after closing every incident, really going after knowledge base updates. Who wants to do it? I've seen people who have started going that direction, then they realize, oh, I have now submitted that knowledge.

Why can't I have agent tech do it for you? So slowly they are getting on the train and the train has gone to the next station. People who are left behind, is it not good enough and all that?

Sorry, that is not gonna Work. So let me talk to the software developers out there. First of all, whatever Raul said, amen.

Uh, no, no, no. Nothing to add. Software developers, if you remember the days of CICD that you doubted building software with some tools and automation, if you remember the days that, uh, you said that developers in order to be faster, they need to be a bit dirty and not secure.

Those who didn't, uh, um, jumped on the train left behind, and they are not software developers anymore. You have more responsibility and the next generation trusts you to build it, right? Because we are changing everyone's world.

Absolutely. I'll end it with this. I said it before, I'll say it again.

You're not gonna lose your job to ai. You're gonna lose your job to someone who uses AI better than you. Right?

And amen to that. We've gotta learn. It's a tool.

It doesn't replace the spark, the spark that's in now all of our brains, right? That cre the creator, but it's a golden age for creators. Absolutely.

And we're lucky to be here. Rahul, Justin Shlomi, thank you. Thank you for watching.

We've got, we've got two more. Oh, another day after this. Another half a day here of, uh, uh, JFR Swamp Up coverage.

So check it out. We're on Techstrong tv. We'll be right back.