BT Group plans to reduce its reliance on third-party support staff in helpdesk roles after introducing ServiceNow’s GenAI technology.
The British telecommunications and IT services giant has announced that it is expanding ServiceNow service management capabilities across all its units. This expansion includes the use of ServiceNow’s Now Assist for Telecom Service Management (TSM), part of its GenAI offering.
BT said that in a pilot, Now Assist GenAI helped agents write case summaries and review complex notes faster, reducing both times by 55%. Average case resolution time also decreased by 35%.
Talk to The registerHena Jalil, BT Group’s managing director and chief information officer, said there were no plans to cut direct headcount as a result. “A lot of these tasks are also being done by contractors… which helps our bottom line,” she said. “We don’t have to outsource as much, which helps us considerably.”
She added that the efficiency savings achieved through GenAI would allow staff to focus on other so-called “value-added” tasks that support staff would rather do than “work that doesn’t give them much satisfaction.”
In May 2022, BT said it plans to save £25 million ($30.8 million) over five years by ditching some legacy applications and moving to ServiceNow workflow and automation technologies. The company has begun replacing 56 legacy applications and 76 different ways of implementing service processes with a single ServiceNow platform as part of a broader group-wide transformation program.
ServiceNow, which has been working with BT since 2019, launched the Now Assist GenAI product line last September, admitting that the models could “hallucinate” or produce errors in a specific area. The company said it would not be held responsible for the output of its GenAI software. A human would still be required to verify the model’s output.
Jalil said BT’s helpdesk model had been trained on anonymised data, improving its output of case summaries over time.
“You have to do that work up front,” she said. “At first, I have to admit it wasn’t as good, but then as we learned, we found things got a lot better.”
However, after the summary reports generated by LLM, human agents also had to check the output in a read-only view.
“We have this process right now because as we build trust, we need that validation,” Jalil said. “There are certain things we want to capture that we don’t want an agent to change. We also do random checks on the other end of the line.”
In addition to introducing GenAI, BT is expanding ServiceNow’s role across the enterprise, including previously unexplored functions such as HR.
“In 2022, there were some areas we hadn’t worked on yet, like HR for example,” Jalil said. “Now that we’ve tried and tested, we’ve seen the value [ServiceNow] “We see that the deployment needs to be quite broad and involve every part of the organization.”
BT also has a major project with SAP to introduce enterprise finance and HR applications. According to SAP’s marketing materials, this would provide “a single, unified, self-service HR platform”.
Across its application portfolio, SAP also provides workflow, the functionality that ServiceNow specializes in.
“We have launched a new HR system… but there is still a lot to do in terms of streamlining processes. That’s where I think [ServiceNow] “This can really help us a lot,” Jalil said.
Jalil explained that ServiceNow would be used by HR to report incidents and manage tickets, as well as to “have visibility across all areas.” She said the direction of the HR project itself was handled by the company’s CIO team and was outside of her remit.
Overall, the expanded use of ServiceNow across GenAI and additional business units would bring BT’s expected investment savings to more than $25 million by 2027, including by integrating it with its use of Google Cloud Platform and the Dynatrace observability platform.
“We knew we wanted to use the ServiceNow platform, but now that we’ve seen how we can bring all of the thinking together on the platform, it becomes super powerful… so we’re more confident now that we’ve tried it and that we can even generate more value,” Jalil said. ®
