Q&A: ServiceNow Federal CTO Jonathan Alboum Sees Efficiency in Application Rationalization

FEDTECH: What is the Government Transformation Suite now offered by ServiceNow, and what are its potential benefits for agencies?

ALBOUM: I was so excited when we launched the Government Transformation Suite because it’s designed to accelerate return on investment, which was something I always focused on as a CIO. In government, it can be difficult to fund a purchase. Then, if you’re not getting results and if you’re not demonstrating value, you’re going to get a lot of questions from your superiors, members of Congress and other stakeholders. We specifically tried to position the Government Transformation Suite as a tool to drive efficiencies, value and fast ROI.

We focused on the things that were going to be really important to the new administration. We want to increase visibility into assets, the things agencies own, whether it be software or hardware or buildings or vehicles. We want to help them understand how effectively their technology is used, help them identify where the redundancies are in systems or in other technologies, and give them a way to quickly come up with a plan to drive the efficiency and the effectiveness of government that everybody wants.

We packaged these ServiceNow capabilities in this way. We really want to help agencies optimize their software licensing. Technology is often acquired organically through different organizations inside a large, federated government agency. And because there are so many places where things can be purchased, there can be redundancies. So, we can have a lot of software that’s not being used. We help agencies check on that and unlock cost savings in short periods of time to gain quick insights into how their programs are operating. We also have a centralized place for people to go to do their work, which is another feature of the Government Transformation Suite.

Government employees are back in their offices, many full time, and this helps to manage the way they work. The goal was to make it seamless for when people are showing up in person. There are a number of requirements that come with that. As soon as you say, “Hey, everybody’s going to be back in the office,” you must think about how you’ve organized the office. Where do people sit? Where do people park? We must think about things a little differently. We are also working with agencies on how to reshape their workforces.

Ultimately, agencies get work done through their application portfolio. One of the goals of the Government Transformation Suite was to include capabilities that help agencies rationalize their portfolios and remove the overlap between existing systems. And at a minimum, we can highlight where those overlaps exist and give them the ability to make smart choices about how to run their agency and meet the requirements of the day without duplication that unnecessarily adds cost and complexity.

FEDTECH: Can artificial intelligence help make things more efficient in this context?

ALBOUM: When we think about how ServiceNow supports this big efficiency challenge, it starts with the data that drives AI. We then add workflows into that combination of AI and data. It’s AI plus data plus workflows — to me, that is the equation for cost cutting and effective and efficient government. We can create really efficient processes using generative AI in ServiceNow. We’re doing that in a number of places. The data that we have in ServiceNow and the data within an organization are the keys to making good decisions. And this administration is very data-driven. They’re making decisions based on the data, and we can help get that data to the right place to make good decisions. We help manage the workflows around asset management and the workflows around getting people back into the office. It’s about real operational transparency that drives accountability, which is part and parcel of this administration. Everyone’s talking about AI, but we’re unique in that when we talk about AI, we also talk about data and workflows together. Those three things drive the efficiency that everyone seeks.

FEDTECH: Can we discuss agentic AI and how it might produce more results?

ALBOUM: It’s worth going back a few years to answer that question. ServiceNow has been investing in AI technology and AI talent for close to a decade. We’ve had AI in the platform for a long time. Our AI capabilities were initially analytic in nature, providing features like document intelligence or predictive intelligence. You got real improvements, but they were incremental.

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In 2023, we introduced generative AI to ServiceNow. Now, suddenly, we can speed up work by completing routine tasks, like automatically creating resolution notes. We can summarize a case for a worker. We can generate code using AI capabilities. The outcomes become bigger and bigger.

As we venture into agentic AI, the outcomes are exponential, because these agents are able to bring a new set of skills into an organization. It fundamentally changes the way we organize to get work done. An AI agent can reason and interact with its environment. It can make a recommendation, or it can decide to complete a task based on its input. An agent can determine how to solve a problem by analyzing information. It can talk to another agent.

Inside ServiceNow, we have hundreds of agents doing very specific tasks, and they are working together to take a process end to end. And it’s beyond automation because of this reasoning capability. There’s logic in there. Because they can be autonomous, these agents can work on solving complex problems on their own 24/7. It can optimize an approach to a problem faster than a person can in some cases.

Ultimately, government service should be as good as any leading brand. If we have fewer people in government, we can still provide great service using these kinds of technologies. There are big opportunities for agents in the federal space over the course of this administration and beyond. It’s an emerging technology at the right time for the way government is evolving.

FEDTECH: There are a lot of concerns in public discourse about using AI with government data. What do you say to people to allay these concerns?

ALBOUM: So many things that we have done in government historically depend on a set of data privacy requirements. Members of the public will always expect the government to keep their data secure and that we’re going to use it strictly for the reasons we captured it. I don’t think it’s any different for our current evolution into AI and generative AI technologies.

It begins with the data and understanding what the data is, where it came from and how it’s supposed to be used. Government must respect those processes and demonstrate to the public that the data shared or captured for an agency supports specific processes. We must be able to show how the AI is trained — whether by an agency or by a software manufacturer like ServiceNow. In doing this, we can earn trust and allay fears that the AI capabilities will violate someone’s privacy or be rogue in some way.

At ServiceNow, we’ve focused on training our AI models with ServiceNow data. Thus, we have a strong understanding of where the data comes from and how it was created. We already are mitigating a lot of the risk for hallucinations. The requirements for government related to AI are evolving. The National Institute of Standards and Technology released an AI Risk Management Framework. It asks important questions about the kinds of processes where AI may play a role and whether a process could have a critically negative result for the customer of a government agency. Once we understand the data and the risks of how AI is trained and how AI is applied, we should demonstrate these things and describe them to government stakeholders.

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FEDTECH: What would ServiceNow like to do next? Are there capabilities to add? Are there challenges to answer for your government customers?

ALBOUM: We are going to bring a lot of great capabilities into ServiceNow’s Government Community Cloud in the coming months. AI agents are on the way, and we are also doing a lot of work with data. First, we’ve created this Workflow Data Fabric, which allows organizations to capture the data from anywhere in their organization and bring it onto the ServiceNow platform in a straightforward, low-impact manner. Once the data from across the organization is available — and it can come from any source — those AI capabilities can work on the data to drive real outcomes and create real insights. It’s going to be a very powerful tool for agencies as they focus on intelligent-based decision-making and being data-driven.

Once you pull data onto the ServiceNow platform, you can use the technologies built into ServiceNow to drive outcomes through automation or AI agents. It’s an incredibly powerful combination. And underlying that is a high-performance database that ServiceNow has created called RaptorDB. It’s designed to handle tremendous amounts of information, petabytes of data, and it’s going to drive really fast processing speeds. We’re using it internally at ServiceNow; you can see the difference when we interact with our internal ServiceNow instances.

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AI agent capability will be huge over the next few years. Think about all of the repetitive tasks that can be done autonomously by agents across an organization, be it a government agency or a private sector company. We use AI agents internally, and they’re making a big difference in the way ServiceNow operates. We measure the value from putting agents to work at ServiceNow, and we’ve seen hundreds of millions of dollars of annualized value across the company by doing this. We have saved hundreds of thousands of hours. We’re going to build more and more agents internally.

ServiceNow can be a role model for the way organizations use these tools to drive efficiency, especially in government. As we share our story, it drives home the art of the possible. The things that ServiceNow does well are strongly aligned to the priorities set by the administration and the Department of Government Efficiency. We have the tools and experience to drive effective service delivery for government operations.

The more we are able to change people’s experiences when they interact with government, the greater the opportunity we have to increase trust in government. As ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott says, “You lose trust in buckets, but you build it in little drops.” Every time that we can provide a great experience to somebody who interacts with government, that’s a little bit of trust that we’re accruing in government and government service.