Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Introducing Servicely

Artificial intelligence is becoming a mainstay in business life. That is the message from Dion Williams, CEO and founder of Servicely, who joined 10 Minute IT Jams to discuss the future of intelligent software and how enterprises can successfully harness its power while overcoming traditional obstacles.

Servicely is an emerging player in the service management arena, offering organisations an easier way to use AI to automate processes, reduce manual tasks, and ultimately transform business outcomes. "Servicely makes it easy to use AI for business outcomes, removing legacy systems and the difficulties they bring, while maintaining the flexibility and control that enterprises need," said Williams.

The company's flagship offering is an intelligent service management platform with artificial intelligence embedded at its core. "Servicely is essentially an intelligent service management platform, and what we mean by that is it's a platform that has AI embedded at the core to really help organisations automate work across the enterprise," Williams explained.

For those unfamiliar with the product, Williams outlined Servicely's current capabilities. "We find a lot of organisations have various workloads or tasks that they need to manage across the enterprise and a lot of that is manual and repetitive. Servicely allows enterprise organisations to have a single system of record upon which they can manage this work," he said.

While the platform currently focuses on IT service management, providing robust modules for handling incidents, problems, and change management, its capabilities extend beyond the IT department. Williams cited HR as a key example: "Adjacencies that we see most commonly include the likes of HR, in particular around the employee onboarding process. We tend to have a number of tasks that need to be completed when an employee is onboard, and as a result of that we need a system of record and work to manage that process through its lifecycle," he said.

Servicely is also a low-code platform, giving organisations the flexibility to build their own workflows. "Customers can leverage that platform capability to really build out their own custom workflows and digitise their work," he added. This, Williams argued, gives organisations "out-the-box, ready-to-go modules" while also enabling innovation and customisation.

Turning to the broader landscape of AI, Williams believes artificial intelligence has finally come of age. "We're certainly seeing AI has come to an age of maturity," he commented. Williams described a journey from initial excitement and hype, through a trough of disillusionment - "well, that didn't quite work out as was promised" - to a new reality where "we're starting to see real value being delivered by AI, [and] expectations are more realistic."

Gone are the days, Williams argued, where AI was viewed as a threat to jobs. "We started off where everybody was afraid AI was going to replace everybody's job and that was going to happen within the next two years. And I think we've seen that hasn't happened," he said. Instead, current trends point to AI being used to "augment humans to drive process efficiencies, improve productivity, and deliver better customer service experiences," he said.

However, barriers to adoption remain. Williams highlighted the enduring misconception that businesses need to perfect their data sets before embarking on an AI journey. "There's this notion of, I've first got to get all my data sorted out before I can look at AI. The reality is very few organisations, if any, ever get their data to a point where it's perfect," Williams explained. "We tend to find that's probably the biggest constraint."

Skills used to be an obstacle, but Williams believes the democratisation of AI tools is changing that. "As we've kind of democratised AI to an extent, it's possible to take benefit of AI without having to have PhDs. That certainly makes it a lot easier," he added.

To help customers overcome complexity, Servicely has developed an approach they call "Observe, Learn, Augment and Automate." Williams elaborated: "If we can observe how humans or staff are doing work and, through that process, automatically create feature-rich datasets that we can then learn from - and from those learnings, augment people to have human in the loop, providing recommendations on the next best actions or relevant knowledge - we can significantly reduce the learning timeframe to get to the point where you can achieve value from the system."

Importantly, much of the technical process, including model training and validation, is handled behind the scenes by the platform. "That's all fully automated. The customer doesn't have to worry about building machine models, testing, splitting the data into testing and validating - that's all done, abstracted under the covers in the Servicely platform," said Williams.

When asked how potential customers or partners should make contact, Williams pointed to several avenues, including direct trials and engagement with local partners. "We do offer customers the opportunity to take it for a test run as it were… we are also on LinkedIn and we have a number of partners in the local market that operate within the service management domain, that we're able to work with customers on as far as implementing and hopefully delivering real value using artificial intelligence for them," he said.

As AI continues its march into the mainstream, Williams is confident that the focus must remain on achieving real business value and keeping things simple for end users. "Humans are incredibly intelligent and continue to build more and more powerful software - so time will tell where we get to. But certainly today, organisations are looking and using AI to really more augment humans, drive process efficiencies, and deliver better customer service experiences," he said.