DXC, ServiceNow Partner On New Center Of Excellence For Now Assist GenAI
‘ChatGPT came into the market two years ago, and for the first 12 months, it was a tool that couldn't be used particularly effectively. So the industry is only nine to 12 months into being able to use large language models in a way that's meaningful for enterprises and public sector organizations. Our Center of Excellence provides quicker but higher quality and more economic capabilities by using AI tools that weren’t available before,’ says Howard Boville, DXC’s executive vice president of consulting and engineering services.
The new Center of Excellence, or CoE, builds on DXC’s 15-year-plus partnership with ServiceNow to provide services to some of the world's leading companies, said Howard Boville, executive vice president of consulting and engineering services for the Ashburn, Va.-based solution provider, ranked No. 11 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500.
“We provide mission-critical services and project delivery work, and we're always looking at ways to continue to improve the quality of service we provide, the speed by which we deliver that, and the economic price points,” Boville told CRN. “Artificial intelligence is a capability that allows you to check those three boxes. Typically you would hear, you can have quality and speed, but you can't have the economics, or you can have speed and economics but not quality. But artificial intelligence, with its ability to intelligently augment the work that our people do and the tools we use, allows you to achieve all three objectives.”
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DXC’s new Center of Excellence aims to show how the company’s customers can use the AI capabilities of ServiceNow in a practical way, Boville said.
“ChatGPT came into the market two years ago, and for the first 12 months, it was a tool that couldn't be used particularly effectively,” he said. “So the industry is only nine to 12 months into being able to use large language models in a way that's meaningful for enterprises and public sector organizations. Our Center of Excellence provides quicker but higher quality and more economic capabilities by using AI tools that weren’t available before.”
With its new Center of Excellence, DXC can take advantage of all the knowledge it has built with customers around the world by bringing it all into a single location, Boville said.
“This means that we can actually send out a beacon of that knowledge more effectively and quickly than what we could in terms of all the various isolated areas that we done this,” he said. “We brought a central repository of knowledge and learning and development for our people based upon practical use cases that we've built.”
A big part of building the Center of Excellence was training of DXC personnel, Boville said.
“We have a very large workforce, 50,000 people,” he said. “We're forever going through a process of re-skilling those people with the skills that are important for customers at the moment. We trained thousands of our people with GenAI use cases so they can actually put them into the market. So there's the local connectivity with shared global knowledge. We're also bringing through new specialists. But the bulk of the population that is now deeply immersed in this has gone through various certification and accreditation programs.”
Erica Volini, ServiceNow’s senior vice president for global partnerships and channels, told CRN that DXC is one of her company’s most aggressive partners in terms of GenAI.
“Not only have they built GenAI into their own managed services platform where it is already impacting 500 clients, they're a phenomenal use case in terms of the power of what GenAI can do in terms of productivity,” Volini said. “Now they've established this CoE, so they're basically committing certified resources and ServiceNow Now Assist to help bring the capabilities of GenAI to clients.”
DXC is making a pretty significant investment along with ServiceNow in helping to train their people in the CoE to make sure they're ahead of all the product releases, Volini said.
“They make sure we can go after the biggest opportunities to position Now Assist in conjunction with their transformation capabilities,” she said. “I would say they're out early. They've committed fully. They probably have one of the best understandings of Now Assist across the ecosystem because they have brought it into their own business and have seen the impact of it. So they’re a tremendous evangelist for Now Assist. … I would say DXC has been one of the most aggressive and first out of the gate to do so.”
ServiceNow has invested a lot in terms of training in DXC’s Center of Excellence, Volini said.
“We’re providing our experts to help train their resources in the CoE and doing drops with Now Assist every quarter, keeping them up to date,” she said. “We’ve made investments in terms of time from our product team and experts to help get their CoE resources positioned as best as they can to take advantage of Now Assist.”