Most Digital CxOs are locked in a battle to break down the various silos that have emerged across the enterprise. While many of these silos have embraced automation to varying degrees, there continue to be islands unto themselves, none more so than sales teams that have invested heavily in customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
To address that issue, ServiceNow is making a case for a CRM application that is based on the same software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform used to automate a wide range of other business workflows within organizations. At the core of the ServiceNow platform is an integrated set of integration and automation frameworks capable of accessing the same pool of data.
In addition, ServiceNow has closed its acquisition of Logik.ai, which adds a composable configure, price, quote (CPQ) capability that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze massive amounts of data. Once integrated with the core ServiceNow platform, that capability will extend the scope of the functionality that ServiceNow is able to offer sales teams, says Terence Chesire, vice president of CRM and industry workflows for ServiceNow.
Most adoption of CRM applications is driven by leaders of sales teams, so the offering from ServiceNow needs to be robust enough to address those needs. However, organizations also need to integrate sales data with other business processes, which is costly to achieve when relying on CRM applications that are built on completely different platforms, notes Chesire. It’s still early days but there is a growing appreciation of the challenge, he adds. “There is a growing maturity,” he says.
In addition to potentially reducing the number of application platforms that might be required, making it simpler to integrate workflows will become an even more pressing concern in the age of agentic artificial intelligence (AI), he adds. Organizations will want to ensure that the data being exposed to these AI agents spanning multiple workflows is as consistent as possible, says Chesire. That’s more easily achievable using a single platform that includes an AI Control Tower versus attempting to integrate multiple legacy applications based on completely different types of IT platforms, he adds.
It’s not quite clear who exactly within organizations is leading the drive to adopt AI, but as AI agents become more pervasively employed there will be an opportunity to streamline workflows in ways that might lead to flatter organizations. AI agents, for example, trained to automate sales tasks should be able to ask an AI agent trained to optimize a human resources process to onboard a new sales representative. Similarly, AI agents created for a sales team should have visibility into the supply chain to ensure the product being sold is actually available.
We’re still in the early stages of the potential flattening of organizational workflows and structures, but the potential to drive re-engineering of processes in the age of AI has never been greater. The challenge and the opportunity now for Digital CxOs is determining what is actually feasible to achieve today with an eye toward achieving something much more ambitious tomorrow.
