Accenture and ServiceNow service Hitachi Energy with agentic AI

Accenture PLC and ServiceNow Inc. are helping Hitachi Energy Ltd., a company centered on sustainable energy practices, advance its enterprise transformation goals by implementing AI-powered platforms that streamline operations and enhance the employee experience

For Accenture and ServiceNow, the challenge wasn’t just deploying new tech. It was proving that ServiceNow’s platform could deliver tangible value across Hitachi’s diverse ecosystem, while keeping the human element front and center.

ServiceNow’s Marcelle Howard and Accenture’s Alex Herttrich discuss their continued collaboration with theCUBE.

“We had to really prove that ServiceNow is the right bet to scale AI and make a massive impact,” said Alex Herttrich (pictured, center), principal director for gen AI initiatives at Accenture. “The first three to four months were proving, establishing how does it fit to the overall strategy that Hitachi is on transforming the enterprise with AI. They have many different technologies, Microsoft, Google, so everyone is at the party, but we were really successful with establishing ServiceNow as now a key driver for business transformation at Hitachi.”

Herttrich and Marcelle Howard (pictured, left), director of AI solutions success at ServiceNow, spoke with theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson at Knowledge25, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed working with Hitachi Energy and improving AI-human interaction. (* Disclosure below.)

Incorporating self-help into services Hitachi

Like most companies preparing for an agentic future, Hitachi needed more than just shiny, new tech — it needed buy-in from its workforce. ServiceNow and Accenture focused their efforts on improving everyday IT support experiences, starting with routine tasks such as VPN resets and password issues. These are often moments of frustration for employees, and building trust in automation meant demonstrating tangible benefits.

“Oftentimes, you just want to call a person [for tech help] because it’s immediate,” Howard explained. “What [we] were able to tap into is not just the automation behind that, but making that experience relatively better. So, people naturally gravitated toward [the virtual assistant] and said, ‘You know what? This is an optimal experience.’”

When the initial global campaign for ServiceNow’s virtual agent launched at Hitachi, employee engagement was minimal, according to Herttrich. To shift that, the team added self-help tools that allowed users to access relevant knowledge and services directly — no agent required.

“Now, when you start engaging with the new AI-powered chatbot, you get access to all of the knowledge,” Herttrich said. “All of the services have different options with real-time translation, getting an agent that understands what you’re having as a problem. Where before you were talking to a random agent, 1748054011 you get instant help.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Knowledge25:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Knowledge25. Neither ServiceNow Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE