All right, Corey, what are we talking about today?
today we got a very special guest on. We've got Mark Scott from service now. And today we're going to talk about now learning. We're going to talk about AI and we're going to talk about. I mean, whatever else pops up.
Have we had anybody on the show twice? Is Mark the first?
Huh? That's a good question. I think he might be the first Mark. You might be the first repeat gas. How
no way, no, come on, that's not true,
I think it might be
that's not true, that can't be right, well that's an honor, that's crazy, that makes me feel really good,
Well, you do bring like twice as much as the average person to the ServiceNow community, so why not, right?
come on. Ridiculous. Like, I mean, maybe twice as much, crazy energy. I don't know.
crazy. Energy is good. Yeah. We like crazy
guess. I don't know. I don't sleep. So maybe it's I exude that much, Intensity that I have to be on twice as many times to get the full story, I have to be on twice as many times, but yeah. my name is Mark Scott. I'm the some senior something staff architect. I can never remember what my title is. Titles are irrelevant. I'm an architect of some sorts. I help build buildings over at now learning. and, uh, you know, I, keep the learning happening over there, which is an incredibly fulfilling job.
I love what I do. And when they brought me on, it was a dream and it still is every day keeping you guys. trained up, ready to go for the next thing. It's, it's a lot of fun. And every, every time this year, this time of year rolls around, it's a reminder of how much fun I'm having because, we're working on all the stuff that is going into knowledge. which is, it's always a challenge this time of year to say it's fun because it's always deadlines, right? It's always deadlines.
but in June, I'll tell you if it's fun or not.
Let's double click a little bit on that. Right? Like, um, cause it, yeah, it sounds like, there's a lot of prep that goes into the now learning side in preparation for knowledge. Let's talk a little bit about that.
Yeah. that usually starts, I months ahead of time. It's funny. You talk about your projects when we talk about go lives and things like that. It's funny to poke your head up look around at LinkedIn and talk to you guys. Like, when I say you guys, I talk to customers because you guys are talking about Vancouver and things like that. And we're talking about Xanadu, like we're talking like way out there.
and so it's so interesting when, I talked to, the customer side of things, because it's almost like I have to reshift my focus. Into okay, where are you guys at? Right? Because we're ahead and you guys, and I don't want to say behind because that's not, that's not the right word. You know, you guys are in a different headspace, right? Because usually we have an update that hits right when knowledge hits.
And then we also have all the features that we're adding into knowledge, which obviously I can't go into that because we always update everybody right around knowledge time. Um,
and there's no, there's no safe harbor here. So Uh,
Yeah, this is, this isn't the. ServiceNow, CJ and the Duke podcast. Unfortunately we, you know, sponsored by, but unfortunately now, yeah. So, so there's a lot of sprint planning that happens. There's a lot of, iteration and cycling that goes through to get those plans going, obviously for that date in knowledge, nail that date and get that ready, and then what's interesting is we can't push anything live. Until right around knowledge time. otherwise you guys would see it.
So there's a group of people that are sitting there like ready to push the button because they're, and then also in charge of that project. So it's a real whirlwind for a lot of people that are working the conference that are also having projects that are launched to the conference, like when you're an employee of ServiceNow, like that knowledge time becomes, Like a tornado. it's crazy. it's a lot of fun, but it's, very different. Very, very different from the employee standpoint.
Yeah, so it sounds like, you're a bit of a service now time traveler, right? you, you exist a little bit in the future, right? Of service now versus like, where the rest of us are and especially around, when it comes down to knowledge and then.
Okay.
that goes into trying to just pull off a service now knowledge event with, making sure that, the now learning stuff gets implemented. Well, and I'm sure it's like, this is like enterprise wide coordination to
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, as someone who's been to like the last 10 knowledges or so, even a virtual ones, like, we just got to take it for granted that this stuff happens, right? Like you show up and there's a conference there and there are, there's like breakouts and then there are labs and there's like this great expo and their booths there and people are doing like really cool stuff. And. You know, you don't always think about what had to go into it in the background to, to make it happen.
and then there's, and apparently there's a lot of people like you, like plugging away, trying to, you know, make our experiences great. Even if you guys aren't even at the conference. So,
I mean, those,
the work,
those t shirts had to be printed, like down to that level, right? Like someone had to figure out what those words were on those t shirts. it's insane to think about, right? Like, if you see a balloon that says, you know, hashtag service now on it, someone had to approve that balloon, It's a lot of work,
Since we're talking about now learning and like the merging of knowledge as well. how much now on now? Do you do to actually, spin up the service down knowledge conference, from the perspective of what you're, involved with.
Obviously, you know, now on now, it's huge, huge, from a representation at the conference, like, how much do we send from, now learning, Here's our story. Here's what we've done over the next from the last year. here's what we've learned. Here's what we've done. we try to send as many people that we can from here's the things that we've learned our entire engineering team, from our leadership all the way down goes right.
And they try to, tell that story and, really, showcase what we've done, uh, especially like last year, we had an entire track of best practices on the portal. and what we've learned when we shifted from what we called now learning 1. 0 to now learning 2. 0, which was just a phenomenal amount of knowledge to, drop into somebody and go, here it is.
Like we're talking about like graduate level, portal level classes, About like, here's how you use broadcast and, talking to widgets and how to make them not talking back and forth so that you don't overload between like, just, just crazy, crazy stuff that it's like, if you're in a, you know, a high, highly functioning, highly scalable type environment, I mean, All the way down to just the minutiae of here's how you scale your sys attachments table.
Like we try to put a lot of that knowledge back into our customers as much as possible. Right. I know I'm always looking for those, Where I go, this is constantly, my team's probably sick of hearing this. I'm like, Hey, this is a great knowledge topic that we could submit. Right. Like constantly, It's huge. it's definitely woven into the fabric of everything that we're doing is, let's put this back into that. because.
honestly, like it, it just, it makes, not only does it make us look better, to everybody else where we're like, look how good we're doing. but I love it from a, let's go show everybody how awesome we are from an engineering standpoint like, we're the best, we're, keeping one of the most highly. Sought after instances online 24 hours a day, seven days a week. people are constantly learning on our system. Let's show off and tell people about it. So yeah, absolutely.
We're now on now is huge, huge, huge in what we're doing.
Nice, so building on the now learning aspects, right? You mentioned the 2. 0, right? And I remember the last time. We had you on the show, That's when you were launching, you know, now learning 2.0. Right? And, we're like super excited about it and it's, and I still am, right? I think this is like a huge improvement Over what I, what came before and honestly, I can't even remember what came before. It's just so much better. Uh.
Yeah.
It totally is. And so I guess what, one of the things I want to know is like, how are you guys seeing the, adoption of now learning increased since you all pushed out to Dido cause I see what feels like a bit more of a push, you know, from service now around now learning than I did, you know, before on, you know, 1. 0 versus 2. 0.
so ironic that you would ask about the push, right? Because you're one of them, right? Like you're like, come on, your picture is used in half the marketing material we have out there. I think Corey, come on. I mean, let's just talk about rise up. Like rise up is one of the most ambitious initiatives I've seen a tech company ever undertake. from a training perspective, it's a lot.
And when it, filters down to the point where I'm ingraining it into the engineers, where I go like the numbers that we're talking about you shouldn't just be talking about, scale. You need to be talking about scale on a massive, massive level. 10 X and when we're talking about like, does this work? It shouldn't just be, does this work? It should be, does this work and will it work? At 10 X and if you're like, well, it should be okay. It's like new, new, new, new, new, new.
This needs to be fail safe. this needs to be good for the next like 10 years because we're going to have 10 years worth of traffic in the next two years. Year. and that's, that's the hockey stick we're looking at trying to achieve. Right. we don't have time to go backwards and fix things.
So what we're looking at doing is if we have, the exponential growth and the hockey stick that we're looking at achieving, it's like, if I kick off and and achieve that growth the way that we're looking at doing, I can't go backwards and fix something that is broken or wasn't scaling the way I thought it was. So I need you to build it now the way that it needs to be done. so yes, the push is there. I'm having my engineers build.
To the point where gosh, I can't say those words because I'm going to jinx it. I'm having my engineers build to the point where they're keeping scale in mind to a massive level.
so it sounds like the now learning to idle launch was as much or more than you guys ever expected. And so now you're humming on all cylinders and trying to figure out how you can keep up with the demand. So that. Yeah. Okay. So that's definitely a good place to be in. Are you, are y'all keeping track of statistics from the standpoint of how many folks are going through now learning and coming out and getting certified based on.
Oh, yeah., if you give a stakeholder a metric, right? They're going to want reporting. it's,
Isn't that the truth? Well, let's, let's pause on that right I think that's something that we can, expound upon because it, Fits in so many different ways. And so many different aspects of, of the service down journey. Right. Like if you give a stakeholder, uh, what was it, was it, what was it? You just said, if you give a stakeholder,
you give a stakeholder a metric, they're going to want reporting. It's like that. If you give a mouse a cookie, they're going to want some milk, right? Like you give it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You give a stakeholder metric. They're gonna want reporting.
Which is kind of sad that way, though, because they should know what they need to report on before a third party gives them a metric.
yeah, exactly.
Think about this a little bit before you even deploy. Before you even deploy, let's talk about the metrics.
Right. you should figure out what you need to measure before you even have to measure it. it should come out the other way. but yeah, absolutely. Do we have KPIs on all of this? Absolutely. The fortune 500 company, like there's, there's tons of people breathing down our necks going, like how many people came through the program yesterday?
So, another thing that you're really famous for lately is all your posts about AI.
famous, you know, yeah, I know. Famous or infamous? I'll let you decide. you know, all this, all this Jenny I stuff started cropping up about a year, year and a half ago? I started jumping on that stuff because when I was a kid who didn't want that robot? You know what I'm saying? Like every one of those sci-fi shows had a robot or some sort of AI benevolent or not, but there was some sort of AI in that thing, and it was like. Man, I want that man.
I want that and so like I would say most of my Childhood I was into it and I was like, let's build this thing the second program I ever wrote told me good morning. Good evening and good night I wanted it to do. Cause I was like, that's the coolest thing ever. It just tells me hello.
but last thing that I saw you post on LinkedIn is identifying the planes that are flying over your house. Right.
I hope, once they overtake us, that they'll know who gave them the high ground, at least in Phoenix. Yeah, that was pretty good. I mean, you know, it's, I'm getting good. I'm getting scary at it. I think I told somebody, it was like, at one point someone will hook something stupid up to them, and I'm like, it was me! It's like, yeah, it'll probably be me. I look at this AI stuff and I go, hey, how long ago did the iPhone come out? I remember looking around and going, man, that thing's neat.
And then I played video games and sat around and didn't do anything. and I could have learned a program on that, We all could have, most of us didn't, didn't do anything. Some of us did. Some cool stuff with those things. And some of us made some pretty good money with them too. and the people that did, did pretty well. And I go, Ooh, maybe this is the next iPhone, maybe this is the next thing.
maybe this is the next, I'm not going to say golden age or, it's not the next industrial revolution, but maybe there's yeah. Gold rush, right? The next iPhone gold rush kind of thing. Yeah, it's kind of clunky right now. Yeah. Everybody's making fun of it right now. Cause it's going to do some stupid things. It's going to straighten itself back out. And it's going to figure it out and there's going to be an application for it.
And there's going to be some of this awesome stuff that comes out of it. And I'm like, if I get the skillset and I can, learn how to wield this thing and mess around with it enough, maybe there'll be some cool career opportunities down the line. So that's where I'm at. So yeah,
hours do you think you sunk into, Yeah. And did you go from nothing to, AI building or can you give us a sense of where you started and how long it took to get you like building Icarus.
It's not good. It's not good. So here's the thing. I went nuts, like, you don't have to do this anymore because there's so many tools that are coming out now that I didn't have a year ago when I started building all of this stuff, right? Like when I started messing around. So there's new stuff that's helping everybody out daily. and there's, technology that's helping people that I'm like, Oh man, if I had had that a year ago, that would have helped me out.
so how many hours have I sunk into this? Hundreds, like lots, lots and lots and lots, which is why you're seeing me crank these things out at like, like Robin Williams joke telling pace, I'm just like throwing them out there. And everyone's like, well, how are you doing this? I have this infrastructure set up with like this no code, low code kind of workflow platform where I can just. Picking, choosing, grab and go.
but I spent a whole lot of time building that up and learning my tool set so that now I'm just like, Oh yeah, grab and go. and I know where all my tools are. And so when someone comes around and they're like, can you do it with this tool? And that's when I'm like, not really no, but you give me the freedom to do what I want. I'm like, yeah, sure. Here you go. Like it's done.
So you've got like a, custom workspace, right? Like you've got all the tools that you need to get you from point a to point Z, right? Like you've got all of those in arms reach and so they're low code, no code to use on, on top of that. Right. and those are allowing you to build some, crazy things, but What folks really want to hear about, right? Is what allows you to get to that point, right?
Where it became low code, no code, because it feels like there's a level of understanding and a level of dedication that had to happen before it became easy.
Got to take the red pill. It's just like when you learned object oriented programming when you learn object oriented programming, there was that time when your brain turned to mush. Like, you remember that? You're like, I don't get it. this sucks. Who does this? this doesn't make any sense to me. and it took time for your brain to adjust and then once you got it, you were like, oh, now I get this. It takes time for it to sink in. You?
there's a reason why I asked this question. It transcends the AI question.
Mm hmm.
Like, how do you get good at anything? you have to obsess about it for
Yes.
in a painful way.
Yes.
Hey, I just got my welcome to service now, sir. I'm super excited to learn. Like, how come there's no info on how to really excel and get a job. I'm like, you're not even there.
Yeah, you just, you,
you spent maybe four hours at
you bought a shovel and now you want to know how to start a construction company. It's like, well, hold on, hold on. You might want to spend some time.
yeah. Are your first five minutes of the gym is like, where's the gains? There's nothing you get in this, like even with AI helping us now, it's still, you have to pay the piper. If you want to do something that cool. You've got a I don't know anything about birthing a child. Right. But it seems to me like it's the most glorious, miraculous thing in the entire world. But what the crucible you have to pass to get that child is astounding, you know,
Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm.
so. if you want to do something cool, be it just being a service now, anything, or being on the cutting edge of the AI stuff, you just have to think about it in terms of what labor am I going to put in? can I do 9 months and then labor?
Don't compare, the way you learn and the way I learned are totally different things. I've been doing integration work for a long time. So when you see me throw together this, PI aware thing, which by the way, guys, I had already built the damn thing. I'd already done this integrated. Go look at my YouTube. I'd already done an integration into PI aware. There's one that I did into, to service now, like I've already messed with this technology before. This isn't anything that's new to me.
I've, I went back through and recycled a project. that's what you should be doing in your careers. Like go back and recycle a project. Don't start from scratch. Like who does that? go take a project that you already know, something that you're familiar with and go do it again. Because you know what? It helps you learn, like it helps you learn how to get to Carnegie Hall, practice, practice, practice, do it again and again and again.
I have one project that I've rebuilt, like I don't know how many times over the course of my career, because that's just the project I know and like I do it again and again to keep me fresh.
So basically the secret to success today is a whole lot of effort yesterday. Right. It
And if you have insomnia, that helps too. You jerk. You
yeah, that, that always does. I am, blessed to not have it. And I always think about that every single day, right before I go to bed.
You jerk. Yeah. Wow. Push that knife. Yeah, that's great.
I mean, I used to, that's why I got all my content from her. It was like, why is the content slowing down? Cause I sleep now.
Yeah, you sleep. Yeah, I'm like, people are like, people are like, what, what's this integration? I'm like, I don't know. I've got, I had three milligrams of Lunesta in my body. I have no idea what it is. Like, can you build it again? I'm like, maybe? Like,
Like, probably not.
I don't know. I tore that one down. Like, I didn't sleep. Yeah.
So, I mean, so look at the, your, LinkedIn feed, Mark. I mean, it is just a. One stop shop of cool stuff, right? Like
Does anybody talk about AI at ServiceNow more than Mark?
not in my feed. No.
Not in my feed either.
And so you've built this AI, uh, you call them cause, right.
Cause. Chatbot operating system. Yeah.
Chatbot operating system. Okay. I like that. and the things that I see come across my feed from you with you and cause, right. Like I should say, right. Like cause can apparently tell you like what's in your fridge.
Sometimes. Yeah.
The chocolate pudding?
was funny. Uh, cause.
40 is like, what the hell are they talking about?
What are they talking about?
They have never heard of Jello pudding and maybe not even Bill Cosby
Pudding
the pudding back! Bring the pudding back! What's funny, so I've been stealing celebrity voices for cause.
Oh, nice.
I would do it for you, but you'll probably get a takedown. right now he's stuck on Nick Offerman, um, Ron Swanson Pretty simple stuff! there's nothing earth shattering about what people are doing here. and, you
It sure feels earth shattering. So that's like, I just want to, I want to, level set the expectation from the outside, right? Like when I scroll your feet, man, it really feels earth shattering,
it's one of those things where like, I'm just some dude, I can't be the only one that's figured this out, like, it can't just be me.
but all right, so,
but you also, you're also the one that did like the hundreds of hours towards it.
great.
Yeah. But
So, so like,
instead of like, I don't know, that was just because I'm an idiot and I didn't know Kubernetes. Like, I don't know.
yeah, I mean, well, neither do I,
I'm not the only one who doesn't know kubernetes.
Well, I mean, eventually I nailed
who is kubernetes?
Yeah.
Who's that guy? And where, where has he been?
mean, it's obviously running now, so,
Oh, and that's the thing, right? earth shattering again, right? think is in the eye of the beholder, right? So I get it, right? Like I've got a lot of projects where I do a proof of concept just to prove to myself that I can do it. Right. And then I put them on a shelf. Right. And it's like, oh, that was, the challenge was getting to that point what made you keep going? Right. Because you didn't stop at, oh man, this is a nice little chat bot that can tell me some weird and cool things.
Like you're like the stuff that I've seen you publish is better than my Google home.
Yeah. there's a couple of impetuses there. I have a Google home. I love Google home. Um, I'm frustrated with Google home because I went Google home. I love that you sometimes tell me there's a package, but you barely ever get it right. let's just be honest. It does an okay job, but you're telling me that this is AI. this is what you're packaging up and selling to people as AI.
Well, that's what most people know is AI. Right.
Yeah. That's frustrating to me. You know what I mean? Like, this is the capability that we have and I get it. Like
now we're getting somewhere.
that was the capability that we probably had at that point. this is the capability we have now, And I'm like, Hmm, that's frustrating. that's really frustrating to me. Like, where's all the innovation? Google's pumping out Gemma. I'm like, so where's our update? You know what I mean? Like, where is it? what happened? all I see is Google shutting down nest. I'm like, so what happened? Like,
so you've got the Google home at home and when you got it, like me, probably like you were thinking like, damn, man, this is crazy. This is great. then like the rest of the world, right? Like the, the AI revolution came and your Google home and Amazon Alexa and so on and so forth, all just kind of stage stuck where they were. Right.
And then Google starts killing it off. And I'm like, guys, we had the whole thing. We had everything ready to go. you had devices in every room in the house. You had everything. And then,
then nothing, just kind of got stuck. And so then, so you, you decided, we've got all the parts here, maybe you could do better.
I guess I'll just kind of start building parts myself. I gave them enough time. Like I, like, I dunno, I
Google, you're on the clock,
Yeah. I'm like, screw you guys, I guess I'll do it myself. And I had talked to people about this I had other nerdy friends that were like, I don't want to put cameras in my home and presence detectors and all this stuff. And I'm like, how are you going to do that? Seriously, in my head, I'm like, how the hell are you guys going to do this? You guys are crazy. And then finally i'm i'm sitting here going Well, now I know how you're going to do it. Like I figured it out.
Cause that kind of net brings us to one of the coolest posts that I've seen on your LinkedIn feed, is your, camera, right. That you've got, AI running against that allows you to know who showed up in front of your house and if they dropped off a package or not. And talk a little bit about that.
yeah. So that one's a little fun. Combine that one with the garage, those two posts are interesting. and I'm, I'm kind of pursuing those ones. so what, those two allow me to do. So I found a platform, they've packaged up all the, OpenCV and, all the computer vision. Packages, which is really neat. And they allow you to tap into, this cornucopia of data. And I've been able to process that data, the visual data that a computer sees. given an IP camera stream and just a local device, so a small.
Well, like a tablet or just, a phone or something small, I can process the visual data that comes in and then stream that into a vector database. Sorry, do. and then, from there, I can do almost real time queries. So what I'm talking about when I say that is, I take that data in and I take the scene and I kind of, you know, I'm going to use a word. I I'm going to call it normalize. So I normalize that data.
I take the, bits of information about that data, the tags, what's in the scene, the frames of that, just, the overall, what's going on in this scene? What's important about this scene? I normalize that into the vector database. Then I can actually do a search on it. So later when I come back and say What's going on, I can do a recall of that, that data real fast. which is really, really cool. it allows me to do some really neat things. So
Okay.
is the car in the garage? What make or model of cars in the garage? And if it's at the right angle, it'll get it right. I can actually tell it, it's a and gray Nissan Leaf. there's no training. I have not trained this on any of this data. This is just full on what is, what's already available to it. if I put it in the patio, it'll tell me if the sliding glass door is open or closed, it'll tell me how many people are in the patio. It'll tell me, all sorts of just nutty data.
and that's without me training it.
Okay. Okay.
cameras. They're a W Y Z E.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,
they're pretty cool little cameras. the reason I picked the Wyze camera specifically, there's a model of Wyze camera called the Wyze Battery Pro. neat little camera. It's got a 2K lens. It's got a battery pack. It is, hot swappable. And it's got, its own spotlight on it. It's got two way audio, wifi, weatherproof, waterproof, basically put it where you want it Outdoors, indoors. that little guy could go. Dang near anywhere and stream you data from wherever you wanted it to go. and, and,
physical site security on service now.
physical site security, the applications are pretty well limitless. Like we, I was thinking about, just the way out there applications, like what about, exterminators, if you're, if you're trying to get rid of
yeah. Put the camera where you can't go and just leave it there,
Oh, that's, that's interesting. Yeah.
I mean, that's bottom of the barrel kind of stuff. But even to go from A to B, right? Think about all the crazy applications that you could do with something like that. anything that you wanna watch that you just don't want to sit there and look at and search through. That's what that would do.
man. Um,
Thank you.
we're going to have to do a second episode of this because we just recorded for like 45 minutes. I didn't even realize I'm like, can't be that bad. I'm thinking 20 minutes. No, no. 45 minutes. All right. Shoot Mark. Unfortunately. Wow. That time just went crazy fast. I think just given the interest in our last AI episode and how much
do another one. I'm good. I'm good.
We should just have you back on and go for another 45 minutes.
I'm good with that. We'll do it. We'll do a hat trick.
editing. Um,
Rob, you know me, man. Editing is the bane of my existence too. No worries here.
We still don't have an outro.
absolutely.
see you on the next one.
Absolutely. Yeah. Love it.