[Digital Today reporter Chi-gyu Hwang (황치규)] ServiceNow said on Wednesday it introduced its 'Autonomous CRM Engine', which uses AI to cut customer relationship management (CRM) system migration time from months to weeks.

SiliconANGLE reported that the engine uses AI to analyse a company’s existing CRM environment and propose ways to improve business processes. It also offers a function that automatically deploys newly designed workflows on the ServiceNow platform.

The move is seen as an effort to lower the cost of switching to another CRM and target customers of established providers such as Salesforce and Microsoft.

The first targets are Salesforce customers, and ServiceNow plans to expand the targets to other companies as well.

The most time-consuming stage in CRM migration is assessing the current state. Companies typically interview employees across multiple departments and regions to understand how sales and service operations work. ServiceNow stressed that the Autonomous CRM Engine can cut this process to just a few days and show all sales processes by product line.

The Autonomous CRM Engine reviews existing CRM configuration values, custom scripts and workflows and organises them into a graph database. Based on that, AI reconstructs how sales approvals, customer complaint handling and service requests are actually processed. The company said it can also identify gaps between documented procedures and actual work, such as approval steps that employees routinely skip.

Companies can review proposed improvements on a visualisation screen and modify them to fit their situation. Once approved, the changes are reflected immediately in ServiceNow CRM.

Even with automation, issues with integrating with other systems remain. ServiceNow appears to be trying to address this with a 'workflow data fabric' that allows external data to be used without moving or copying it. Legacy applications are connected through robotic process automation (RPA).