Here's a sentence you weren't expecting from CoreX Insights: For Jay Wigard, innovation has never been about chasing the newest technology.
Long before he was leading innovation efforts at CoreX, Jay was building websites in the early days of the internet, designing user experiences, creating music, collecting records, and finding inspiration in everything from software architecture to gardening. Whether he's talking about enterprise platforms, AI, or the natural world, a common thread begins to appear. Complexity is inevitable, but it doesn't have to feel complicated.
As Global Head of Innovation at CoreX, Jay spends much of his time exploring how emerging technologies can solve real business challenges. Yet his focus remains remarkably grounded. Rather than asking what technology can do, he tends to ask what people need, where friction exists, and how experiences can become more intuitive, useful, and (dare we say?) enjoyable.
In this conversation, Jay shares thoughts on innovation, AI, user experience, and why the most meaningful advances often come from understanding people as much as technology.
Note: For employee profile articles, we often choose the best quotes for the piece. But we won't lie, Jay's interview responses were too good to edit. Here's Jay, in his own words.
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You’ve said your focus has been simplifying complex enterprise experiences. As technology becomes more powerful and AI-driven, does making things simpler become easier or harder?
This is a really good question! Honestly, the answer is probably "both." A lot of things get easier with AI, but new challenges open up. Things are moving very rapidly, but sometimes they aren't moving fast enough. In a lot of cases, you're waiting for people or technology or budgets to catch up so you can really take things to the next level.
I'm extremely excited about the ability of conversational AI and agentic AI to improve user experience. I think this is the next big leap in terms of UX. People have always struggled with how to organize things and how to make it easy and intuitive for users to find.
The more content you have to serve, the harder it is to make something that works for everyone. With conversational AI and AI-first products, you can really simplify this. If you can just ask Otto where something is or how to do something, you don't have to go down the rabbit hole of trying to remember how your service catalog is organized.
As Global Head of Innovation, what do you think innovation actually means? Is it building something new, simplifying something existing, or something else entirely?
To me, at a high level, Innovation is about finding​ patterns (or anti-patterns) and trying to constantly improve. My team builds new things to fill in gaps in the ServiceNow ecosystem, and along the way, we continually uncover new patterns or anti-patterns and find ways to improve.
Sometimes it's a new product, sometimes it's just a set of best practices we discover. When I first joined ITS Partners [now part of CoreX], and we were getting started building integrations, I looked at what was in the ServiceNow App Store for market research. The user experience of most integrations back then was really rough. If you were lucky, there was a PDF manual to read, then you'd configure sys_properties, light a candle, and contact the spirit realm.
If all the right sigils and signs were in place, the APIs would cooperate, and data would appear.
I always had the philosophy that I had failed as a designer if someone needed a manual to figure out how to use my stuff. Enterprise workflows can be complex, but even if you need to put data into 5 or 6 tables to complete a workflow, you can build custom Service Portal widgets that abstract the backend complexity by guiding the user through whatever they need to do. You can see this in our CoreX Jamf Integration.
We soon started to use ServiceNow's Guided Setup framework to basically do the same thing, but with less custom UI development. We're gearing up to a point where conversational AI will be able to simplify that flow even further.
When you look at enterprise software today, what frustrations or patterns still make you think, "We should be past this by now"?
In general, there is still a lot of room to improve the user experience. There are still so many things that go wrong, and I think we are at a point where the software should be more proactive in saying, "Hey, we've got a problem, boss!"
We should ideally be past the point of having to really hunt for issues, but that's still a big thing we all have to deal with.
AI is rapidly changing what applications can do. How do you think it changes what users expect from their experiences?
They're expecting that they should just be able to interact with technology on their own terms, and they're expecting things to be very intuitive. I'm very empathetic and focused on the human experience.
I'm very grateful to my first managers in IT, but I remember in the dark ages of 2002, there was kind of an elitist, gatekeeping aspect. It was harder to write code, and a lot of the UI/UX patterns weren't well established, so it was usually hard to use!
I wanted to make things actually user-friendly and fun to interact with. Things should be intuitive! If things don't make sense to your users, congratulations, you just found an opportunity to improve things.
With AI, there is an amazing opportunity to abstract complexity by phrasing things in ways that make sense to you and getting results quickly. Being able to say, "Hey Otto, I need a new laptop" or "Hey Otto, I need to pull a utilization report for my team" and actually get what you want right away, without having to wait for someone to respond to your request, is pretty amazing.
Obviously, we're still in the early days of that, and there are still kinks even with the best-in-class solutions. But it feels like we're on that horizon, and that's the new dawn people are expecting to see.
You've spent much of your career designing for people. What behaviors or human tendencies stay remarkably consistent, even while technology changes around them?
People are still people, and we have tendencies to get frustrated, especially when we're in a hurry. We're all trying to do more with the same amount or fewer resources, and time is always the most precious resource. When you're already busy, the hardest thing to do is to slow down and figure out how to optimize what you're doing. But if you don't, you're going to tip over.
I have a lot of memories of moving in and out of apartments, up and down stairs, and that's a dominant metaphor in my head for the way we all tend to work. If you're coming down the stairs and your hands are full of boxes, you might want to ask for help, but your hands are too full to think about how to do that without hurting yourself or the person at the bottom of the stairs. So, instead, you "power through."
In our careers, we tend to power through, carrying too many boxes and lamenting our heavy burdens. We have to be intentional about carving out time to set down our burdens and think about what we can do to improve.
Do you think organizations sometimes become too focused on what technology can do and lose sight of what people actually need? How do you balance those things?
Definitely, I think that's really where human-centered design comes in. By mapping out the pain points and what you're trying to solve first, you can improve things meaningfully and make sure you aren't just riding the hype train, unsure if it is even going to your stop.
[As I've mentioned], conversational AI is really exciting, and so is agentic AI. If I can leverage AI to "carry the boxes down the stairs" while I spend my time strategizing on more creative or bigger things, that's exciting.
At the same time, I want AI to improve the human experience, but we also need to figure out how to transform responsibly.
If you looked 3-5 years ahead, what do you hope enterprise technology feels like for the people using it every day?
I hope it feels satisfying and intuitive, and dare I say, fun! I've had a lot of fun developing and leading developers over the years. There were a lot of times that we were building something that felt legitimately fun to use and demo, and some of my favorite career moments were of people coming up to me and telling me they really liked using a piece of software I had designed or developed.
We all put a lot of ourselves into our jobs and our careers. If we can live in a future where people feel satisfied and don't feel like they're wasting their lives, that's a big win.
On that note, what excites you most about CoreX today, and where it's headed over the next few years?
It's exciting to see the momentum that we're building, and seeing our OT practice getting a lot of recognition, knowing that my team had a big part in that with all the integrations we built and our collaborations with the OT Product team.
It's also great that we first built some of the first Armis ServiceNow integrations back in 2019-2020, and then seeing them have such a big boost with the recent ServiceNow acquisition. They're great people, and have equally great technology.
I like where we are at and where we are heading as CoreX because I get to collaborate with ServiceNow product teams while also getting to be entrepreneurial and help build CoreX from the ground up. I'm excited to see us replicate our success in OT in all the growing AI opportunities and newer products like EmployeeWorks, AI Control Tower, Employee Slate, and Otto.
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To learn more about Jay, check out his LinkedIn page. Also, be sure to keep an eye on these pages for Jay's upcoming series on ServiceNow innovations. And of course, don't hesitate to schedule a discovery call to begin seeing these ideas in action.