Gioni Gennai

At ABB, we embraced a digital adoption strategy to keep pace with the growing complexity of our global application landscape and to help employees stay productive despite frequent system, process, and organizational changes. As our digital transformation accelerated across platforms such as ServiceNow, Ariba, Concur, SharePoint, and various internal tools, it became evident that traditional training methods and static documentation were no longer enough.

In 2025, two strategic initiatives stood at the center of this transformation: the Greenfield program, launched in 2023 to rebuild ABB’s ServiceNow platform after the previous instance had become overly customized and difficult to maintain; and the adoption of Workday, aimed at unifying and modernizing the global HR ecosystem by replacing fragmented local tools with a single, intuitive, fully integrated platform. These changes required employees to learn new workflows, adapt to redesigned interfaces, and navigate updated user journeys.

WalkMe played a key role in easing this transition. By providing in app, step by step guidance, contextual prompts, and clear entry points for support, it reduced the number of steps employees needed to complete and made critical tasks more intuitive. WalkMe’s behavioral analytics further highlighted where users struggled, whether due to confusing buttons, low visibility features, or complex process steps, enabling teams to streamline flows and quickly resolve pain points.

The ABB Way is ABB’s operating model, our shared framework for how we work, create value, and stay aligned as a global, decentralized organization. While this decentralization enables agility and empowers divisions, it also introduces challenges such as increased complexity, fragmented processes, and limited visibility across functions and platforms.

To address these issues, I built from the ground up an internal WalkMe Center of Excellence (COE) and, from day one, adopted a hybrid operating model capable of supporting all internal content requests. This model combines centralized governance with decentralized execution: the CoE retains ownership of platform strategy, standards, and governance, while Business Areas manage project and program implementation.

To accelerate adoption and ensure scalable support, I also introduced a catalogue of services, each designed to meet different business needs:

• Demo – A rapid, lightweight implementation (max. five days) to demonstrate WalkMe capabilities to a targeted audience.
• Pilot – A structured three month initiative focused on a selected set of use cases, including up to four weeks of build time followed by eight weeks of live operation, complete with KPI definition and value realization tracking.
• Analytics – Advanced application monitoring to identify critical user experience gaps, track adoption trends, and build conversion funnels to analyze real process behavior.

This approach allowed us to bring consistency, visibility, and impact to digital adoption efforts despite ABB’s highly decentralized environment.

Our digital adoption strategy centered on WalkMe has significantly enhanced the employee experience by reducing complexity, accelerating onboarding, and enabling users to complete tasks confidently without relying on manuals or support teams. For our internal customers, WalkMe’s in app guidance and analytics shortened learning curves, reduced errors, and surfaced friction points that allowed us to deliver continuous UX improvements.
In the Workday program specifically, WalkMe played a critical role by going live on day one alongside the platform. We delivered 155 content items, translated into 21 languages, covering 23 processes tailored for Employees, Managers, and HRs. Adoption was outstanding: on go live day, 75K unique users accessed Workday, and 97% interacted with WalkMe—a level of engagement that remained consistently strong seven months later. During this period, the “Introduction to Workday” Walk-Thru was completed by 51K unique users, 65.5% of users engaged with Smart Walk-Thrus, generating 75K total plays (about 1.5 per user). Overall, among 102K active Workday users, 98% interacted with WalkMe, resulting in 4,316,948 total interactions, with an average of 43.4 interactions per user.

I joined ABB in January 2024, when WalkMe was live only on Ariba and Concur and lacked an organic, structured approach. I began shaping the CoE to align the WalkMe adoption strategy with ABB’s business objectives, improving employee experience and digital dexterity while keeping costs under control. I onboarded an implementation partner to provide a Digital Adoption Consultant and a Solution Engineer for new deployments, and later added another Solution Engineer to support Workday and additional platforms.
WalkMe has been also key in enforcing internal policies. The Shadow Al feature helped monitor the use of Al tools, promote responsible behaviour, and guide employees toward MS Copilot; after the content release, MS Copilot usage grew by 67%. WalkMe’s value was proven with the gradual implementation increase, for example Ariba started with Guided Buying at the end of 2023, in 2024 we added Ariba SSS and, after a successful pilot, we will integrate Ariba SCC. In 2024, WalkMe certified value realisation on Ariba with 416,607 interactions, saving 100 minutes per FTE and totalling 27,455 hours saved, achieving a 344% ROI.

There are many achievements I’m proud of. Building a CoE from scratch has been a major milestone: in just one year I established the structure, defined the services, and introduced the chargeback model. Workday has been another key success, thanks to our close collaboration with the HR Implementation team to deliver WalkMe content from day one. The go-live was smooth, with no major issues afterward. One manager shared: “As a new manager at ABB, before Workday and WalkMe it took me a couple of days to understand how to open a job requisition. Workday helped, but I still struggled to find the right place. With WalkMe it took 1 search, 2 clicks, and I was already on the job requisition page. Fast, smooth, the best experience possible!”
Within the first year, we deployed WalkMe content across ServiceNow, Workday, SharePoint, our Incident and Crisis Management tool, MS Copilot, and other internal applications, creating around 8,000 content items. This work has also been externally recognized: SAP awarded us the SAP Adoption Excellence Transformation Trailblazer Award during the SAP Transformation Excellence Summit in The Hague.

I am the IS Qualtrics and WalkMe Platform Owner, leading the strategic development and operational excellence of both platforms to ensure alignment with key business outcomes. I am also a member of the Digital Adoption Advisor Council, an exclusive, invitation-only community comprised of senior digital transformation leaders, technology executives, and change management experts.
Vision: As Al accelerates digitalization, employees are continuously exposed to new tools and processes. Traditional training cannot keep pace, making Digital Adoption Platforms essential to ensure a seamless and intuitive experience across the digital ecosystem. In my vision, WalkMe will become a central element of the Change Management Framework, offering process owners a catalog of services they can select from to support the introduction of new applications and services.