ServiceNow releases its most comprehensive set of new AI innovations with the Now Platform Xanadu

• Now Assist for Security Operations (SecOps), helps boost response times to more quickly contain security threats. With Now Assist, SecOps teams can transfer interactions with AI driven incident summarizations and interactive Q&A to automatically prioritize and respond to each security event. As a result, they can better scale incident response protocols, accelerating the assessment, prioritisation, and response process for critical security threats.

• ServiceNow is also bringing Now Assist to its Finance and Supply Chain Workflows, available first for Sourcing and Procurement Operations, with more GenAI capabilities to follow.

• Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations makes the procurement intake process simple and seamless for submitting requests, which can result in greater compliance and accuracy while minimising friction with fulfilment. Employees can initiate a procurement request or access information through a conversational prompt with Now Assist, removing the need to navigate complex systems.

Boosting customer agility, enhancing productivity, and improving employee experiences

ServiceNow continues to put customer agility at the forefront with Now Assist Skill Kit, a new feature that unlocks the development and deployment of custom GenAI skills and prompts. Additionally, data visualisation generation, chat and email reply generation, change summarisation, and LLM-based proactive prompts, help improve productivity. They break down complexities, enable easier internal collaboration, and help employees work better and faster.

• Now Assist Skill Kit offers a pro-code experience for partners and customers to create custom GenAI skills for their specific business needs, as well as when they have a use case that isn’t yet available out-of-the-box with Now Assist. Skill Kit connects seamlessly to data and knowledge within the Now Platform for enhanced context and accuracy and offers powerful options for customisation—whether customers choose Now LLMs or want to incorporate third-party or custom LLMs.

• Data visualisation generation, the first-analytics generation skill in Now Assist, helps teams more effectively visualise data and make informed decisions quickly to reduce bottlenecks and speed up response times. It gives user the ability to get targeted insights from their data using natural language prompts and add them to interactive dashboards, all without needing to understand the data’s underlying structure.

• Chat and email reply generation reduces the time spent on manual replies with AI-generated suggested responses and revisions. Available within Agent Workplace, users can harness Now Assist to help resolve issues even faster. The quick reply feature uses GenAI to draft or edit emails for service agents, reducing response times and helping ensure more effective communication.

• Change summarisation, powered by Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM), allows IT teams to summarise change requests and assess related data to quickly make more informed decisions, improving agent productivity and decreasing cycle times while minimising risks.

• LLM-based proactive prompts, powered by Now Assist for HR Service Delivery (HRSD), proactively engages employees and managers with relevant and timely reminders to complete tasks. LLM-based proactive prompts helps managers and employees take necessary actions, all through conversational, GenAI-enabled prompts in Virtual Agent.

Extending the possibilities of Now Assist through partnerships

During Knowledge 2024, ServiceNow previewed an expanded partnership with Microsoft to integrate the intelligence of ServiceNow’s AI powered workflows with Copilot for Microsoft 365. With the Xanadu release, ServiceNow is officially bringing that functionality to customers, enabling new levels of employee productivity and connected experiences. The Copilot for Microsoft 365 integration is now generally available.

Harnessing the power of Now Assist across industries

The expansion of Now Assist into ServiceNow’s industry offerings brings the Now Platform’s leading GenAI capabilities to telecom, media, and technology, financial services, public sector organisations, and more. With Now Assist for Telecom, Media, and Technology (TMT), Now Assist for Financial Services Operations (FSO), and Now Assist for Public Sector Digital Services (PSDS), organisations across industries can easily understand and resolve issues and requests quickly, improving customer and agent experiences. 

Additionally, ServiceNow is deepening its retail footprint in the Xanadu release with the launch of Retail Operations and Retail Service Management, new solutions that unify a retailer’s ecosystem to deliver consistent and connected experiences across every channel, and in the store. 

• Retail Operations empowers frontline managers and store associates to seamlessly handle day-to-day in-store tasks, like reporting a broken POS system or performing daily store open and close checks, leveraging AI and automation to improve self-service.

• Retail Service Management brings ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management capabilities to retailers, allowing customers to easily submit requests in-store and online while enabling headquarters teams to resolve both customer and store support issues from a single system.

Platform innovations boost productivity and strengthen collaboration across the enterprise

The Xanadu release helps customers foster an innovative and connected work environment so any organisation can scale to meet the pace of rapid transformation.

• Strengthening developer collaboration to build applications faster

• Integrated development environment (IDE) lets developers harness the power of industry-standard development tools and workflows to quickly create and modify ServiceNow apps with code, in a matter of minutes. ServiceNow’s IDE exponentially accelerates development, allowing developers and ServiceNow SMEs to collaborate seamlessly.

• Supercharging productivity and operational resiliency

• Enterprise Architecture, an expansion of ServiceNow’s Application Portfolio Management (APM), helps organisations simplify all aspects of their operations to reduce costs, risks, and redundancies. It drives greater alignment between IT teams and the strategic objectives of the business.

• A redefined approach to AIOps, in IT Operations Management (ITOM), helps IT teams who use Event Management more effectively enrich, group, and escalate alerts and better understand impact through mapped visualisation, with or without a mature CMDB. . The solution complements GenAI-powered incident and alert analysis through Now Assist for ITOM so IT teams can quickly make sense of complicated alert messages to proactively address issues before they impact the end user

• Service Reliability Management for ITOM speeds up resolutions to application issues or outages by providing clear visibility into the performance of an organisation’s technical services. Service Reliability management allows Site Reliability Engineers and application teams to set their own on-call schedules, align on Service Level Indicators & Objectives, manage alerts autonomously, and more without having to rely on central administrators.

• Driving intelligent and personalised experiences

• Guided Self-Service in Employee Center provides a new way for employees to get help across departments, including IT and HR, guiding them to the right answers through a visual, interactive Q&A experience. This intuitive experience delivers fast, accurate, and personalised answers to the most frequently asked questions so employees don’t waste valuable time reading through irrelevant articles or creating a support ticket.

Powerful data enhancements to unlock value with ultra-scale and performance

In addition to the Xanadu release, ServiceNow also announced powerful data enhancements to unlock value with ultra-scale and performance. New capabilities in this next-generation data layer include the RaptorDB Pro high-performance database, for up to 53% faster transaction times, 27X faster pulling of reports, analytics, and list views, and 3X increase in transactional throughput across workflows so customers can support more users and more workflows on their ServiceNow instances. 

What customers and partners are saying:

Eaton

“Technology is fundamental to our success in helping deliver value for our customers so they can tackle some of the most critical power management initiatives across the world,” said Sunil Tulyani, service management platform leader at Eaton.

“For the last century, Eaton has been dedicated to helping our customers manage power more reliably, efficiently, safely, and sustainably. In the new era of AI, our ability to drive efficiencies and solve challenges with technology has never been greater. We look forward to leveraging the power of generative AI, with the help of ServiceNow Now Assist, to increase productivity across our entire organization and to make it easier for teams to get the answers they need when they need them.”  

Boomi

“Our core mission at Boomi is to simplify the complexity of connecting applications and business processes for our customers,” said Arlen Shenkman, president at Boomi.

“Layering GenAI across our customer experiences is the next step in reducing complexity even further, speeding up time to resolution and delivering a fantastic service experience. With the Now Platform and ServiceNow’s AI?powered TPSM offering, we’re working to transform customer support and expand self?service. Now Assist for CSM will further help us ensure that our customers receive a simplified, efficient customer experience.” 

Availability

• Most Generative AI features announced are generally available and can be found in the ServiceNow Store.

• Customer Service Management AI Agent and ITSM AI Agent are expected to be available to customers in November 2024, with additional use cases added through 2025.

• ServiceNow industry solutions and platform-wide capabilities are generally available to all customers in the ServiceNow Store today, including:

• Integrated development environment (IDE), Enterprise Architecture, updates to AIOps, Service Reliability Management, and Guided Self-Service in Employee Center

• Retail Operations and Retail Service Management

• Now Assist for TMT, Now Assist for FSO, and Now Assist for PSDS

• RaptorDB Pro is available now to new and existing ServiceNow customers. RaptorDB Standard is available now to new customers and will be available to existing customers later next year.

• Expected availability for personalised workflows powered by ServiceNow Knowledge Graph is March 2025.

See more stories here.