Put AI to Work. That’s the tagline for Knowledge24, ServiceNow’s annual user conference taking place this week in Las Vegas. The acute focus on AI, as well as ServiceNow’s strategic importance to customers as a workflow automation platform, has drawn thousands of knowledge-hungry attendees who are filling the palatial halls of The Venetian.
It’s an electric atmosphere but the excitement reached a fever pitch when ServiceNow Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott took to the stage for the first keynote of the conference on Tuesday.
A Platform Curated for the AI Era
My colleague Bob Evans recently posted an article in the run-up to Knowledge24, citing comments made by McDermott in the company’s latest earnings call where he labels ServiceNow as “the AI platform for business transformation.” As Evans says, McDermott has chosen “to inextricably align” his company with GenAI.
In his keynote, McDermott reinforced this commitment, repeating his vision of turning ServiceNow into the go-to AI platform for business transformation. Importantly, he explained how ServiceNow is focused on reducing the chaos of business operations by providing a single pane of glass that unites the quagmire of applications and systems that companies rely on. In some cases, those platforms and systems run into the hundreds, a situation that McDermott says has “worn customers out.”
McDermott’s vision is to drive out this complexity by leveraging his company’s ethos of simplification and effectively weaving GenAI capabilities into every corner of the business. In fact, he asserted, “Every single business process, every single workflow, will be re-engineered with generative AI.” And the catalyst for this innovation is Now Assist.
Expanded GenAI Capabilities
Jon Sigler, ServiceNow’s senior vice president of platform and AI, and Joe Davis, the company’s senior vice president of platform engineering, took to the stage to give a brief overview of how Now Assist is evolving.
Their discussion included a powerful demonstration of Now Assist’s forthcoming capabilities that enable users to deploy AI search across third-party systems, in this case, Microsoft SharePoint, and extract specific information that was instantly presented in context using Now Assist’s GenAI capabilities.
During day one of Knowledge24, ServiceNow released a series of announcements going deeper into the specifics of these new GenAI features. They impact a wide user group, including employees, developers, agents, and government agencies. The company also released details about a new bring-your-own (BYO) GenAI model for Now Assist portfolios that enables customers to use the large language model (LLM) of their choice within Now Assist.
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Regarding the new Now Assist capabilities, from an employee perspective, Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) is designed to help product managers expedite the decision-making process. Within the new product, a conversational experience enables users to respond to customer demand quickly, prioritize workloads, and break through bottlenecks.
Developers and admins can benefit from new features that boost productivity in app development and automation, including a prompt management feature in Now Assist for IT Service Management and a series of new features in Now Assist for Creator. As well as a Service Catalog item generation feature that leverages GenAI to build catalog items based on natural language, the company announced a playbook generation tool and an app generation tool that enable non-technical users to create business apps quickly.
Agents will benefit from a series of new GenAI capabilities aimed at enhancing efficiency. These include knowledge article generation, post-call summarization, and feedback summarization. For governments, ServiceNow is bringing Now Assist to the ServiceNow Government Community Cloud (GCC), providing governmental agencies with wide-ranging GenAI capabilities.
Partners News
While they certainly made a significant impact, the upgrades to Now Assist weren’t the only major developments at day one of Knowledge24. There were also a series of partner announcements.
ServiceNow is entering into a partnership with Genesys, the cloud customer experience company. Together, the firms aim to elevate customer and employee experiences by uniting the capabilities of their platforms. The company is also expanding its partnership with Fujitisu, the Japanese technology manufacturer, with plans to open a new Fujitsu-ServiceNow innovation center.
Finally, ServiceNow will be strengthening its collaboration with the Indian IT consulting company, Infosys; they will focus on GenAI-powered industry solutions.
Open Learning
McDermott closed his keynote by introducing a concept that affirmed ServiceNow’s dedication to its customers and invited the audience to send in nominations for a new user group board of Directors to help steer the company’s progress. However, not all the action took place on the keynote stage.
The expo hall at Knowledge24, swathed in brand-centric green and blue, was unique. As we reported pre-event, the aim was to create an experience where attendees could mix sessions with hands-on experience and partner introductions.
This approach had the desired effect. With wide avenues running alongside open theater spaces, demo and user experience spaces, partner booths, and creative demonstrations illustrating many use cases including the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in farming and scaled-down smart cities, attendees weren’t just observers, they were participants.
ServiceNow isn’t holding back on its commitment to revolutionizing how businesses operate and accelerate growth with AI. With Now Assist, a tried and tested tool at the heart of these ambitions, few if any other platform companies can match ServiceNow’s objective to lead the field in simplified and unified AI that serves a wide swath of customer personas and use cases.
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