ServiceNow has delivered a sweeping set of new AI functionality targeting business and tech functions, industries, and new use cases as part of the Now Platform release it dubs Xanadu.
Simultaneously, the company’s ecosystem leaders outlined aggressive new measures to leverage partners — through new approaches, tools, training resources, and more — to propagate its AI technology and drive up the percentage of net new average contract value (ACV) for GenAI that is sourced by partners.
Collectively, new functionality and ecosystem initiatives aim to extend the reach of the Now Platform into all corners of a business and a broader range of industries as the company pushes to realize CEO Bill McDermott’s vision of “The AI Platform for Business Transformation.”
Now Platform Gets GenAI Infusion
Xanadu extends the company’s flagship Now Platform to new enterprise functions that stand to gain important new efficiencies through GenAI, including security operations as well as sourcing and procurement. New industry-specific apps have been developed for financial services, telecom, retail, public sector, and more. From the expansive set of new, expanded, or integrated functions ServiceNow announced this week, I’m highlighting these five:
- Now Assist for SecOps and Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations, two applications that expand the platform into critical new functional areas. Now Assist for SecOps lets teams leverage AI-driven incident summarizations to automatically prioritize and respond to individual security events, which should help manage massive quantities of security threats and notifications. The sourcing and procurement app lets employees initiate a procurement request, or access procurement or policy information, through conversational prompts, rather than navigating complex systems and creating lengthy queries.
- Autonomous AI agents — or Agentic AI — for IT, customer service, procurement, HR, software development, and more: These agents can complete many tasks needed to resolve high-frequency cases and then route a request to approve their actions to a human agent. Now Assist Skill Kits allow partners and customers to build and deploy new GenAI skills that aren’t available out of the box. “You can now put AI agents to work for your business to rapidly scale productivity. You’re able to use existing skills or create your own tailored to your needs,” Kush Panchbhai, senior vice president, platform fundamentals for ServiceNow, said during the company’s Global Partner Ecosystem Summit. The AI agents can take it a step further, suggesting steps that can increase customer satisfaction and updating content on behalf of human agents.
- Purpose-built GenAI apps: In some cases, these are co-created with customers for industries including financial services, retail, telecom/media/technology, and public sector. Now Assist for Banking, developed with Visa, performs GenAI-powered dispute resolution with the goal of raising productivity and customer loyalty. Now Assist for Retail Operations helps frontline retail workers tap AI to efficiently manage daily tasks such as reporting problems with a point-of-sale system or checking on daily store open and close tasks.
- An enhanced data layer, built on the RaptorDB Pro database: This has shown improvement up to 53% in time required to execute transactions on the Now Platform, and the ability to pull reports and analytics up to 27 times faster. The company also enhanced its core Configuration Management Database, as well as industry-specific data models with powerful analytics, personalization, and automation across systems and data sources in a unified platform built on RaptorDB.
- In another ecosystem tie-in, this one with Microsoft — the integration between Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Now Assist, announced at ServiceNow’s Knowledge conference in May, is now generally available. Copilot can hand off automated self-service employee tasks, such as requesting benefits information during the onboarding process, to Now Assist in Microsoft Teams. Now Assist, in turn, can provide real-time responses and kick off workflows for employees.
Partner Push
Erica Volini, senior vice president of partnerships and channels, explained the role partners have played in fueling ServiceNow’s growth to this point and how its role must continue to expand so that ServiceNow and its ecosystem continue to thrive in the GenAI era. “Partners will be the primary delivery channel for GenAI,” Volini said. Partners currently deliver 92% of the company’s implementations, yet there’s still more work to be done. “With GenAI, it’s going to be more than just having our partners implement the majority of our go-lives,” she said.
The need to partner — and collaborate — differently is driven by the changes GenAI has wrought. It requires ServiceNow working with partners not just on delivery but on new market creation. The company will deliver the presales and sales enablement that partners require. “In a world where outcomes are the ultimate measure, it’s only an end-to-end strategy that will get us there.”
As the expanded technology focus plays out, ServiceNow aims to dramatically increase the percent of net new GenAI revenue that partners source. The goal: Go from today’s 2% of net new GenAI ACV to more than 20%; the latter figure is in line with partners’ broader net new ACV contributions to ServiceNow’s overall business.
To that end, Volini and her team committed to providing the resources to reach that 20+% net new ACV target. “The gap between those numbers is not because you haven’t leaned in,” she said during the ecosystem event. “The disparity is here because we simply haven’t done enough — yet.” That applies to resources, data, customer stories, and equipping partners to move at the speed of the market.
The company has developed an AI Navigator that gives partners packaged, end-to-end sales plays. It’s also created a team of dedicated AI partner support experts across global regions, among other initiatives to raise ecosystem performance collectively. “Every part of our business is looking to this ecosystem to ensure their success.”
