ServiceNow enhances Now Assist generative AI agents with ‘bring your own model’ experience

ServiceNow Inc. is determined to maintain its position at the forefront of generative artificial intelligence innovation, announcing yet more capabilities today that it says will drive enterprise-wide productivity.

Among the innovations announced at its user conference Knowledge 2024 today is a new “bring your own GenAI model” experience that enables customers to leverage the large language model of their choice in ServiceNow’s generative AI agents. In addition, the company unveiled yet more Now Assist agents within its portfolio of virtual assistants.

ServiceNow has been pushing generative AI aggressively since last year, integrating a wide range of powerful AI features across its workflow platforms. These efforts are largely focused on the Now Assist family of AI agents, which integrate with the company’s Service Management, Customer Services Management, Human Resources Services Delivery and Workflow Creator modules.

According to ServiceNow, Now Assist has grown to become the fastest-selling product in the company’s history, with its most recent innovation being the addition of multimodal models that can incorporate and process multiple types of data, including text, images, audio and video, enabling them to become much more knowledgeable.

With today’s launch of BYO GenAI model for Now Assist, ServiceNow says its models will become even more powerful, with customers able to choose any LLM they wish to sit at the heart of their Now Assist models. They can use proprietary LLMs such as GPT-4 or Google LLC’s Gemini Pro, or they can even develop their own LLMs to tailor their Now Assist experience and get it just right.

Before today, the Now Assist AI agents were all trained on ServiceNow’s proprietary Now LLM, which is based on the open-source StarCoder2 model that was co-developed with Hugging Face Inc. and Nvidia Corp.

Yet more Now Assist agents

Meanwhile, the Now Assist family itself continues to expand. For instance, the new Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management is designed to help product managers accelerate decision making and strategic planning by incorporating the unique needs of their customers via the feedback they provide, with the result being greater customer satisfaction, the company said.

Now Assist for SPM also delivers a new conversational experience for demand creation, helping business users to create demands more quickly, without completing lengthy intake forms.

For developers and administrators, ServiceNow is enhancing Now Assist’s capabilities with new prompt management, Service Catalog item generation, playbook generation and app generation features, so they can create catalog items and playbooks, and build entirely new applications in much shorter timeframes.

Today’s updates will also ease the headaches of customer service and support agents by helping them to quickly summarize, distill and analyze information and alerts, and generate content based on them. The new features, which also include feedback summarization, are designed to help agents work “smarter, not harder,” the company said, so they can focus their energies on improving customer and user experiences by solving more complex problems.

The Now Assist family of AI Agents is being made more accessible too, launching in ServiceNow’s FedRAMP-authorized cloud platform, the ServiceNow Government Community Cloud, which is a unique version of ServiceNow’s offering for government agencies.

Now Assist in GCC allows government customers to finally take advantage of the company’s most advanced generative AI capabilities, the company said. GCC is a dedicated cloud platform that’s designed to meet the stringent regulatory, compliance and security requirements of public sector customers, authorized at the FedRAMP High compliance level and at the DoD Impact Level 4.

Jon Sigler, ServiceNow’s senior vice president of Platform and AI, said today’s updates mean ServiceNow offers the most comprehensive AI platform for business transformation. “We have one of the most ambitious generative AI roadmaps in enterprise software today and our customers are already seeing significant value from their Now Assist implementations,” he said. “With our latest Now Assist solutions on the Now Platform, we’re helping organizations power enterprise-wide transformation so they can achieve new levels of productivity, innovation, and ultimately, business impact.”

No-code app development for everyone

In a separate announcement today, ServiceNow announced yet another AI-powered tool called the Creator Studio within the ServiceNow App Engine platform that extends the low-code application builder experience for developers to workers of every type.

With Creator Studio, the company said, it becomes possible for every employee to build the applications they need to boost their productivity, without relying on developers to do it for them. It’s described as a “no-code” environment, as opposed to the “low-code” capabilities it offers to developers, meaning that it completely eliminates the need for users to do any coding. Regular workers can simply use their natural language to outline the app they wish to create, and Creator Studio will build it for them, with the user able to refine its functionalities through additional natural language commands.

ServiceNow says Creator Studio puts the application development process into the hands of employees in a way that’s guarded, secure and governable, reassuring customers that their new, employee-created apps won’t cause any problems. By doing this, the company says it can help to reduce the backlog faced by IT teams, while ensuring they’re still able to monitor and manage everything that lives within the organization’s technology stack.

Josh Kahn, senior vice president and general manager of Creator, Finance and Supply Chain Workflow products at ServiceNow, said organizations are in need of a more comprehensive platform for creating, scaling and measuring automation across the enterprise. That’s because they face more pressure than ever to boost efficiency and productivity.

“These major enhancements in ServiceNow Creator Workflows mark a significant leap forward in the evolution of app development and automation on the Now Platform by securely moving these capabilities beyond the borders of IT and engineering,” Khan said. “Now, creators of any skill level have access to the tools needed to create and deploy applications and automations at scale.”

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