This year’s Knowledge — ServiceNow’s flagship event for partners, customers, and collaborators— was about making Generative AI (GenAI) as seamlessly available as its AI counterparts. By tapping into its partner ecosystem for workflow innovations, ServiceNow takes GenAI out of sandboxes to powerful off-the-shelf use cases that drive tangible business transformation.
Integrations with Microsoft Copilot, IBM watsonx, and NVIDIA’s Avatar Cloud Engine bring “intelligent workflows into the flow of work,” as ServiceNow describes it. ServiceNow offers clients intelligent experiences via digital agents/avatars that orchestrate hand-offs to solve complex problems, reduce time from concept to build with image-to-workflow conversion, change instruction-driven coding to intention-driven with no-code platforms, and speed up training or fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Be it onboarding a new employee, troubleshooting a slow internet connection, ordering a new laptop, or even filing timesheets – ServiceNow puts GenAI to serious work.
As a global ServiceNow integrator, Persistent collaborates with leading enterprises to plug GenAI into their operations to maximize the value of their ServiceNow investments. For us, ServiceNow is not an end goal but a means to enable businesses to unleash efficiencies, speed, and synergies, making work more engaging and less draining. Based on what we heard and observed at Knowledge 2024, ServiceNow is making GenAI native to its core platform, taking enterprise collaboration and innovation to strong new levels.
The Impact on Enterprises
Here is our take on how the ServiceNow GenAI off-the-shelf use cases will impact enterprises:
- Modern businesses, backed by intelligent workflows: As they expand, enterprises develop and deploy various workflows, knowledge bases, and processes that become unwieldy to manage and govern. While ServiceNow sanitizes this landscape with a single-pane view across IT, human resources, and finance workflows and assets, it will now create synergies that accelerate the pace. With GenAI in the mix, ServiceNow enables deeper process mining, ready analyses via chat summarization, multiple knowledge base references, and predictive analytics that improve productivity and self-service deflection rates, and trigger innovations in service management. For the world’s oldest financial institution, JP Morgan Chase, ServiceNow brought more than 60 internal platforms down to one. It now onboards more than 400 employees daily via the ServiceNow Now Assist platform, embedded with GenAI capabilities that orchestrate multi-departmental signoffs, process access requests, and answer queries – all through automated, autonomous, and end-to-end intelligent workflows.
- Maximum productivity with minimal friction: With GenAI models native to the ServiceNow platform, clients can empower admins, agents, developers, and employees to offload rote or repetitive tasks, significantly reducing workloads and freeing up time for more value-adding work. For developers, the timeframe from concept to build will shrink significantly with ServiceNow’s GenAI-powered no-code functionalities that automate image-to-workflow conversion, which can be iterated with simple conversational prompts. ServiceNow also allows code edits with natural language prompts that offer higher flexibility to developers and a wider playing field for citizen developers. The underlying LLMs rest within the ServiceNow core platform, ensuring enterprise data is secure since it does not leave the enterprise firewall. For employees, ServiceNow personalizes Now Assist with MyAssist, a digital assistant to help employees navigate day-to-day activities. ServiceNow ran a demo to show how the employee onboarding journey was made seamless with an interactive, real-time digital avatar that mapped the employee’s ETA to the office, secured required passes and access requests, booked one-on-one meetings with direct team members at a convenient time, and even wrote an introductory email for the new employee.
- People-led, tech-driven culture with GenAI-human partnership: Can GenAI ease navigating organizational culture beyond workflows and processes? This is what ServiceNow is attempting with its partnership with NVIDIA. On the event’s second day, during ServiceNow President and Chief Operating Officer CJ Desai’s keynote with NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang, this came to life. Powered by NVIDIA NIM microservices and NVIDIA ACE, ServiceNow demoed an employee raising an issue about slow internet speed, engaging conversationally with an IT service digital avatar agent, and receiving a resolution without a single click. Digital avatars embedded within end-user journeys create frictionless experiences, converting technology into an enabler and not an inhibitor of real-life collaboration.
- 360-degree end-user profile with knowledge graphs: ServiceNow stacks sit on a mass of end-user data stored across SharePoint, databases, and modalities. By overlaying these disparate and distributed data sources with a virtual knowledge graph, ServiceNow enables agents, admins, and employees to get a 360-degree end-user profile to draw insights quickly. This is a game-changer for operations and business intelligence, where querying multiple data sets becomes superlatively faster and easier, allowing business users to avoid blind spots and capitalize on hidden synergies. With a single view of all variables connected to an end user, businesses can deliver higher value with shorter turnaround times – making lives easier for admins, agents, customers, and employees.
What Does it Mean for the Larger Ecosystem?
There are several industry-changing implications of ServiceNow’s new offerings and capabilities.
- It’s all about the experience: GenAI-based automation from ServiceNow will ensure that users get more acquainted with an AI interface, which also provides higher sensitivity with fewer human-generated errors. This means:
- Users will have fewer complexities in everyday transactions with higher predictability.
- Ecosystems will converge, and the most efficient plays will combine capabilities to create a more coherent ecosystem that will provide better user output.
- Small-time players must get into a niche or be out of the game.
- Service providers that cannot work with several key players with wider use cases will lose relevance.
- Shift back to a beautiful past with futuristic fluidity and agility: Technology is ultimately reaching a stage where enterprises will adjust to the available technology and focus on their mainstream business. For example, complex developmental skills will not be as much of a dependency. Citizen developers will slowly take over, and businesses will be able to focus on core capabilities. The key imperatives are:
- Higher agility with citizen developer: GenAI-based development capabilities will allow business managers to directly convert a workflow from brainstorming whiteboard and napkin to consumer functions, increasing the agility to create or modify several folds.
- No loss in translation:Business to technology and reverse conversation always leave much to be inferred. You get what you want when a business can directly achieve the result.
- Change in job definitions towards higher value:Several jobs, such as developers, support staff, back-office ground staff, HR, and facilities, will considerably shrink.
Get Out-of-the-Box GenAI Off the Floor with Persistent
These shifts in enterprise culture, operations, and work environment herald new working methods. While ServiceNow democratizes GenAI to knowledge workers, Persistent assists enterprises with fine-tune underlying models to support unique business use cases while ensuring model governance, data integrity, and Responsible AI.
As a ServiceNow partner, we bring a 360-degree approach to value extraction, embedding our ServiceNow practitioners and domain experts within enterprise teams to understand pain points and translate them into business requirements. We also have strategic partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure – and can get our clients the best-fit cloud services, resource strategy, and configurations to supercharge their ServiceNow-led GenAI use cases. For our work driving cloud-based synergies for clients, Gartner recognized us as the only mid-cap IT services provider to be ranked as a Challenger in its 2023 Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud IT Transformation Services.
Our analyst-recognized, ServiceNow-aligned GenAI IPs, accelerators, and long-standing data analytics practice set us apart from other providers. We operationalize machine learning engines, and train and test LLMs that power our clients’ GenAI ambitions. We were recently recognized as Leaders in Everest Group’s Data and Analytics Services for Mid-market Enterprises PEAK Matrix® 2023. Our commitment to take GenAI pilots to scale for business transformation also earned us the status of a market leader in HFS Horizons: Generative Enterprise™ Services, 2023 Report.
To learn how Persistent can help you put AI to work with ServiceNow-native GenAI capabilities, contact us here.
