ServiceNow unveils more AI innovations with the Now Platform Xanadu release

Source: ServiceNow website. Xanadu release logo.

ServiceNow, the AI platform for business transformation, has released its most comprehensive set of new AI innovations with the Now Platform Xanadu release.

The Xanadu release features hundreds of additional, new AI capabilities to boost customer agility, enhance productivity, and improve employee experiences, the company said. It also expands the ServiceNow Now Assist generative AI (gen AI) portfolio to new mission-critical enterprise functions, including security operations as well as sourcing and procurement operations.

According to Gartner, US$3 T will be spent on AI between 2023 and 2027, and by 2027, gen AI will represent 36% of total AI spending.* As CEOs look for new vectors of growth, simplification, and digitisation, ServiceNow is already delivering differentiated gen AI capabilities that help streamline operations, maximise productivity, and deliver world-class experiences to customers such as American Honda Motor Company, Bayer, and Boomi, the company said. 

In the company’s Q224 financial results, Now Assist continued its run as ServiceNow’s fastest-growing new product set in company history, doubling net-new annual contract value (NNACV) quarter-over-quarter. 

“Our customers are hungry to put AI to work now and they want more from their gen AI deployments—more productivity, more personalisation, more value,” said Jon Sigler, Senior VP, Platform and AI at ServiceNow. 

“That’s why we are laser-focused on delivering a complete, end-to-end platform experience for our customers. The Xanadu release marks a significant step forward for our gen AI roadmap, empowering enterprises to quickly harness the potential of gen AI and drive unprecedented business outcomes without hassle.” 

With the Xanadu release, ServiceNow is significantly expanding the breadth and depth of its gen AI offerings, bringing the power of Now Assist to more areas of the enterprise with innovations that multiply impact. This includes addressing critical enterprise needs like security and threat management, where expediency can be the difference in safeguarding IT environments. 

SecOps

The new Now Assist for Security Operations (SecOps) is tailormade to help enterprises accelerate security incident response (SIR) workflows and proactively manage threat exposure in real time. Now Assist for SecOps helps boost response times to more quickly contain security threats. With Now Assist, SecOps teams can transfer interactions with AI-driven incident summarisations and interactive Q&A to automatically prioritise 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. 

Finance and supply chain workflows

ServiceNow is also bringing Now Assist to its finance and supply chain workflows (F & SCW), available first for sourcing and procurement operations, with more gen AI capabilities to follow. According to Gartner, “Gen AI can already enhance many different workflows in procurement and 73% of procurement leaders at the start of the year expected to adopt the technology by the end 2024.”** 

Similarly, ServiceNow sees immense opportunity for intelligent automation to unify complicated and fragmented processes. Built to simplify these processes, customers can use Now Assist to help expedite procurement requests, improve compliance, gain better control of enterprise spend, and drive tangible business value.

Sourcing and procurement

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 fulfillment. Employees can initiate a procurement request or access information through a conversational prompt with Now Assist, removing the need to navigate complex systems. It also lessens the burden on procurement and finance teams by reducing the time it takes to receive, review, and complete tasks, freeing up more of their day to focus on higher-value work.

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 gen AI skills and prompts. Additionally, data visualisation generation, chat and email reply generation, change summarisation, and large language model (LLM)-based proactive prompts are among the hundreds of new AI innovations in the Xanadu release. These updates help improve IT productivity, break down complexities, and enable easier internal collaboration, helping employees work better and faster.  

Custom code

Now Assist Skill Kit offers a pro-code experience for partners and customers to create custom gen AI skills for their specific business needs, as well as when they have a use case that isn’t available yet out-of-the box with Now Assist. With Now Assist Skill Kit, developers have an easy way to build, test, and deploy new gen AI skills and their underlying prompts for an array of AI use cases, including for developers building skills on ServiceNow. It connects seamlessly to data and knowledge within the Now Platform for enhanced context and accuracy and offers powerful options for customisation—whether customers want to choose Now LLMs or want to incorporate third-party or custom LLMs. 

AI-generated data visualisation

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. Data visualisation generation gives users the ability to get targeted insights from their data using natural language prompts and add them to interactive dashboards. Users can get fast insights without needing to know anything about the underlying structure of their data. Chat and email reply generation reduces the time spent on manual replies with suggested AI-generated responses and revisions. 

Service agents services

Available within Agent Workplace, users can harness Now Assist to help resolve issues more quickly. The quick reply feature uses gen AI to draft or edit emails for service agents, generating context-aware details to cut down response times and help ensure more effective communication, which is especially useful when agents are managing mission-critical incidents. 

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

HR services

LLM-based proactive prompts, powered by Now Assist for HR Service Delivery (HRSD), proactively engage employees and managers with relevant and timely reminders to complete tasks like approving a travel request, finishing mandatory training, or submitting career goals. Now Assist for HRSD is designed to provide a more streamlined work experience for employees, managers, and HR teams. LLM-based proactive prompts further that mission, helping managers and employees take necessary actions, all through conversational, gen AI-enabled prompts in Virtual Agent.  

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. The Copilot for Microsoft 365 integration is now generally available, bringing the power of Now Assist and Copilot for Microsoft 365 into a unified, seamless experience for employees. 

Copilot can hand off automated self-service employee tasks—such as ordering a new laptop or asking about company policies—to Now Assist in Microsoft Teams. Now Assist can then arm employees with real-time responses and kick off workflows on their behalf. 

With gen AI embedded directly into the Now Platform, customers get out-of-the-box intelligence with ServiceNow’s multimodal model—Now AI. 

Earlier this year, ServiceNow launched the Bring-Your-Own GenAI model, which allows customers to tailor their AI‑driven transformation to their unique needs. This open approach gives customers the choice and flexibility to use Now AI, their own LLMs, or general-purpose LLMs as they create more intuitive, efficient, and seamless experiences on the ServiceNow platform. 

ServiceNow further announced new data enhancements to the Now Platform, unlocking value for customers with ultra-scale and performance. The new premium RaptorDB high-performance database will deliver improvements in data processing, enabling customers to better execute mission-critical workflows across industries, the company said. 

When it comes to secure, responsible, and ethical AI, ServiceNow has internal processes and guardrails within the Now Platform that bolster security and reliability. This includes data encryption to strengthen data confidentiality, secure communication channels, pre-processing analysis, ongoing vulnerability scanning, accuracy-checking, post-processing and response filtering, safety detection, and policy compliance. 

ServiceNow also partners with organisations like NVIDIA, Hugging Face, IBM, and others to foster an open, transparent, and responsible AI ecosystem. For example, it is a founding member of the AI Alliance, a group comprising academia, research, science, and industry that is committed to advancing open and responsible AI. ServiceNow has also integrated with NVIDIA NIM to optimise the quality and performance of its Now Assist generative AI services for faster and more accurate responses.

"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, a power management company serving 175 countries. 

“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 gen AI, with the help of ServiceNow Now Assist, to increase productivity across our entire organisation and to make it easier for teams to get the answers they need when they need them."

“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.” 

TPSM refers to technology provider service management while CSM stands for customer service management.

"Olam’s goal is to adopt AI to bring new value to our organisation,” said Shivram Ramakrishnan, CDIO & Senior VP at Olam Global Agri. 

“With ServiceNow’s gen AI solutions, we’ve developed a cashflow model to predict when a customer will pay us so we can better manage our cash position. We’re using gen AI in our procurement process to understand the various quotes provided by our suppliers, and to be able to generate scripts for our buyers in their negotiations. We’re excited for the Now Assist for F&SCW solution as part of the Xanadu release, a gen AI solution built specifically for finance and procurement teams, which will help unlock new efficiency for employees and create a more resilient supply chain."

*Gartner, IT Spending Forecast, 3Q23 Update: The Impact of GenAI, by John Lovelock, Chrissy Healey, Errol Rasit, Alys Woodward, 17 October 2023.

**Gartner press release, Gartner Says Generative AI for Procurement Has Hit Peak of Inflated Expectations, July 25, 2024.