ServiceNow marries key products with generative AI in Now Platform Vancouver release

ServiceNow has announced generative AI integrations and new features as part of the Vancouver release of its Now Platform. Today’s release comes less than six months after the Utah release (the company names its releases after world locations, in alphabetical order).

“This Now Platform release is designed to give our customers exactly what they need, as they face intensifying internal and external pressures that are forcing leaders to make difficult decisions, from tech disruption to heightened security, risk of changing regulatory environment and more,” said vice president and head of global design at ServiceNow, Amy Lokey.

As part of this release, the company is embedding generative AI via its Now Assist family of solutions in four existing products (Stock Keeping Units (SKUs)), launching Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM), Customer Service Management (CSM), HR Service Delivery (HRSD), and Creator.

The company released Now Assist for Virtual Agent during the summer to help organizations provide contextual responses to user inquiries, access relevant information, connect with tailored digital workflows, and more.

Here’s what each SKU will offer through the Now Assist integration:

1. ITSM – Create summaries of incident history and live Virtual Agent interactions, deliver complete answers instead of search results, provide resolution notes, allowing agents resolve issues and requests faster
2. CSM – Generates summaries of cases and chats, allowing agents to resolve customer issues faster. Customers can also access resources faster, enabling higher case deflection and cost reduction
3. HRSD – Allows HR teams to review instant summaries of case topics, and previous history from live chat and Virtual Agent interactions, as well as previous resolutions and actions taken
4. Creator – Includes the general availability of text-to-code, which converts natural language text into high‑quality code suggestions, and in some cases complete code.

The company says that these new features are powered by a domain-specific ServiceNow language model (Now LLM), which the company’s senior vice president overseeing Now Platform development, Jon Sigler, said is “faster, cheaper, safer.”

Sigler added that ServiceNow does not need “the billions and trillions of parameters” found in a general purpose LLM at the moment.

With its domain-specific LLM, the company is also training its output to be more accurate and based specifically on the enterprise data of its customers, Lokey added.

Now Assist ITSM, CSM and HRSD will be priced based on the package add-on that a customer chooses; either Pro Plus, Professional Plus or Enterprise Plus. Each package gives the customer a specific number of “assists” based on their needs. Sigler noted that 80 per cent to 90 per cent of companies “are going to be just fine with Pro Plus,” adding that ServiceNow has been “generous” with the number of assists it allows as companies get started. 

Now Assist with Creator will be available through an additional Creator Plus product SKU.

Customers who bring their own LLMs still need at least a Pro Plus SKU.

All new features will be available on Sept. 29.

Other Vancouver release products and updates include:

1. Zero Trust Access – Build a zero trust framework with a tailored platform, adhering to compliance levels required by the U.S. government and giving customers “a proactive and resilient security approach to safeguard their critical assets, and this includes users, devices, and applications.”
2. Expanding Third Party Risk Management to help customers prepare for modern threats, easily visualize risk from third party applications, access automated inherent risk questionnaires, facilitate board level reporting and more
3. Expanding Software Bill of Materials Management (SBOM)  to allow centralized visibility to all third party components used in an application, making open source collaboration safer
4. Clinical Device Management provides a centralized process with ready made clinical workflows around installation, servicing and maintenance of clinical devices like MRI or X-ray machines
5. Accounts Payable Operations (announced in May, generally available now) automates all accounts and payable processes, digitizes invoice receipt, reconciliation and payment process and more
6. Employee Growth and Development – EGD uses AI to collect, validate and update employee skills data on a single platform, giving leaders greater insight into workforce capabilities