ServiceNow releases its most comprehensive set of new AI innovations with the Now Platform Xanadu release

ServiceNow, 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. It also expands the generative AI (GenAI) portfolio to new mission-critical enterprise functions including Security Operations and Sourcing & Procurement Operations. In addition, the previously announced Now Assist integration with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now generally available, meeting employees where they work and collaborate by offering a holistic, connected experience.

According to Gartner, $3 trillion will be spent on AI between 2023 and 2027, and by 2027, GenAI will represent 36% of total AI Spending.1 As CEOs look for new vectors of growth, simplification, and digitisation, ServiceNow is already delivering differentiated GenAI capabilities that will help streamline operations, maximize productivity, and deliver world-class experiences to customers such as American Honda Motor Company, Bayer, Boomi, Eaton, and Olam Global Agri. In the company’s second quarter 2024 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 GenAI deployments—more productivity, more personalisation, more value,” said Jon Sigler, senior vice president, 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 GenAI roadmap, empowering enterprises to quickly harness the potential of GenAI and drive unprecedented business outcomes without hassle.”

Expanding Now Assist to new mission-critical enterprise functions

With the Xanadu release, ServiceNow is significantly expanding the breadth and depth of its GenAI 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. New Now Assist for Security Operations (SecOps) is tailor-made 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 prioritize 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.

ServiceNow is also bringing Now Assist to its Finance and Supply Chain Workflows, available first for Sourcing and Procurement Operations, with more GenAI capabilities to follow. According to Gartner, “GenAI 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.”2 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.

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.

Boosting customer agility, enhancing productivity, and improving employee experiences

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 GenAI skills and prompts. Additionally, data visualisation generation, chat and email reply generation, change summarisation, and 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.

Now Assist Skill Kit offers a pro-code experience for partners and customers to create custom GenAI 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 GenAI 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.

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 AI- generated suggested responses and revisions. Available within Agent Workplace, users can harness Now Assist to help resolve issues even faster. The quick reply feature uses GenAI 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.

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, GenAI-enabled prompts in Virtual Agent.

Extending the possibilities of Now Assist through partnerships

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. With the Xanadu release, ServiceNow is officially bringing that functionality to customers, enabling new levels of employee productivity and connected experiences.

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.

Accelerating AI and data platform innovation for the GenAI era

The Xanadu release cements ServiceNow’s GenAI leadership with one of the most ambitious roadmaps in enterprise software today. With GenAI embedded directly into the Now Platform, customers get out-of-the-box intelligence with ServiceNow’s multimodal model—Now AI—built and optimised to deliver actionable AI to every corner of the enterprise. Earlier this year, ServiceNow also launched 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.

In addition to extending the depth of its GenAI capabilities with the Xanadu release, ServiceNow announced new data enhancements to the Now Platform, unlocking value for customers with ultra-scale and performance. New capabilities including the premium RaptorDB high- performance database will deliver improvements in data processing, enabling customers to better execute mission-critical workflows across industries.

ServiceNow continues its strong commitment to secure, responsible, and ethical AI—furthering AI innovation that augments human capabilities and contributes positively to the world. Internal processes and guardrails within the Now Platform 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 optimize the quality and performance of its Now Assist generative AI services for faster and more accurate responses, increasing the productivity for employees, customers, and developers.