ServiceNow releases its most comprehensive set of new AI innovations

ServiceNow has introduced its most comprehensive set of new AI innovations to date with the Now Platform Xanadu release. The Xanadu release features hundreds of new AI capabilities, expanded partnerships, innovative industry solutions, and ServiceNow AI Agents, all designed to supercharge productivity across the entire enterprise.

“Our customers are hungry to put AI to work now and they want more from their GenAI deployments—more productivity, more personalization, 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.”

ServiceNow to unlock 24/7 productivity at massive scale with AI agents

ServiceNow announced its plans to integrate Agentic AI into the ServiceNow platform and unlock 24/7 productivity at massive scale across use cases including IT, customer service, procurement, HR, software development, and more. This forward-thinking approach puts AI to work for people by redefining how AI agents collaborate with employees and customers.

Using advanced reasoning and grounded in cross-enterprise data through the Now Platform, ServiceNow AI Agents evolve from the more familiar prompt-based activity to deep contextual comprehension, keeping people in the loop for robust oversight and governance. Available this November, the first use cases for Customer Service Management (CSM) AI Agents and IT Service Management (ITSM) AI Agents are expected to reduce mean-time-to-resolution and make live agents more productive.

Expanding Now Assist to new mission-critical enterprise functions

With the Xanadu release, ServiceNow is addressing critical enterprise needs like security and threat management, where expediency can be the difference in safeguarding IT environments.

Now Assist for Security Operations (SecOps), helps boost response times to more quickly contain security threats. With Now Assist, SecOps teams can transfer interactions with AI driven incident summarizations 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, prioritization, 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.

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 minimizing 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.  

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 visualization generation, chat and email reply generation, change summarization, and LLM-based proactive prompts, help improve productivity. They break down complexities, enable easier internal collaboration, and help 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 yet available out-of-the-box with Now Assist. Skill Kit connects seamlessly to data and knowledge within the Now Platform for enhanced context and accuracy and offers powerful options for customization—whether customers choose Now LLMs or want to incorporate third-party or custom LLMs.

Data visualization generation, the first-analytics generation skill in Now Assist, helps teams more effectively visualize data and make informed decisions quickly to reduce bottlenecks and speed up response times. It gives user the ability to get targeted insights from their data using natural language prompts and add them to interactive dashboards, all without needing to understand the data's underlying structure.

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, reducing response times and helping ensure more effective communication.

Change summarization, powered by Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM), allows IT teams to summarize change requests and assess related data to quickly make more informed decisions, improving agent productivity and decreasing cycle times while minimizing risks.

LLM-based proactive prompts, powered by Now Assist for HR Service Delivery (HRSD), proactively engages employees and managers with relevant and timely reminders to complete tasks. LLM-based proactive prompts helps 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.

Harnessing the power of Now Assist across industries

The expansion of Now Assist into ServiceNow’s industry offerings brings the Now Platform’s leading GenAI capabilities to telecom, media, and technology, financial services, public sector organizations, and more. With Now Assist for Telecom, Media, and Technology (TMT), Now Assist for Financial Services Operations (FSO), and Now Assist for Public Sector Digital Services (PSDS), organizations across industries can easily understand and resolve issues and requests quickly, improving customer and agent experiences.

Additionally, ServiceNow is deepening its retail footprint in the Xanadu release with the launch of Retail Operations and Retail Service Management, new solutions that unify a retailer’s ecosystem to deliver consistent and connected experiences across every channel, and in the store.

Retail Operations empowers frontline managers and store associates to seamlessly handle day-to-day in-store tasks, like reporting a broken POS system or performing daily store open and close checks, leveraging AI and automation to improve self-service.

Retail Service Management brings ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management capabilities to retailers, allowing customers to easily submit requests in-store and online while enabling headquarters teams to resolve both customer and store support issues from a single system.

Platform innovations boost productivity and strengthen collaboration across the enterprise

The Xanadu release helps customers foster an innovative and connected work environment so any organization can scale to meet the pace of rapid transformation.

Strengthening developer collaboration to build applications faster

Integrated development environment (IDE) lets developers harness the power of industry-standard development tools and workflows to quickly create and modify ServiceNow apps with code, in a matter of minutes. ServiceNow’s IDE exponentially accelerates development, allowing developers and ServiceNow SMEs to collaborate seamlessly.

Supercharging productivity and operational resiliency

Enterprise Architecture, an expansion of ServiceNow’s Application Portfolio Management (APM), helps organizations simplify all aspects of their operations to reduce costs, risks, and redundancies. It drives greater alignment between IT teams and the strategic objectives of the business.

A redefined approach to AIOps, in IT Operations Management (ITOM), helps IT teams who use Event Management more effectively enrich, group, and escalate alerts and better understand impact through mapped visualization, with or without a mature CMDB. . The solution complements GenAI-powered incident and alert analysis through Now Assist for ITOM so IT teams can quickly make sense of complicated alert messages to proactively address issues before they impact the end user

Service Reliability Management for ITOM speeds up resolutions to application issues or outages by providing clear visibility into the performance of an organization’s technical services. Service Reliability management allows Site Reliability Engineers and application teams to set their own on-call schedules, align on Service Level Indicators & Objectives, manage alerts autonomously, and more without having to rely on central administrators.

Driving intelligent and personalized experiences

Guided Self-Service in Employee Center provides a new way for employees to get help across departments, including IT and HR, guiding them to the right answers through a visual, interactive Q&A experience. This intuitive experience delivers fast, accurate, and personalized answers to the most frequently asked questions so employees don’t waste valuable time reading through irrelevant articles or creating a support ticket.

Powerful data enhancements to unlock value with ultra-scale and performance

In addition to the Xanadu release, ServiceNow also announced powerful data enhancements to unlock value with ultra-scale and performance. New capabilities in this next-generation data layer include the RaptorDB Pro high-performance database, for up to 53% faster transaction times, 27X faster pulling of reports, analytics, and list views, and 3X increase in transactional throughput across workflows so customers can support more users and more workflows on their ServiceNow instances.