TL;DR:
- ServiceNow introduces Now Assist for Virtual Agent, a generative AI solution to enhance self-service experiences.
- The solution delivers direct, relevant, and conversational responses to user queries, seamlessly connecting with digital workflows.
- Now Assist for Virtual Agent uses generative AI to provide immediate and accurate information, regardless of the user’s familiarity with the system.
- Customers can easily configure intelligent conversational experiences and supplement general answers with access to large language models.
- Now Assist for Virtual Agent is powered by the ServiceNow Generative AI Controller, ensuring secure and accurate results.
- ServiceNow’s investment in AI includes partnerships, workflow automation, and transparent and accessible generative AI models.
- Now Assist for Virtual Agent and Now Assist for Search are expected to be generally available in September 2023.
Main AI News:
ServiceNow, the leading digital workflow company, is once again at the forefront of innovation with its latest solution, Now Assist for Virtual Agent. This cutting-edge generative AI solution is poised to transform self-service experiences by creating truly conversational interactions that are more intelligent and intuitive. Now Assist for Virtual Agent builds upon ServiceNow’s strategic vision of integrating generative AI throughout the Now Platform, enabling customers to leverage intelligence at scale, simplify digital workflows, and optimize operations. This exciting announcement was made during ServiceNow’s renowned Knowledge event.
According to Bill McDermott, Chairman and CEO of ServiceNow, “ServiceNow is leading the intelligence era. Years of AI investment have put us at the center of an undeniable movement. We’re building generative AI into our platform so customers can maximize their ROI: ‘return on intelligence.’ This is all about thoughtful, high-trust co-innovation as we find the balance between machine speed and human judgment. Enhanced by our strategic partnerships with NVIDIA and Microsoft, we are engineering smarter, fully automated workflows. We help our customers innovate completely new business models on ServiceNow as the intelligent platform for end-to-end digital transformation.”
Now Assist for Virtual Agent harnesses the power of generative AI to deliver direct, relevant, and conversational responses to user queries. By seamlessly integrating with digital workflows across the Now Platform, this solution ensures a seamless connection between conversations and actions. For instance, if a user poses a question to Now Assist for Virtual Agent, the generative AI capabilities instantly provide a clear and concise answer within the ongoing conversation. This enables users to quickly access the information they need, including internal code snippets, product images or videos, relevant documents, or summaries of knowledge base articles. Regardless of the user’s familiarity with the organizational structure or the starting point of their query, ServiceNow’s cross-departmental capabilities ensure accurate and efficient interactions, boosting productivity, self-solve rates, and issue resolution speed.
CJ Desai, President and Chief Operating Officer at ServiceNow, highlights the significance of Now Assist for Virtual Agent as an organic extension of ServiceNow’s generative AI offerings: “Now Assist for Virtual Agent is a powerful organic complement to the generative AI capabilities ServiceNow has already started to roll out. By embedding generative AI into the Now Platform, we are empowering our customers to radically improve productivity and realize the true potential of enterprise-grade AI.”
Customers utilizing Now Assist for Virtual Agent can benefit from a range of features and functionalities, including:
- Easy configuration of intelligent conversational experiences through a low-code, drag-and-drop environment provided by Virtual Agent Designer.
- Seamless access to general-purpose large language models (LLMs), such as Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service LLM or OpenAI API, enables end-users to supplement general answers safely and effortlessly without the need to navigate through multiple knowledge base articles.
- Real-time responses to user queries within ongoing conversations, with the information presented in a format that best suits the answer, be it text, links, images, videos, or relevant excerpts from knowledge base articles.
- A more personalized, contextually relevant self-service experience delivered through Virtual Agent.
Now Assist for Virtual Agent is powered by the recently introduced ServiceNow Generative AI Controller, which serves as the foundational backbone for all generative AI functionalities across the Now Platform. This Controller seamlessly connects ServiceNow instances with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service LLM and OpenAI API, while also incorporating built-in actions to facilitate faster intelligent workflow automation. Additionally, Now Assist for Virtual Agent leverages the capabilities of Now Assist for Search, which works in conjunction with the Controller to provide cohesive generative AI experiences across the entire Now Platform. By sourcing information from within a customer’s environment, Now Assist for Search ensures enhanced security measures are applied within the Now Platform, resulting in more accurate results and reducing the likelihood of errors or inaccuracies.
Neil Ward-Dutton, Vice President of AI, Automation, and Analytics Europe at IDC, acknowledges the immense potential of generative AI in various enterprise use cases: “We are seeing extraordinarily rapid growth in organizations exploring potential use cases for generative AI in the enterprise. Use cases relating to customer and employee experience improvement, together with knowledge management, are among those at the top of the list for those organizations making the earliest moves. Generative AI advances are ushering us towards a future in which AI-powered capabilities are woven into processes, decisions, products, services, and experiences of all kinds.”
ServiceNow’s commitment to advancing AI capabilities is evident in its ongoing investments in the Now Platform. By seamlessly integrating AI functionalities into the platform, ServiceNow empowers organizations to streamline and optimize their digital workflows effortlessly. Recent initiatives include a strategic partnership with NVIDIA to develop custom LLMs for workflow automation, along with additional features that apply generative AI to various use cases across IT departments, customer service teams, employees, and developers. Furthermore, ServiceNow, in collaboration with partner Hugging Face and on behalf of the BigCode community, has unveiled the open-access, open-science, open-governance 15 billion parameter StarCoder LLM for code. This breakthrough allows for responsible innovation at scale, promoting transparency and accessibility in the realm of generative AI.
Now Assist for Virtual Agent and Now Assist for Search are currently available to a limited set of customers and are expected to be generally available with ServiceNow’s upcoming Vancouver released in September 2023.
Note: This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding Now Assist for Virtual Agent and its anticipated benefits. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Factors that may cause such differences include changes in the AI regulatory landscape, alterations to ServiceNow’s AI strategic partnerships, delivery delays and unforeseen challenges, and uncertainties regarding sales performance. ServiceNow undertakes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided. For more information on factors that could affect ServiceNow’s financial and operational results, please refer to the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Conclusion:
ServiceNow’s Now Assist for Virtual Agent represents a significant advancement in self-service capabilities by leveraging generative AI. The solution’s ability to deliver immediate and relevant information, its integration with digital workflows, and its user-friendly configuration options will undoubtedly enhance productivity, self-solve rates, and issue resolution speed. With ServiceNow’s continued investment in AI and its commitment to partnerships and transparent models, the company is well-positioned to meet the growing demand for intelligent, conversational experiences in the market.
