ServiceNow’s sub-brand, Now Assist, is expanding its presence into field service management (FSM) and empowering organizations to build bespoke chatbots as part of a deliberate strategy to improve its generative AI features.
The most recent version includes generation AI features designed for field service personnel, chatbot developers, and owners of various accounts. Earlier, Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM), Customer Service Management, and HR Service Delivery were introduced with the September release of the Now Platform in Vancouver. On the other hand, there were questions raised when field service management was not included in the first deployment.
In order to close this gap, ServiceNow has now made Now Assist for Field Service Management available to all clients. This feature has the potential to completely change the way field service employees work by using past information on events, actions, and components to expedite processes like work order summaries for mobile devices that are frequently used in the field.
The company’s rigorous approach to matching Now Assist with users’ individual demands was highlighted by Jeremy Barnes, vice president of ServiceNow’s AI product. Barnes said, “We wanted to avoid releasing something broad across every single one of our personas and users.” Barnes was previously the principal architect and CTO at Element AI, a Canadian deep AI firm that ServiceNow purchased in 2020.
Now Assist, like its industry peers Einstein GPT from Salesforce, Joule from SAP, and Copilot from Microsoft, distinguishes out as ServiceNow’s specific sub-brand for generative AI capability. Barnes elaborated, saying, “Our branding is Now Assist. Our intention is to make it possible for users to discern the specific areas inside our product where generative AI has established itself.”
Specifically, Now Assist varies in the tasks that each product iteration can help with, as well as in the generative AI models that underpin it and how they are tuned. ServiceNow is steadfast in its commitment to developing its AI solutions, making sure they accurately meet the particular requirements of various workflows and user profiles.
ServiceNow Expands Now Assist’s Reach to Virtual Agent, Enabling Effortless Chatbot Creation
ServiceNow has expanded Now Assist’s functionality to allow chatbot generation within the Virtual Agent platform as part of its ongoing endeavor to transform its generative AI services. With the added feature of multi-turn discussions, Now Assist in Virtual Agent enables users to have dynamic back-and-forths with the agent and acquire information without requiring explicit order specifics.
It has taken many more than ten years to create a new chat experience, but according to ServiceNow, it is now possible to do it in less than fifteen. Even a year ago, creating a virtual agent that could thoroughly reply to employees’ questions regarding business IT regulations would have needed complex code to account for different request phrasings, according to Jeremy Barnes, vice president of AI products at ServiceNow.
Barnes emphasized the difficulties businesses experience when they have to cope with several expressions of the same requirement, such “I need a new computer,” and continued additions over time. This procedure is now made simpler by Assist in Virtual Agent, which enables chatbot developers to quickly and easily import data from the business knowledge base by simply checking a single box.
Furthermore, the new feature makes it possible to effortlessly access every item in the service catalog with a single click, doing away with the need for further setup, utterance production, or conversation tree building. The functionality streamlines the chatbot creation process and is instantly operational once users activate it.
ServiceNow’s action is in line with the industry trend of streamlining the creation of chatbots tailored to certain tasks. Aiming to highlight the rising significance of user-friendly AI solutions in the industrial environment, Microsoft recently revealed Copilot Studio, a copilot tool for creating additional copilots, while OpenAI recently provided a service for businesses to develop bespoke chatbots based on ChatGPT.
ServiceNow Empowers Low-Code Conversations with Innovative Flow Generation
ServiceNow is exploring the field of flow generation and integrating low-code capabilities into conversational interfaces in an innovative effort to improve user interactions. ServiceNow’s vice president of AI products, Jeremy Barnes, emphasized the need of developing workflows for virtual agents to initiate and handle issues. This is because knowing user requests is not enough; action must also be taken in response to them.
Aware of a backend development bottleneck brought on by a lack of ServiceNow developers, the business is using generative AI—as opposed to its Now Assist branding—to expedite flow generation. The goal of this project is to turn process descriptions written in simple language into low-code automated sequences. The system interprets user-specified workflows into a visual representation in the editor, including ServiceNow best practices and the customer’s coding style.
The importance of this strategy was highlighted by Barnes, who said, “This just makes it massively easier and doesn’t require as much upskilling to get it right.” He did clarify, though, that customers or their IT staff would still need to utilize the platform’s built-in automated testing capabilities to confirm the created code.
Barnes discussed the purchase of Element AI, a corporation that specializes in developing AI applications for easy integration into corporate procedures, in response to the difficulty of integrating generative AI for commercial benefit. ServiceNow was released from the burden of developing a workflow engine, which was already completed, as a result of the acquisition.
Barnes recommended CIOs to take the integration difficulty into account while selecting technologies for creating generative AI chatbots. He stressed that what was required was a strong platform that could do more than just have nice talks. In Barnes’ opinion, generative AI capability needs a strong platform that can carry out activities under the surface in order to go beyond simple conversation. This is consistent with ServiceNow’s mission to offer comprehensive solutions that meet users’ changing demands.
