The information technology workflow management giant ServiceNow Inc. said today it’s expanding its family of Now Assist generative artificial intelligence agents.

The new Now Assist in Virtual Agent, flow generation and Now Assist for Field Service Management offerings are available to all customers via the ServiceNow Store. They’re said to reduce the time workers spend searching, summarizing and creating basic information, providing an immediate productivity boost.

ServiceNow’s namesake cloud platform helps IT and human resources teams manage their day-to-day work. Administrators can use the platform to answer employee support requests, tackle cybersecurity risks and perform other tasks. ServiceNow’s software is also used outside IT departments for tasks such as processing customer service tickets.

In recent months, the company has been very aggressive in pushing new generative AI capabilities across its product portfolio as it races to help customers benefit from major advancements in these technologies.

Much of that effort has been focused on the Now Assist family of AI agents, which are integrated with the company’s IT Service Management, Customer Services Management, Human Resources Services Delivery and Workflow Creator modules and optimized for accuracy and data privacy.

With Now Assist in Virtual Agent, ServiceNow customers have a way to create and deploy generative AI chat experiences in 15 minutes or less, taking advantage of its enhanced guided setup capabilities, the company said. It will enable companies to create customer and employee service agents that provide a superior conversational experience, the company claims, as they’ll be able to pull the most up-to-date information from their internal knowledge bases or service catalogs.

The agents boast advanced capabilities including Q&A in knowledge management and multi-turn conversations, meaning they can help customers to order catalog items or make service requests, the company said. They also have the ability to provide additional, contextual information when requested.

Flow generation is a new generative AI tool that’s designed to help administrators and developers create workflow blueprints to enable faster development at scale. It works by converting plain text into low-code workflows, so developers no longer need to spend time on creating flow automations manually. Once the initial workflow is established, developers can make continuous adjustments and refinements using a no-code design interface in the ServiceNow App Engine, helping to speed up automation rollouts.

Now Assist for Field Service Management, in turn, is aimed at simplifying the work order process. It works by leveraging generative AI to access all activities and incidental data to summarize work order tasks. According to the company, this can be critical for field technicians who move from site-to-site and rely on mobile devices to accomplish their work.

With its latest announcements, it might appear that ServiceNow is simply joining the frenzy for generative AI that began with the debut of OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT last year. But in fact, the company says it has spent a number of years developing and integrating AI into its platform. Rather than piggybacking on the advances of other companies and adapting general-purpose generative AI models, it has instead built its own from scratch.

The Now Assist family is powered by ServiceNow’s domain-specific Now large language model, which is trained on its own workflows and data and customized to help customers perform very specific tasks within its own platform. The result is a better user experience along with greater transparency and superior governance and data security, the company said.

ServiceNow President and Chief Operating Officer CJ Desai said AI holds the key to helping companies achieve faster execution and smarter decision-making. “ServiceNow is leading the charge, by intelligently integrating generative AI into the core of the Now Platform and enabling organizations to harness AI securely and confidently to drive unprecedented speed to value for their business.”

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