Workflow management software giant ServiceNow Inc. said today it’s building on an existing partnership with Nvidia Corp. to launch a suite of new generative artificial intelligence tools aimed at helping to elevate service experiences for telecommunications providers.

For now, there’s only one tool available at launch, called Now Assist for Telecommunications Service Management. It’s built atop ServiceNow’s Now Platform and uses Nvidia’s AI software and hardware to improve the productivity of customer service agents, speed up resolution times and enhance customer experiences.

The company has been aggressive in pushing new generative AI capabilities across its product portfolio as it races to help customers benefit from major advancements in these technologies. Most of those efforts have been centered 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.

Now Assist for TSM is the latest offering in the Now Assist family, designed to help telcos rapidly adopt generative AI for business-critical use cases such as customer care and service assurance, the company said.

In its pitch, the company explained that customer service agents in the telco business are put under a lot of pressure to provide fast and accurate support when it’s required by customers. Generative AI is the ideal technology to help agents achieve that, and Now Assist for TSM provides chat summarization and agent assist capabilities that will not only boost their productivity, but also play a role in call deflection, the company said.

As an example, it said Now Assist for TSM can quickly summarize case activity, take down notes from each customer interaction, and guide agents with the next best action. In this way, it can help agents to resolve customer’s problems faster, allowing them to focus on more complex queries that require personalized attention.

With regard to service assurance, ServiceNow said Now Assist for TSM provides service assurance teams, stakeholder and customers with a streamlined and accurate understanding of incidents. For instance, common problems such as fiber cuts can be extremely troublesome for telcos to resolve and have significant financial consequences.

That’s because teams face various challenges in responding to such incidents, with the need to deal with technical data and the risk of misinterpretation due to the specialized terminology and acronyms involved. The company said generative AI can help to decipher this technical jargon, distill complex information into clear and concise summaries and therefore help teams to resolve issues much faster than before.

ServiceNow believes there will be big interest from telcos in its new offering, as a recent survey by International Data Corp. found that 73% of them are aiming to use AI and machine learning to automate customer support operations as a priority.

Rohit Batra, ServiceNow’s general manager and vice president for telecom, media and tech, said generative AI provides game-changing possibilities for telcos, helping to improve productivity and drive cost savings while enhancing customer experiences. “Together, ServiceNow and Nvidia will help telcos realize unprecedented business value and impact, fast,” he said. “This is just the beginning of a large-scale transformation for the industry.”

ServiceNow explained that Now Assist for TSM is powered by its proprietary large language models that have been fine-tuned for telco use cases. They’re served by a Triton Inference Server and customized using Nvidia’s NeMo framework. Its partnership with Nvidia was first announced last year, and telecommunications is just one of their focus areas for generative AI.

The companies said Now Assist for TSM is just the first of a number of telco-specific generative AI applications they’re planning to roll out later this year, as part of a concerted effort to solve some of the industry’s biggest productivity challenges.

“The telco industry is rapidly evolving as AI makes its mark on enterprises everywhere,” said Chris Penrose, Nvidia’s global head of business development for telco. “Our partnership with ServiceNow will help telcos leverage generative AI to tackle unique challenges and build better, stronger and more efficient experiences.”

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