ServiceNow Inc. today introduced a raft of new artificial intelligence features designed to help enterprises make their employees more productive.

NYSE-listed ServiceNow provides a popular cloud platform, the Now Platform, that companies rely on to deliver services. It can be used to provide, among others, customer support to buyers and onboarding assistance to new hires. The platform also provides features for a variety of other tasks ranging from fixing cybersecurity issues to planning business growth initiatives.

AI-powered automation

As part of today’s product announcement, ServiceNow detailed plans to integrate so-called agentic AI into its platform. Agentic AI is a term for artificial intelligence models configured to carry out complex, multistep tasks with little to no human supervision.

Customer support and information technology service management, which covers the technical support a company provides to employees, are the first two use cases to which ServiceNow will apply the technology. The software maker says that its AI will be capable of collecting data about a technical problem and develop a plan for fixing it. It will be also capable of carrying out that plan, requesting approval for key actions from humans when needed.

Down the line, ServiceNow plans to extend the technology to more use cases across areas such as procurement and human resources. Software development is another task that the company hopes to ease using agentic AI. 

“ServiceNow AI Agents will work autonomously in the background, handling tasks, managing processes, and collaborating with employees rather than just serving them,” said Jon Sigler, senior vice president of platform and AI at ServiceNow. 

New Xanadu release 

ServiceNow debuted its agentic AI roadmap alongside a new version of the Now Platform dubbed Xanadu. The release adds several hundred enhancements, several of which use AI to improve employee productivity.

ServiceNow is launching a tool called the Now Assist Skill Kit that allows companies to extend its platform with custom AI features, or skills. According to the software maker, skills created with the tool can draw on the data that an enterprise keeps in the Now Platform to make decisions. Skills can be powered using language models from ServiceNow or third-party providers. 

The tool is rolling alongside a prepackaged AI feature bundle called Now Assist for Security Operations. According to ServiceNow, it can summarize breaches for cybersecurity teams to ease analysis. After a hacking attempt is mitigated, the tool automatically generates a report about the incident to save time for administrators.

One of ServiceNow’s existing AI capabilities, an integration with the Copilot chatbot built into Microsoft Teams, became generally available in conjunction with the release of the new features. The integration makes it possible to access data stored in the Now Platform via the Teams interface. “Users get answers and take actions without swiveling between applications,” Sigler stated. 

The new AI features in the Xanadu release are joined by a number of other enhancements. 

ServiceNow is equipping its platform with a new database, RaptorDB Pro, for storing customer information. The database can perform some computations up to 27 times faster than the one the company used until now. As a result, customers can now more quickly complete analytics tasks such as creating ServiceNow-powered dashboards that visualize business metrics.

The Xanadu release also promises to speed up the process of extending ServiceNow deployments with custom code. The company has added a new integrated development environment, or IDE, geared towards building apps atop its platform.

Image: ServiceNow