Less than a week after agreeing to acquire the natural language processing artificial intelligence startup Parlo, ServiceNow Inc. is adding conversational chatbot technology to its Now Platform.

ServiceNow said the base technology for its new “Virtual Agent” (pictured below) was built by itself. It says its chatbot is designed to manage employee and customer requests from “start to finish” and can handle a range of tasks, including resetting user passwords and basic customer requests.

“Our Virtual Agent enables a powerful conversation model built natively in the Now Platform,” said CJ Desai, chief product officer at ServiceNow. “This enables our customers to develop a wide range of intelligent service conversations, from a quick question to an entire business action through the messaging platform of their choice.”

With Virtual Agent, employees can create basic conversations to handle common customer requests via a drag-and-drop interface in seconds. These chats can then be integrated with a range of messenger applications such as Slack or Microsoft Teams.

ServiceNow said its Virtual Agent can perform three kinds of tasks for now. First, it can help human resources teams with simple tasks such as requesting a leave of absence or researching pay discrepancies. For IT teams, the Virtual Agent can assist with common help desk requests such as resetting a password or creating an incident report. On the customer experience side, ServiceNow said its Virtual Agent can handle between 15 and 20 percent of routine interactions such as product orders and status checks.

ServiceNow has much bigger plans afoot, however. The company said that once it closes on its acquisition of Parlo later this month, it’s planning to integrate the startup’s natural language understanding abilities with Virtual Agent to make the platform even more versatile. Parlo’s technology will be able to help Virtual Agent to better understand the nuances of human language so it can be trained to comprehend technical or jargon-laden content, a capability that ServiceNow says is critical for chatbots to simplify work interactions.

“Speech is the new UI and vendors have realized they need to make it easier for users to use their software,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc. “When it works, it’s wonderful, and when it does not, it is a pain, but I am sure that ServiceNow has made sure that Parlo works for the needs of its applications.”

ServiceNow said it will be demonstrating its Virtual Agent during its Knowledge 18 customer conference this week, ahead of a full release later this year.

Image: Peter-Lomas/Pixabay