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ServiceTime today announced its latest generative AI solution, Now Assist for Virtual Agent, with the aim of revolutionizing self-service by delivering intelligent and relevant conversation experiences. The new feature expands on ServiceNow’s strategy to integrate generative AI capabilities into its Now Platform, which helps customers streamline digital workflows and optimize productivity.
This tool uses generative artificial intelligence to provide direct and contextually accurate answers to user requests. Integrated with the Now Platform, it will enable users to quickly access relevant information and connect with digital workflows tailored to their needs. Now Assist assists you with internal code snippets, product images or videos, document links, and summaries of knowledge base articles.
According to the company, this self-service capability will help users get quick and accurate solutions, even when they need guidance on who to contact or where to start. The company believes that by improving auto-resolution rates and accelerating problem resolution, the feature significantly increases productivity.
“One of the key goals of our new offering is to unlock additional productivity without additional complexity by providing direct and relevant conversational responses,” Jeremy Barnes, vice president for AI platform product at ServiceNow, told VentureBeat. “By linking exchanges to automated workflows, customers can get the information they need in the context of their organization.”
ServiceNow’s launch of Now Assist aligns with the introduction of the Generative AI controller, which serves as the foundation for all Generative AI features on the Now platform. Additionally, the company has also partnered with Nvidia to develop custom large language models (LLMs) for workflow automation.
Leverage generative AI to streamline user requests
Now Assist for Virtual Agent can be easily configured using the Virtual Agent Designer in a low-code, drag-and-drop environment. Additionally, users can build and deploy conversational self-service with the tool’s diagram drag-and-drop designer, which incorporates natural language understanding (NLU).
ServiceNow says this integration can be easily incorporated into an organization so it can start automating and streamlining digital workflows for faster responses.
“Now Assist enables organizations to easily connect across a company’s internal knowledge base and then integrate responses with generic LLMs such as Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service LLM and OpenAI API,” said Barnes.
In partnership with Nvidia, the company is actively developing custom LLMs tailored to ServiceNow. These LLMs will be readily available and integrated into the Now Platform.
Barnes emphasized that the company’s strategy includes supporting both generic LLMs and providing domain-specific LLMs. The ongoing collaboration with Nvidia aims to address a broad spectrum of customer needs with tailored LLMs.
Custom LLMs built with Nvidia
The company is developing custom LLMs using Nvidia’s software, services and infrastructure, trained on data specific to the ServiceNow platform, Barnes said.
“We believe there will be many more exciting advances as we continue to strengthen workflow automation and increase productivity,” he said.
Barnes explained that if an organization’s knowledge base does not have enough information to provide a contextual answer to a general question, Now Assist will connect with generic LLMs to augment the response.
“If a user doesn’t know who to ask or where to start, our new solution will help them quickly determine the most relevant answer without scrolling through endless links or knowledge base articles,” added Barnes. “For our clients, it’s about simplifying and not having to slow down to figure out how and where to get the help you need, but being able to get it at the speed of your work.”
The company said Now Assist for Virtual Agent and Now Assist for Search are currently accessible to a select group of customers and are expected to be widely available in the Vancouver release of ServiceNow expected in September 2023.
What’s next for ServiceNow?
Barnes said that ServiceNow is actively exploring future use cases for generative AI to improve productivity across various business functions, such as IT, employee experience and customer service.
“We are exploring additional future use cases to help agents resolve a broad range of user questions and support requests faster with purpose-built AI chatbots that utilize LLM and focus on defined IT tasks,” he said. “Internally, ServiceNow is exploring how to use AI to generate and document code and scripts, as well as evaluating how it can help employees find information faster for things like benefits, PTO policies, incident openings, and more.”
The company aims to integrate all workflows with generative AI and low code. By doing so, ServiceNow believes it unlocks new use cases that effectively harness the potential of technology across industries and enable the creation of new revenue streams.
“We are incredibly excited about enterprise AI,” said Barnes. “There are hundreds of use cases where generative AI, applied to a business problem you’re solving, can dramatically transform the productivity curve.”
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