ServiceNow, Microsoft To Integrate Their Now Assist, Copilot GenAI Platforms

‘ServiceNow and Microsoft are integrating Now Assist and Copilot, bringing the power of two generative AI systems into one seamless experience. This has been made possible by merging the intelligence of Now Assist, the ServiceNow generative AI-powered workflows, with Microsoft Copilot, creating a more holistic, connected experience that allows employees to get the help they need, regardless of which platform they're in,’ says Dorit Zilbershot, ServiceNow’s vice president of product management, AI, and innovation.

ServiceNow and Microsoft Wednesday unveiled what they are calling the first integration of two different GenAI platforms.

The two used this week’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2024 conference in Las Vegas to unveil their partnership under which their two GenAI platforms will be able to seamlessly pass information and data between them, said Dorit Zilbershot, vice president of product management, AI, and innovation at Santa Clara, Calif.-based ServiceNow.

“ServiceNow and Microsoft are integrating Now Assist and Copilot, bringing the power of two generative AI systems into one seamless experience,” Zilbershot said during a press conference. “This has been made possible by merging the intelligence of Now Assist, the ServiceNow generative AI-powered workflows, with Microsoft Copilot, creating a more holistic, connected experience that allows employees to get the help they need, regardless of which platform they're in.”

Now Assist is ServiceNow’s technology for adding AI and GenAI into every workflow on the company’s flagship Now Platform workflow automation technology.

The new partnership between ServiceNow and Microsoft is an important move as businesses increasingly rely on GenAI, Zilbershot said.

“This is a game changer for organizations and their employees,” she said. “This reduces the time on administrative tasks, and arms employees with powerful insights in real time, making sure that the right information and the right intelligence is coming from the right generative AI system. Now Assist and Microsoft Copilot will seamlessly interact and hand off tasks to each other in ServiceNow and compatible Microsoft 365 applications.”

For example, Zilbershot said, an employee working on Microsoft Teams with Copilot could ask a question to get a response from Now Assist. This might include an employee speaking with a live agent from Copilot, or ordering a new laptop via Copilot, she said.

Future use cases include bringing Copilot capabilities into Now Assist to make ServiceNow users more productive in their work, she said, citing as an example an employee who was out of the office for a week to attend the ServiceNow Knowledge 2024 conference.

“I'm coming back to work and I want to get caught up for the day,” she said. “So instead of me going through all the emails and all the chat conversations, I can really just ask Copilots in Teams, ‘Catch me up on what I missed last week.’ And it will give me a great summary of everything important that I need to know to get on with my day.”

In that example, Zilbershot said the employee also saw that the IT department noticed her laptop has been crashing and asked her to reach out to them to troubleshoot the issue.

“But I don't have time for this,” she said. “And I had this laptop for quite some time. So let me ask Now Assist what is the company policy to replace this laptop. So I can just type within Copilot Now Assist, ‘What is the laptop replacement policy?’ And Copilot will now hand out this task to Now Assist analysis, give all the context about the employee and the laptop question, and Now Assist will do its magic at the backend, finding the right information, the right policy, and summarize that in an answer. And not only that, it also tells me that I'm eligible for a new laptop. So I can go on and ask it to order a new laptop.”

In this example, the employ is not just getting information, but is getting an action via GenAI on Now Assist and Copilot, Zilbershot said.

This new GenAI partnership is important in terms of GenAI, said Srini Raghavan, vice president of product for Microsoft 365 and Teams.

“This partnership, working with ServiceNow, truly is a first for us, at least in parts of the industry, having two different GenAI agents, CoPilot and Now Assist, that are able to talk to each other in context,” Raghavan said.

This partnership actually shows how ecosystem-focused Microsoft is, Raghavan said.

“Just like we are a platform company, we are a partner-centric company as well,” he said. “Everything that we have built over the course of the last 35 years has been focused on improving that ecosystem. [We built Copilot] to be a highly productive, employee-focused, user-focused productivity tool bringing in the power of OpenAI and GenAI to everybody. But most importantly, we know that we cannot be specialized in every field and domain. This is where we partner with companies like ServiceNow, because they have a lot of domain expertise in this area.

ServiceNow channel partners said they are excited to explore the opportunities presented by the ServiceNow and Microsoft GenAI partnership.

The partnership means solution providers and their customers will be able to more easily leverage all the functionality and data available on the Now platform, said Michael Lombardo, CEO of Glidefast Consulting, a Waltham, Mass.-based solution provider focused on the ServiceNow ecosystem.

“There is a lot of data in Now, but there can be problems with extracting all that data,” Lombardo told CRN. “This will help us digest all that data in ServiceNow. We could do this before, but this partnership provides further integration for improved functionality.”

Jason Wojahn, CEO of Thirdera, a Broomfield, Colo.-based ServiceNow solution provider in the process of being acquired by global service provider Cognizant, told CRN that the partnership between ServiceNow and Microsoft offers an intuitive way to handle work workflow management.

“For example, workflows need real-time data retrieval,” Wojahn said. “If users can use natural language to get the data, it decreases the time to get the data.”

The integration of Now Assist and Copilot is slated to be completed in the second half of 2024.