ServiceNow Partner Summit, Xanadu Release: The Biggest AI News

'Those kinds of really significant productivity savings deliver material cost savings to the business,' Amy Lokey, ServiceNow CXO, tells CRN.

Agentic artificial intelligence. Improvements to the Now Assist AI assistant offering. And a pro edition of RaptorDB.

These are some of the biggest changes ServiceNow has revealed Tuesday as part of its Now Platform Xanadu release and during its Global Partner Ecosystem Summit (GPES) held at its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters Tuesday.

When asked by CRN during a virtual pre-briefing event about partners working with customers to get AI projects ready–especially if budget is an issue–Amy Lokey, ServiceNow chief experience officer, said that partners can focus on “massive productivity gains that benefit employees, that deliver better customer service, that deliver better customer loyalty.”

“Those kinds of really significant productivity savings deliver material cost savings to the business,” she said. “Our customers can do the math. They can quickly figure out that the value is there and it's worth the investment because of the productivity gains and ultimately better business outcomes that they're seeing from these solutions.”

ServiceNow Xanadu Release

ServiceNow has about 2,200 channel partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs. About 100 ServiceNow partners were scheduled to attend the GPES, according to the IT management and automation tools vendor.

Lokey told CRN during a virtual pre-briefing that the vendor is focused on making deployments easy for partners.

“We're making that continually simpler and easier, and doing all that hard work so that our customers don't have to and our partners can quickly achieve what they're looking for,” Lokey said. “Frequently, our partners are really some of the first to try these new solutions themselves in their own ServiceNow implementations. So they're really design partners with us as we deploy the solutions. They help provide feedback where we can continually iterate on the product. And then they can take that firsthand experience of seeing the value of these product experiences and then share that with our shared customers.”

Heath Ramsey, vice president of outbound product management for the ServiceNow platform, told CRN during the event that he recommends partners who are talking to customers about AI products to focus on outcomes.

“As our partners are going to market and working with customers around this, it's a lot of the same things that we've been talking about with respect to workflow and everything else,” Ramsey said. “Focus on the things that are high value with respect to automation and then layer the AI on top of it to make it more efficient.”

“What we see from our customers is the desire and the need to continually transform, get all those manual processes into the platform and also prepare them for the future, things like AI,” he said. “For us to be able to get there, it's about making sure that we have the right foundation for them to set them up for success as they move forward.”

In response to other questions asked on the call, Dorit Zilbershot, ServiceNow’s vice president of AI product management, said that the vendor is differentiating itself in part from more generic agentic AI vendors with its 20 years of workflows, actions and catalog items.

“They already have access to all the policies, to all the past cases, all the workflows, everything is already available for them,” she said.

ServiceNow’s one platform, one data model structure means no siloes when leveraging agents for IT service management (ITSM) across different divisions in an organization, from legal to finance, she said.

Read on for the most exciting news ServiceNow made today as part of its Xanadu release and GPES event.

RaptorDB Pro

A RaptorDB Pro offer is now available to ServiceNow customers, adding to the RaptorDB Postgres‑based database offering unveiled during its Knowledge 2024 customer and partner event in May.

The standard RaptorDB offering promises to act as a foundational data layer for users to process large amounts of transactional data on the Now Platform in real time for AI-powered applications.

Standard is available now for new customers. Existing ServiceNow customers have to wait until later next year, according to the vendor.

The Pro edition is more scalable with better overall performance, with a 53 percent improvement in overall transaction times, according to ServiceNow. Users could see upwards of 27 times faster pulls of analytics, reports and list views–plus three times more transactional throughput across workflows.

Users should have just-in-time trend data and individual reports around how processes perform and how to improve those outcomes, according to the vendor.

The vendor also has a RaptorDB Lighthouse Program rolling out for select early-adopter customers.

ServiceNow leveraged its Swarm64 acquisition from 2021 to build the new database offering. The vendor said that RaptorDB reduces up to 70 percent of query times over five seconds, increases queries per second twelvefold and reduces configuration management database (CMDB) list view load times by about 90 percent among other advantages.

Knowledge Graph

ServiceNow plans to release in March 2025 a unified Knowledge Graph that consolidates data management and analytics to cut down on manual data mapping and integrations.

Users can manage a large amount of insights to speed up connecting real-world events and pulling data across operations, employees, partners and customers for personalized information.

The capability should reduce supply delays and improve supply chain management among other use cases, according to ServiceNow.

ServiceNow AI Agents

ServiceNow’s summit happened alongside the release of its Xanadu AI platform, promising users capabilities around AI agents, email reply generation, data visualization generation and more.

The vendor’s first AI agent offers–Customer Service Management AI Agents and ITSM AI Agents–should have a limited release in November, according to ServiceNow. More use cases will come in 2025.

ServiceNow AI agents can understand environments, tap into available data across the enterprise and take actions from that data and autonomously handle tasks that otherwise take up a large amount of employee attention, according to the vendor.

An example of an AI agent at work is an agent working a case of Wi-Fi not working while a human IT professional is away. The agent should have the ability to verify network stability, analyze similar cases and ask the customer for router details and provide the human with next steps based on company policies.

Eventually, ServiceNow AI agents will have the ability to pull context from voice, video, images and other inputs for personalized responses, according to the vendor.

Agents will have the ability to collaborate with each other across workflows and aiding multiple departments.

Xanadu AI Capabilities

The Xanadu release brings hundreds of AI updates to ServiceNow, according to the vendor. The ServiceNow Xanadu release marks improvements to ServiceNow’s Now Assist AI assistant for IT support workers.

Included in those updates is email reply generation, which promises to save IT support workers time on communications with requestors, according to the vendor. Email tone can be made more empathetic, and the emails can bring in information from the complaint.

Change summarization, powered by Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM), can summarize change requests and speed up related data assessment, potentially decreasing cycle times and minimizing risks.

Now Assist for HR Service Delivery (HRSD) powers large language model (LLM)-based proactive prompts in the platform for relevant and timely task completion reminders. Users can have reminders for travel request approval, mandatory training completion and other tasks, according to ServiceNow.

And the data visualization generation feature should bring managers and process owners all the data and information needed for decision-making. Users can leverage natural language prompts to translate complex data queries into charts and graphs.

Improved Now Assist

A Now Assist integration with Copilot for Microsoft 365 became generally available (GA). Copilot can pass new laptop ordering, company policy questions and other automated self-service employee tasks to ServiceNow’s Now Assist for real-time responses and workflow kick offs.

Now Assist for Security Operations aims to improve security incident response (SIR) workflows and manage threat exposure in real time, according to ServiceNow. SecOps teams can leverage AI-driven incident summaries and interactive question-and-answer experiences to prioritize and respond to security events, scaling incident response protocols and accelerating the response process.

Now Assist has come to sourcing and procurement operations, with more GenAI capabilities for finance and supply chain workflows expected, according to ServiceNow. The sourcing and procurement operations Now Assist aims to simplify procurement intake processes and request submitting. Employees use a conversational prompt to start requests and access information. The tool also promises to free up time for procurement and finance teams.

The Now Assist Skill Kit allows for custom GenAI prompt and skill building within the ServiceNow platform. Users can tailor skills to specific use cases, according to ServiceNow.

Users can build, test and deploy GenAI skills and underlying prompts, select models and then assign the skills to apps and AI agents. They can use Now LLMs or third-party and custom models, according to the vendor.

Industry-Focused Now Assist Offers

ServiceNow revealed iterations of Now Assist meant for particular industries, with the first offerings including telecommunications, media and technology (TMT), financial services operations (FSO), public sector digital services (PSDS).

Now Assist for TMT can generate summaries of technical issues and test results to speed up diagnosis and IT support work. A resolution summarizer is meant to update customers and help future cases, according to the vendor.

Now Assist for FSO has offers aimed at banks and insurers. Now Assist for Banking integrates with ServiceNow Disputes Management to leverage GenAI to speed up resolutions around card issues and increasing customer loyalty. Now Assist for Insurance can summarize claims to give workers context and improve response times, reduce repeat questions for customers and cut down on mistakes.

And the iteration for PSDS brings government employees relevant case history for better decision-making and speeding up assistance. The offer is aimed at nutrition assistance, housing, transportation, medical care and other government services, according to the vendor.

Industry-focused Now Assist offers that were already released include Now Assist for Government Community Cloud (GCC) and Now Assist for Telecommunications Service Management (TSM).

Retail Sector Offers

The Xanadu release brings ServiceNow further into IT products aimed at retailers, in the store and in the back office and with leadership, according to the vendor. Both products have two-way communication and visibility between stores and headquarters.

Retail Operations seeks to aid managers and associates with open and close checks and broken point of sale (POS) system fixes, among other tasks. Retail Operations is integrated with Field Service Management to allow for robust field technician support, according to the vendor.

A Retail Service Management offering brings the ServiceNow Customer Service Management to the retail space, with in-store and online request submission and offsite support workers collaborating on a single system.

Updates For Developers, IT Teams, Employees

The Xanadu release includes an integrated developer environment (IDE) meant to speed up digital work at scale from within ServiceNow environments.

Developers can make apps in code and leverage source control, conflict resolution, error detection and other capabilities, according to the vendor. Developers can also edit apps in the more familiar platform user interface (UI) without leaving.

The new release also aims to integrate AI operations (AIOps) into IT workflows, especially for incident prevention and mitigation. Operators can test automations before activation, seeing the effect on data and when grouping alerts. Users can also leverage Now Assist for ITOM (IT Operations Management) to get a summary of an issue and how to troubleshoot.

ServiceNow expanded its Application Portfolio Management (APM) offering into Enterprise Architecture, better aligning IT teams with business objectives for less waste, better compliance, better data privacy control and lowered time to market, according to the vendor.

A service reliability management capability aims to speed up resolutions around app issues and outages with visibility into technical services performance, according to ServiceNow.

Site reliability engineers and app teams can set on-call schedules, align with service-level indicators and objectives and manage alerts autonomously–saving central administrators work.

Guided self-service in employee center is meant to give knowledge, frontline and deskless employees help across IT, human resources (HR) and other departments with a visual, interactive question-and-answer experience.

The self-service feature can answer questions around computer upgrades, benefits and time-off policies to cut down on support tickets and article reading.