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Summary
ServiceNow recently held its annual Knowledge event that attracted more than 20,000 attendees. The event showcased how ServiceNow is a vendor at the forefront of the digital workflow movement and opportunity. ServiceNow shared its vision, strategy, and roadmap to become a $15bn company by 2026. Generative AI (GenAI) is a common theme across vendor events of late, and Knowledge 2024 was no different. ServiceNow built on the GenAI vision it shared at last year’s event, highlighting how its capabilities, which have seen significant investment this year, can help customers generate new outcomes, insights, and actions from cross-functional data and workflows. The event also featured several notable platform enhancements and announcements on new partnerships ServiceNow has formed to further empower customers across various industries, functions, and use cases. This report provides a summary and analysis of the main messages and announcements from the event.
ServiceNow’s strategy and vision for how Generative AI will be used across its platform has huge potential.
ServiceNow's vision is to become the AI platform for digital transformation by infusing GenAI into every workflow and every aspect of the business. At the core of ServiceNow’s future strategy and go-to-market approach is a focus on helping customers leverage GenAI to turn insights into actions through automating and optimizing processes, enhancing employee and customer experiences, and ultimately supporting businesses in creating new value and outcomes. ServiceNow has been on an AI development journey for more than seven years, evidenced by its investment in building and acquiring AI capabilities. Consequently, the vendor has diverse AI features and skills such as natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, machine and deep learning. Some of the key AI capabilities and features that ServiceNow showcased at Knowledge 2024 included:
- Now Assist: ServiceNow's pillar GenAI experience and offering that extends across its entire platform. This solution provides conversational AI, intelligent recommendations, and proactive guidance for users and agents across teams, including IT, HR, and customer service. Now Assist helps businesses improve self-service, deflect requests, reduce resolution time, and increase employee productivity and customer satisfaction.
- Microsoft Co-Pilot and Now Assist integration: One of the more notable announcements at the event was the new integration between Microsoft Co-Pilot and ServiceNow’s Now Assist GenAI capabilities. This integration brings actionable workflows directly into the Teams platform, enabling users to access and execute ServiceNow workflows and actions directly from a single solution.
- Knowledge Graph: This is ServiceNow’s new repository of platform knowledge that collects and connects data from various sources, such as assets, devices, users, and third-party systems. It delivers technological and operational context and insights for GenAI models.
- My Assist: ServiceNow's new personalized assistant for work. It uses GenAI to provide tailored and relevant information, suggestions, and actions for users based on their roles, preferences, and needs. My Assist can also leverage data from pictures, such as passport photos, to create digital badges and avatars for users across all apps.
- Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM): ServiceNow also demonstrated a new conversational AI solution for creating and managing projects and portfolios. Now Assist for SPM uses NLP to process user queries and intent and provide employees with personalized and relevant information, insights, and actions.
- Creator Studio: ServiceNow's low-code/no-code tool is also set to benefit from AI capabilities that enable people to use natural language descriptions to generate app components, including new catalog items and playbooks. ServiceNow also demonstrated how its new multi-modal AI capabilities can convert sketches and diagrams (from a whiteboard, for example) into digital processes and workflows.
ServiceNow's GenAI capabilities and features are designed to deliver value and benefits for its customers and partners across various industries, functions, and use cases
Knowledge 2024 was a platform for ServiceNow to advocate and share examples of how its Generative AI capabilities can help businesses save time and money, improve efficiency, quality, and agility, and enhance customer and employee experiences and satisfaction while driving new business innovation and growth. Although it is still relatively early, the event featured numerous use cases and testimonials on how businesses across different industries have leveraged the ServiceNow platform and AI capabilities. Some especially notable use cases and results were shared across telco and financial services firms. Telcos have become an important customer and industry segment for ServiceNow. Numerous large telcos, including BT and Vodafone, use ServiceNow's capabilities to simplify their complex technology ecosystems and digitize customer and employee workflows. Telcos report notable improvements in customer satisfaction, net promoter score (NPS), and mean time to resolve (MTTR) for IT incidents since deploying ServiceNow. Many banking and financial services organizations use ServiceNow to simplify and optimize legacy procurement processes and systems and better integrate workflows across different business functions. Saving costs by reducing the number of systems utilized and delivering a unified and personalized single pane of glass for business services across HR, IT, legal, and procurement are other benefits customers in this industry have realized. These businesses are now using Now Assist to deflect low-complexity tasks, develop talent, further improve incident management, and accelerate self-service.
ServiceNow is looking to further enrich its partner ecosystem to strengthen global platform adoption
ServiceNow's strategic partner network expansion is about growing numbers and enhancing its partners’ skills, capacity, and industry-specific capabilities. This approach is integral to ServiceNow's ambitious growth plans and vision to lead in digital workflow. The core of ServiceNow’s partner strategy will be to strengthen region specificity and drive capacity and capability via these partnerships. The key to success here will be how effectively ServiceNow can educate partners about the broader value of its multi-workflow proposition. This educational aspect is vital to ensure that partners fully grasp ServiceNow's expansive value, so industry-specific solutions tailored toward the broader business value proposition will be vital in this approach.
Partners will play a vital role in ServiceNow achieving its aspiration of becoming a $15bn company. In growing globally, further strengthening its partner network is a priority for ServiceNow across all regions. The company's growth in the EMEA region underscores the significance and potential of this partner expansion. ServiceNow’s investment in long-time partners like Plat4mation in EMEA highlights the importance ServiceNow is placing on skills development. ServiceNow's presence and traction in Japan are also growing robustly, with strong adoption across manufacturing, financial services, and the public sector. Focusing on supporting customers around the specific dynamics of the Japanese market will also be important for ServiceNow’s regional team here. The recently announced partnership with Fujitsu exemplifies ServiceNow's commitment to creating a partner ecosystem tailored to the Japanese market.
ServiceNow and Genesys announce new partnership and platform integrations to enhance customer and employee experiences
Unlike the more traditional service provider and service integrator partnerships, ServiceNow also announced that a US-based contact center and customer experience vendor, Genesys, will be a new technology partner. Genesys and ServiceNow will co-create a GenAI-powered solution that integrates customer interaction data and workflows across the front, middle, and back-office. The solution will leverage data and insights across both platforms and enable customers to choose the AI platform of their choice when referencing this data. The combined solution of ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management (CSM) and Genesys Cloud will provide a unified experience and workspace for customer service teams, enabling seamless communication and workflows across different interaction and communication channels. The objective of the partnership is to support customer service teams in providing more seamless customer interactions by breaking down internal silos that often hurt services. In addition to opening new opportunities for ServiceNow and Genesys to broaden the adoption of their solutions, this partnership and integration has huge promise for businesses already invested in both tools. Integrating end-to-end processes and working practices is essential to improving customer experiences and employee productivity, which this new integrated solution delivers.
The GenAI opportunity for ServiceNow is huge, but overcoming challenges associated with cost will be vital
ServiceNow's strategy of embracing domain-specific and third-party GenAI models and solutions positions the vendor as one that can cater to various business needs and AI-related objectives. The wealth of enterprise data contained within the ServiceNow platform makes its domain-specific sGenAI capabilities very attractive to organizations looking to adopt AI capabilities more securely and business-specific fashion. However, ServiceNow also faces several challenges and opportunities in accelerating the adoption of its GenAI capabilities, with customer concerns around costs and licensing being the most immediate. Now Assist is currently included as part of ServiceNow’s premium Pro Plus offering, and it requires separate and additional licenses for each product and solution across which it is deployed. For example, the HRSM and ITSM modules require individual Now Assist licensing. Should businesses only have a budget to invest in GenAI for one module (IT over HR, for example), there will be an inconsistent user experience delivered across centralized business services as some teams will use Now Assist, whereas others will not. ServiceNow is aware of the challenge it faces here. For the vendor, quantifying and demonstrating the business value and ROI in monetary terms delivered via this additional investment will be important. ServiceNow also advises that it has intentionally launched with a modular, flexible packaging approach as experiences with early deals, conversations with customers, and its own market research have indicated that customers, in many cases, are not ready to deploy Generative AI across the enterprise. These customers prefer to start with specific use cases and within specific departments when deploying Generative AI.
Some customers Omdia has spoken to advised that investment in Pro Plus (and thus ServiceNow’s GenAI features) incurs a 20-25% licensing increase, making it a challenging business case/investment. Customers have also shared a concern that ServiceNow’s huge focus on Now Assist is devaluing the traditional Virtual Agent capabilities many are currently investing in. Omdia believes that at some point, there will need to be a consolidation of ServiceNow Virtual Agent into Now Assist, both functionally and in terms of how the commercial/licensing model for Now Assist may evolve. Customers undoubtedly want to adopt the new ServiceNow GenAI capabilities, but they will need to carefully assess the projected value and impact of the capabilities to justify the additional investment required. Relating to this challenge, ServiceNow advises that while a price uplift is associated with Now Assist, it reflects the increased value these solutions will deliver to customers. Additionally, ServiceNow is not alone in its values in these solutions – there is a similar uplift associated with GenAi capabilities offered by its peers in the enterprise IT space.
Knowledge 2024 highlighted how ServiceNow’s broader enterprise value proposition continues to strengthen
ServiceNow's Knowledge 2024 event showcased the vendor's mature GenAI vision, strategy, and roadmap. While GenAI was the focal point, the announcements and customer stories shared at the event further solidified ServiceNow as a vendor at the forefront of supporting businesses in their digital transformation efforts. ServiceNow should no longer be considered a platform for IT; the capabilities delivered via the solution are proving to enable and transform different business functions across diverse industries. The value of cross-functional workflows and the data they create will become increasingly important in the age of AI, as this enterprise-wide data and insight will be invaluable to how domain-specific models will be grounded in a business context.
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Author
Adam Holtby, Principal Analyst, Workplace Transformation
