Yet again, ServiceNow has delivered by far its largest release of new capabilities for generative AI powered by a platform with an entire new back-end built for speed and scale. With major releases coming every six months, ServiceNow is now aiming to release AI capabilities more frequently, which makes ServiceNow the AI platform for your business. 

I’m excited to bring some of the key highlights of the Xanadu release to our customers: 

Platform Core Technology

Bigger scale - ServiceNow wants customers to get more stuff done with their instance, and at Knowledge Conference 24, ServiceNow announced a new ultra-scale database technology for their back-end, RaptorDB. RaptorDB is optimized for both transactional workloads and analytics workloads. This means that customers can get more work done on their instance. Customers will get more headroom on their instance, especially if you are one of ServiceNow's larger customers, you can now feel more comfortable to put higher performance workloads on the system. Last but not least, the transactions will be 3 times faster per min. 

Faster performance - ServiceNow is committed to making your experience faster, smoother, and more efficient. With the Xanadu release, all workspaces have seen performance boosts, with the average workspace running about 25% faster. When you upgrade to Xanadu, you can expect noticeably quicker performance across your workspaces, ensuring a more seamless workflow.

Better security model - ServiceNow is now bringing a more powerful, easier to use, security model in Xanadu to better secure your instance. 

1) A new kind ACL, called deny-unless ACL, so rather than listing every positive condition where something can happen, customers can now only define exception cases where something should not be allowed, making it way easier to put your security model in place. 

2) Query ACLs - ServiceNow has extended the ACL Layer to apply to queries, so customers can control who can run queries and which fields queries are allowed to run upon. 

3) Granular ACLs - A new feature to all table based ACLs, so customers can specify the specific rows and columns the ACL should apply to.

Features Powered by Now Assist

Now Assist introduces a range of specialized packages designed to bring generative AI capabilities to the Now Platform, boosting productivity and enhancing efficiency. Key highlights include:

Now Assist for IT Service Management 

Change summarization - Change summarization summarizes change requests and related data, so change managers / approvers need to be inform/ed when making decisions to increase the probability of successful change implementation. 

Microsoft Copilot integration - Organizations can now seamlessly integrate between Now Assist and Copilot, where Now Assist will solve issues, tickets, and tasks, and get answers directly from Microsoft Copilot in Teams, increasing agent and employee productivity.

Knowledge article generation (multi-source) - Knowledge content generation from a single incident does always fully encapsulate the learnings or how to resolve similar incidents, with knowledge content generation from multiple incidents, the accuracy of knowledge will increase and it will also prevent the creation of duplicate articles. 

Now Assist for IT Operations Management

Alert analysis and incident population - Introducing a groundbreaking generative AI feature for IT Operations—a transformative solution that converts cryptic alerts into clear, actionable insights. Powered by a secure, proprietary LLM, this technology equips your teams with enhanced intuition and technical expertise to diagnose and resolve issues more effectively. By clarifying alerts and offering potential remediation options, it boosts efficiency and fosters a more agile IT environment.

Now Assist for Security Operations

Analysts spend a lot of time summarizing incidents, writing and reading resolution notes, searching for context on incidents, with Now Assist for Security Operations Security teams can now quickly summarize security incidents, generate resolution notes, and understand the lifecycle context for incidents. This will result in boosting analyst productivity while compressing mean-time-to-contain. 

Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management

Multi-feedback summarization - Product managers often face challenges in efficiently processing large amounts of feedback and managing documents effectively within different planning phases. The traditional planning methods of manually synthesizing feedback from multiple sources results in time-consuming analysis processes, hindering timely decision making and strategic alignment. With Now Assist for SPM, users can leverage the multi-feedback summarization by consolidating multiple inputs into concise and actionable summary. This not only saves substantial analysis time but also enhances decision making efficiency by providing quick insights from diverse sources helping identify trends and prioritize feature requests to help them make informed decisions.

Document summarization - Document creation and refinement require significant effort to ensure clarity and efficiency across different planning modules. The new document summarization and text modification capabilities powered by Now Assist help in summarizing and adjusting text length. This streamlines the creation and editing of documents - reducing time spent on administrative tasks, while allowing more time for strategic planning, collaboration, and fostering productivity.

Now Assist for Human Service Delivery

LLM-based proactive prompts - Organizations are looking for ways to continue to boost employee productivity, and with AI enabled prompts, Employees and Managers can take action on pending activities and approvals. This feature is creating conversational experiences for employees that support proactive behavior and with the help of AI, employees can now keep up with important to-dos and milestones.

Now Assist for Creator

Data visualization generation - Customers lack the tools, time and skill to create graphs, data plots and other types of data visualizations to help them identify trends in their data. Customers Need to identify trends quicker and easier in order to gain a more thorough understanding of performance. The data visualization generation skill lets your users create relevant charts and scores based upon natural language queries and available data, leveraging Platform Analytics. The charts can show data from any Platform Analytics data sources such as tables, indicators, User Experience Analytics. This skill simplifies the process of data visualization generation and configuration, and can potentially increase efficiency.

Playbook generation enhancements - Creating playbooks is a key part of any automation, however, a person needs to have a working knowledge of the ServiceNow platform and Creator in order to build them out effectively. This takes time to learn. Using basic text, developers of all skill levels can now create a playbook and preview it as many times as needed to get to the ideal workflow. Suggested activities will also be generated by AI to make playbook creation more seamless, efficient and higher quality.

Now Assist for Customer Service Management

Email reply recommendations - Today in ServiceNow, there is no easy way to quickly create personalized email responses - Many organizations rely on agents to craft appropriate emails to respond to customers, sometimes offering templates to help fast-track responses, but there is often still some personalization needed based on the context of the case. Agents spend significant time searching the knowledge base for appropriate solutions to send the customer. Agents need to compare the case context to the knowledge article to confirm whether the solution is relevant. 

Email reply recommendations will enable the agents to automate the generation and rewriting of emails which can then be reviewed and sent by the agent. It would simplify the process for them and boost productivity and decrease errors. Agents can ask Now Assist to compose an email from scratch without any templates or ask Now Assist to rewrite the template to match any tone or sentiment for the client. 

Chat reply recommendations - Today in ServiceNow, there is no easy way to quickly create personalized responses – Since chats and calls are live interactions, agents must respond quickly to keep the customer engaged. Agents spend considerable time searching the knowledge base for appropriate solutions to send the customer. Agents need to compare the case context to the knowledge article to confirm whether the solution is relevant. Using chat reply recommendations agents can instantly generate and rewrite chat messages using generative AI. Chat reply recommendations automatically provide contextually relevant chat or call response recommendations in real time. 

Sidebar summarization - Customer Service Agents often need to consult with peers or next level of support to find the best solution, however the details of that discussion may be lost if the case owner doesn’t capture a summary of the discussion into the case, leaving out important context on how the case was solved. Sidebar summarization enables agents to easily summarize and capture the details of a sidebar discussion so that no context is lost. With Sidebar summarization, agents can generate a summary of a Sidebar discussion, and edit and share the summary to the work notes on the case.