ServiceNow’s Orlando Release Focuses on AI With Now Intelligence
ServiceNow’s Orlando release introduced Now Intelligence, a set of features that strengthen ServiceNow’s lead in the AI-powered IT service management (ITSM) and digital transformation space. The latest biennial update, released in March 2020, provides fully embedded virtual agents and context-aware predictions and insights.
Highlights of the Orlando release include:
- Virtual agents with natural language understanding. Always-on virtual agents across multiple platforms (including Slack, Teams, and Facebook Messenger) allow both customers and employees to have dynamic conversations and initiate workflows. Virtual agents can also deliver alerts to employees through these channels and can be customized to your organization’s vocabulary.
- Chatbots can also be used to deploy customizable templates for common scenarios.
- Predictive intelligence – Agent Assist suggests relevant content to help agents solve tickets faster, while machine learning proactively identifies similarities across open incidents and automatically categorizes, routes, and prioritizes tickets.
- Performance analytics – Access real-time data, insights, and analytics driven by machine learning.
- Mobile enhancements – Including mobile analytics, app management, and personal branding of the mobile app.
- Cloud insights – Provides intelligent recommendations to manage cloud asset usage.
- Advanced risk assessments – Uses continuous monitoring to provide data on high risk areas and noncompliance.
ServiceNow DevOps is also available as part of the release, along with over hundreds of enhancements and changes.
Source: ServiceNow Service Management at SoftwareReviews, Report Published February 2020
Our Take
The release of Orlando and Now Intelligence will help ServiceNow on multiple fronts:
- AI: It strengthens ServiceNow’s AI capabilities by integrating its recent acquisitions of PassageAI (a conversational AI platform) and Loom Systems (an AIOps solution).
- Digital Transformation: This topic is very important to ServiceNow’s new CEO Bill McDermott, who took over in November 2019 from SAP. McDermott’s vision is to grow ServiceNow from an IT vendor for CIOs to a digital transformation partner for CEOs. ServiceNow is well positioned to achieve McDermott’s vision, given the company’s successful expansion beyond IT into HR, operations, and customer service.
- COVID-19: Improved self-service features and 24x7 virtual agents will help companies to better support their staff working remotely and to reduce demand on ServiceNow’s contact centers. Improved instant messaging capabilities will also help contact centers and service desks by increasing their capacity – agents will be better positioned to help three or more customers simultaneously.
Low-maturity IT departments won’t be ready to take advantage of these features, but enterprises with mature processes will be able to use these AI-powered features to increase productivity and business agility.
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SoftwareReviews: IT Service Management