The IT Nerd

ServiceNow today announced its first platform release of 2024, designed to accelerate enterprise transformation with smarter, faster, simpler experiences. The Now Platform Washington, D.C. release includes new features that boost intelligent automation and deliver fast time to value, critical elements of a business’s digital transformation roadmap. 

According to Gartner, global spending on technology is forecast to rebound from 4.8% in 2023 to 7% in 2024, reaching $5 trillion. As CEOs seek to transform their businesses and work smarter, leaders are concentrating their digital investments into proven, strategic platforms that deliver net‑new innovation and maximize digitization across the enterprise. ServiceNow’s Washington, D.C. release makes it easier than ever for customers to put the power of the Now Platform to work, connecting and orchestrating processes to build seamless experiences that increase productivity and reduce costs.

Simplifying experiences to drive productivity and business efficiency

The Now Platform drives seamless, intelligent experiences among businesses, customers, and employees to propel growth. With a focus on enhancing efficiency, satisfaction, and productivity, the Washington, D.C. release includes new tools to optimize crucial interactions, fueling business growth and helping organizations adapt to ever‑shifting customer and employee needs.

Sales and Order Management (SOM) helps organizations increase revenue by uniting the sales and order lifecycles across front, middle, and back‑office teams on the ServiceNow platform. Sales and fulfillment agents can easily manage opportunities, configure and price quotes, and capture and fulfill orders. SOM empowers customer service agents to complete post‑sale commercial changes, helping drive upsell and cross‑sell opportunities – all in the same platform they use to manage customer service requests. Service agents can create opportunities, quotes, and orders just like sales staff. Improving the sales experience is a core need for businesses in industries like telecommunications, manufacturing, and technology—SOM helps companies orchestrate a more connected sales experience on a single platform to simplify processes, improve customer experiences, and accelerate results.

Platform Analytics offers a secure, simple, unified experience for reporting and analytics across the entire Now Platform. Customers can now seamlessly create data visualizations and dashboards that incorporate multiple data inputs into one, easy to understand experience to power faster, smarter decision making. Platform Analytics also surfaces meaningful, personalized, and timely information directly within Next Experience workspaces effortlessly connects to Workflow Studio, so customers can easily create condition‑based workflow triggers based on analytics thresholds out‑of‑the‑box to seamlessly go from insight to action. 

New AIOps experiences in Service Operations Workspace for ITOM allows AIOps users and administrators to speed issue resolution and achieve faster time to value with enhancements to Express List and alert automation. Express List helps operators work and address issues quickly and effectively—bringing historical alert trends and automated root cause analysis into a single, digestible screen view. Alert automation provides helpful context for operators to more easily understand and action events with alert simplification and grouping, so they can onboard more quickly and speed up resolution times.

A single intuitive interface for end‑to‑end workflow automation

Automating workflows not only simplifies experiences, but improves productivity, freeing up time for employees to focus on more complex tasks rather than manual and menial ones. The Washington, D.C. release includes new features to unlock end‑to‑end workflow automation across the enterprise, powering innovation and creating new efficiencies.

The new Workflow Studio allows creators to create workflow automations quickly and easily from start to finish. Users simply describe the process they’d like to automate, and Workflow Studio will visualize and create the workflows. The solution integrates capabilities like Flow Designer, Automation Engine, Process Automation Designer, and Decision Builder into one view, so employees can collaborate and easily create, configure, and monitor automated workflows. 

The Washington, D.C. release also updates the ServiceNow Operational Technology (OT) solution portfolio to serve industrial environments and smart factories. Operational Technology (OT) Knowledge Management adds to existing OT Visibility, Service Management, and Vulnerability products by accelerating the resolution of shop floor issues, further breaking down organizational barriers by capturing and sharing known resolutions for OT incidents and process deviations across sites. With upgraded asset inventory and amplified security, ServiceNow does for OT what it did for IT over the past two decades – accelerating digital transformation, specifically for industrial environments and smart factories.

Security Posture Control (SPC) is a new solution in the Security Operations portfolio that helps organizations gain visibility into critical security tool coverage gaps, identify assets with high‑risk combinations, and automate response workflows across the enterprise. This solution builds on customers’ existing investments in ITOM Visibility and Service Graph Connector programs. With Security Posture Control, customers will have a better understanding of their security posture, improving cybersecurity strength and resilience.

Driving consistency and efficiency with one extensible data model

Poor or inconsistent data can create risk, cost organizations time and resources, and lead to mistakes. The latest Now Platform release includes new pre‑built, cross‑functional workflows developed with our Common Services Data Model (CSDM), so companies can harness the power of their operational data and drive efficiencies at scale. Through automation, CSDM allows organizations to collect data across hardware or software, cloud or data center, into a trusted, auditable data model that can be used across multiple workflows and follows compliance guidelines.

These solutions can be applied across use cases in security incident management, human resources, and governance, by helping IT teams retain accurate, audit‑ready data for executive and regulatory reporting, decreasing time spent on maintaining applications.

Availability

Innovations announced today are generally available to all customers in the ServiceNow Store on March 20. In addition to the above, new, generative AI‑focused innovations were also announced. More details can be found here. 

Additional information:

• Watch a demo on innovations from the Now Platform Washington, D.C. release.
• Learn more about the Now Platform Washington, D.C. release from Jon Sigler, senior vice president of Platform and AI.

 ServiceNow today announced it has signed an agreement to acquire 4Industry, a Netherlands‑based partner whose manufacturing technology application is built on the Now Platform, and has completed the acquisition of  Smart Daily Management, a connected digital worker application from EY. Together, the deals augment ServiceNow’s existing operational technology (OT) management capabilities, adding Connected Worker solutions and enhancing expertise across key industrial markets such as manufacturing, energy and transport & logistics.

4Industry, founded in 2018, brings a mobile‑enabled application to make shop floor work more intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable through a suite of digital tools and Smart Daily Management from EY, which creates more efficiency around time‑consuming tasks, will enable ServiceNow’s industrial customers to drive operational excellence. The technology and industry expertise from 4Industry and the Smart Daily Management application will be utilized to build a new Connected Worker solution on the ServiceNow platform, expected in 2025. 

This example of continued investment in European tech and talent will significantly enhance ServiceNow’s long‑term roadmap for its global customers, delivering continuity across IT, OT, and factory floor workers. ServiceNow will continue to maintain a strong alliance with EY and partnership with Plat4mation, an affiliated services company of 4Industry. It will work jointly with these companies, as innovation and implementation alliance partners for both existing OT solutions as well as future Connected Worker solutions.

4Industry and Smart Daily Management from EY follow acquisitions of UltimateSuite, G2K, Atrinet’s NetACE technology and Element AI as part of ServiceNow’s ongoing commitment to bringing impactful automation to customers. ServiceNow closed the acquisition of Smart Daily Management in early March and expects to close the acquisition of 4Industry in the coming weeks. Financial terms of the deals will not be disclosed.

ServiceNow, Hugging Face, and NVIDIA, has announced StarCoder2 which was released on February 28th, a family of open‑access large language models (LLMs) for code generation that sets new standards for performance, transparency, and cost‑effectiveness.

StarCoder2 was developed by the BigCode community, stewarded by ServiceNow, the leading digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, and Hugging Face, the most‑used open‑source platform where the machine learning community collaborates on models, datasets and applications.

Trained on 619 programming languages, StarCoder2 can be further trained and embedded in enterprise applications to perform specialized tasks such as application source code generation, workflow generation, text summarization, and more. Developers can use its code completion, advanced code summarization, code snippets retrieval, and other capabilities to accelerate innovation and improve productivity.

StarCoder2 offers three model sizes: a 3 billion‑parameter model trained by ServiceNow, a 7 billion‑parameter model trained by Hugging Face, and a 15 billion‑parameter model built by NVIDIA with NVIDIA NeMo and trained on NVIDIA accelerated infrastructure. The smaller variants provide powerful performance while saving on compute costs, as fewer parameters require less computing during inference. In fact, the new StarCoder2 3 billion‑parameter model also matches the performance of the original StarCoder 15 billion‑parameter model.

Fine‑Tuning Advances Capabilities with Business‑Specific Data

StarCoder2 models share a state‑of‑the‑art architecture and carefully curated data sources from BigCode that prioritize transparency and open governance to enable responsible innovation at scale.  

The foundation of StarCoder2 is a new code dataset called The Stack v2 which is more than 7x larger than The Stack v1. In addition to the advanced data set, new training techniques help the model understand low‑resource programming languages (such as COBOL), mathematics, and program source code discussions.

StarCoder2 advances the potential of future AI‑driven coding applications, including text‑to‑code and text‑to‑workflow capabilities. With broader, deeper programming training, it provides repository context, enabling accurate, context‑aware predictions. These advancements serve seasoned software engineers and citizen developers alike, accelerating business value and digital transformation.

Users can fine‑tune the open‑access models with industry or organization‑specific data using open‑source tools such as NVIDIA NeMo or Hugging Face TRL.

Organizations have already fine‑tuned the foundational StarCoder model to create specialized task‑specific capabilities for their businesses.

ServiceNow’s text‑to‑code Now LLM was purpose‑built on a specialized version of the 15 billion‑parameter StarCoder LLM, fine‑tuned and trained for ServiceNow workflow patterns, use‑cases, and processes. Hugging Face also used the model to create its StarChat assistant.

BigCode Fosters Open Scientific Collaboration in AI

BigCode represents an open scientific collaboration jointly led by Hugging Face and ServiceNow. Its mission centers on the responsible development of LLMs for code.

The BigCode community actively participated in the technical aspects of the StarCoder2 project through working groups and task forces, leveraging ServiceNow’s Fast LLM framework to train the 3 billion‑parameter model, Hugging Face’s nanotron framework for the 7 billion‑parameter model, and the end‑to‑end NVIDIA NeMo cloud‑native framework and NVIDIA TensorRT‑LLM software to train and optimize the 15 billion‑parameter model.

Fostering responsible innovation is at the core of BigCode’s purpose, demonstrated through its open governance, transparent supply chain, use of open‑source software, and the ability for developers to opt data out for training. StarCoder2 was built using responsibly sourced data under license from the digital commons of Software Heritage, hosted by Inria.

StarCoder2, as with its predecessor, will be made available under the BigCode Open RAIL‑M license, allowing royalty‑free access and use. Furthermore, the supporting code for the models resides on the BigCode project’s GitHub page.

All StarCoder2 models will also be available for download from Hugging Face and the StarCoder2 15B model is available on NVIDIA AI Foundation models for developers to experiment with directly from their browser, or through an API endpoint.

For more information on StarCoder2, visit https://huggingface.co/bigcode.

ServiceNow today announced the results of its fourth annual World of Work study. The study reveals Canadian office workers are spending nearly two workdays per week on menial tasks and see AI tools as a key driver to help alleviate workloads. Despite only 20% of workers currently using AI, half believe that training will give them a competitive advantage at work.

Canadian office workers recognize the potential for AI to drive productivity, reduce menial work, and future-proof their skills. Furthermore, 66% cite inadequate technology, training, and innovation as notable reasons to leave their current role. Companies that want to attract and retain talent need to identify and put into practice innovative solutions that boost employee productivity and growth opportunities.

Turning to AI as menial tasks surge

The majority of Canadian office workers (2 in 3) need to do meaningful work. Today, companies are presented with a unique opportunity to consider the role of AI-powered tools and technologies in alleviating the impact of menial, repetitive work on employees. This ultimately helps reduce employee burnout and attrition. The study highlights several key findings:

• Employees are bogged down with menial tasks: Canadian office workers are spending more than one-third of each day on repetitive work, equating to nearly 14 hours, or two workdays, each week. And it’s on the rise. Despite rapid advancements in technology, the proportion of time spent on menial tasks increased by 6% in 2023.
• Employers need to better enable productivity and efficiency: The majority (63%) of office workers feel their employer does not currently have adequate solutions in place to help alleviate repetitive work. As a result, 58% of Canadian office workers are looking to their employers to invest in solutions that enable productivity.
• The potential for AI to transform work is clear: Office workers recognize the potential of AI to enhance productivity (45%), minimize errors (42%), and provide more time for strategic and creative tasks (30%). This contributes to better work-life balance among employees (29%) and reduced stress (28%).
• The range of AI use cases is growing: Employees see AI tools that automate work as the most helpful, particularly automating routine and repetitive processes (41%), IT services (38%), analytics and reporting (37%), and summarization of meetings, documents, and emails (37%).

Embracing AI for career growth and job security

Recognizing the critical role of AI in their professional growth and development, Canadian office workers are increasingly looking to embrace AI to enhance their skillsets and remain competitive in the job market. According to the report:

• Employees will future-proof their skillsets with AI: Canadian office workers recognize developing AI skills is important for career progression. More than half (57%) anticipate getting additional education or training in AI at work, while 49% plan to pursue AI education or training on their own. Notably, only 33% fear they won’t be able to keep up with the technology.
• Current training programs aren’t cutting it: Having a comprehensive understanding of how to use AI is a priority for Canadian office workers but only 37% of employees perceive AI as easy to use. Further, current training programs are seen as insufficient. Only half (51%) consider the current training programs available to them as conducive to their career development.
• Leaders and individual contributors need equal access to AI training: While most Canadian office workers assert that their employer is responsible for providing job-relevant training (62%), there exists a disparity in training access between leaders and individual contributors. Specifically, 59% of leaders report greater training opportunities compared to individual contributors (48%). And while 61% of leaders believe their workplace invests in their career growth, only 41% of individual contributors feel the same.

For more information about the World of Work survey findings, please visit here.

Survey Methodology

The 12-minute online survey was facilitated by SAGO (Asking Canadians). The study was in field between August 15 and September 1, 2023, and surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,504 English and French-Canadian office workers. To qualify for the survey, respondents must have been currently working at an office or remotely at companies with 500+ employees.

The precision of Asking Canadians online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within +/- 3.19 margin of error at a 95% confidence level. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement errors that may be off by +/- 1%.

ServiceNow has announced a major Now Platform expansion with the Now Assist family of solutions. Available in the Now Platform Vancouver release, Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM), Customer Service Management (CSM), HR Service Delivery (HRSD), and Creator embed the power of generative AI across all workflows on the Now Platform to accelerate productivity, improve experiences, and increase agility for customers. New features within Now Assist are powered by a domain specific ServiceNow large language model (Now LLM), built for the enterprise and optimized for accuracy and data privacy.

Delivering enterprise-grade generative AI across every workflow

According to Goldman Sachs, generative AI will lift human productivity, adding ~$7 trillion to global GDP in the next decade1. The Now Platform operationalizes generative AI to drive growth and reduce costs for every customer across every business function with enterprise-grade AI supported by the highest levels of digital trust and privacy. Now Assist is woven into all processes and workflows to optimize performance and is fully compliant with all ServiceNow controls for ethical and responsible development and use.

All aspects of Now Assist incorporate generative AI features, such as case, incident, and agent chat summarization, virtual agent, and search, that can be applied to a broad range of scenarios and functions, so every persona from employees to agents to developers can harness the power of generative AI. This foundational approach allows enterprises to bring the power of generative AI to any department and expand to other parts of the business quickly and easily.

• Now Assist for ITSM empowers enterprise IT leaders to take control of their IT experience, dramatically improving agent productivity and the employee experience with faster resolutions. With summaries of incident history and live Virtual Agent interaction designed to deliver complete answers instead of search results, agents can resolve issues and requests faster without needing to ask users to repeat themselves. Now Assist for ITSM can also create contextual summaries of incidents and resolution notes, which helps organizations implement incident management best practices and resolve more incidents in less time.
• Now Assist for CSM streamlines the customer service process from beginning to end, leading to higher agent productivity, cost savings, and an improved customer experience. By rapidly generating summaries for cases and chats, Now Assist for CSM reduces manual work and allows agents to resolve customer issues faster. Customers also benefit from an improved self-service experience, with access to resources that help them find answers fast, leading to higher case deflection and cost reduction.
• Now Assist for HR helps HR leaders drive productivity and operational efficiency, reduces redundant, manual tasks for HR teams, and gets employees the answers they need quickly with little disruption to their day. HR managers can handle issues from payroll discrepancies to paperwork changes without needing to sift through loads of information by reviewing instant summaries of case topics, previous history from live chat and Virtual Agent interactions, as well as previous resolutions and actions taken. This gives HR teams the context they need to solve problems quickly and confidently.
• Now Assist for Creator helps development teams create and scale apps more quickly on the Now Platform. Now Assist for Creator includes the general availability of text-to-code, which converts natural language text prompts into executable code for the ServiceNow Platform. Additionally, code completion allows developers to start typing a line of code and quickly see code completion recommendations. Now Assist for Creator is trained on code from ServiceNow engineering, so it provides code that is higher quality, more scalable, and more secure than any other code generation technology.

AI embedded in the DNA of the Now Platform

ServiceNow’s generative AI strategy provides customers with broad and secure LLM support, through either general purpose LLMs or ServiceNow-developed models. General-purpose LLMs provide customer flexibility and currently include access to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service LLM and OpenAI API. Built into the ServiceNow platform, domain-specific LLMs are designed specifically for ServiceNow’s workflows, use cases, and processes, and are tailored to agents, employees, customers, and IT administrators who use ServiceNow. This allows for an excellent end-user experience, unprecedented time-to-market, and the highest levels of transparency and governance.

For example, features within Now Assist for Search are powered by a ServiceNow fine-tuned LLM based on the NVIDIA NeMo framework and served using NVIDIA Triton Inference Server software, both part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform. These features bring to market new capabilities built from the ServiceNow and NVIDIA partnership announced in May.

Pricing and availabilityWith the launch of Now Assist, ServiceNow also rolled out its generative AI pricing packages. These new SKUs allow customers to get started with Now Assist quickly and easily through pricing models built on a number of factors including value, flexibility, and simplicity. Details about generative AI pricing can be found here.All generative AI innovations announced today are part of ServiceNow’s Now Platform Vancouver release and will be generally available in the ServiceNow Store on Sept. 29 to all customers. Information about additional Vancouver innovations can be found here.

Yesterday, in line with its Q2 2023 financial results, ServiceNow made several significant announcements, including net-new generative AI capabilities and a first-of-its-kind program with NVIDIA and Accenture to accelerate generative AI innovation and adoption. This is timely, given all the discussion this week around AI, especially in terms of business impact and rising enterprise demand, and cross-industry partnerships. 

Here’s some more details on the news: 

• Introduced a first-of-its-kind program with NVIDIA and Accenture – AI Lighthouse – designed to fast-track the development and adoption of enterprise generative AI capabilities. Since May, ServiceNow has launched a slate of powerful generative AI capabilities, purpose built for the Now Platform, and has engaged with large pharmaceutical, financial services, manufacturing, and health care companies to test them in enterprise environments. The AI Lighthouse program will build on that early progress to collaborate on designing, developing, and implementing new generative AI use cases with a select group of customers across IT service management (ITSM), customer service management (CSM), and employee experience. Learn more HERE.

• Announced expanded generative AI capabilities, case summarization and text-to-code, which are powered by ServiceNow large language models (LLMs) to drive speed, productivity, and value for customers. ServiceNow also announced today its approach to commercialization with new premium SKU offerings across ITSM, CSM, and HR Service Delivery (HRSD), which will be available this September with the Now Platform Vancouver release. Learn more HERE.

• Announced an expanded partnership with KPMG, building on its recently announced AI-powered Finance and Supply Chain Workflows and focusing on intelligent automation, low-code, generative AI, and enterprise risk management. ServiceNow estimates there is a $11B total addressable market by 2025 for sourcing and procurement operations. Learn more HERE.

Today, at Knowledge 23, ServiceNow announced several major innovations and initiatives to accelerate intelligent automation across the enterprise, including innovative generative AI capabilities built into the Now Platform, new workflows for the critical work of Finance, Procurement, and Supply Chain leaders, an AI-powered skills intelligence solution to supercharge employee growth and development, as well as a new initiative to digitally transform non-profits’ critical work.    

New features and capabilities include (more innovations are included within the media kit):  

• Generative AI solutions that expand ServiceNow’s already extensive AI functionality with built-in capabilities, which apply the power of generative AI to enterprise applications.  

• New Finance and Supply Chain workflows to automate procurement, accounts payable, and other critical processes. These workflows represent a major expansion of the ServiceNow portfolio as the company continues to extend the reach of the Now Platform to new personas industries, and geographies to propel its growth. 
• Employee Growth and Development, a new AI-powered solution that helps organizations predict, identify, and develop skills that will have the greatest impact on the business and close talent gaps. Underpinned by AI, EGD will guide employees and their managers through career plans, development goals, and learning resources on a single platform. 

• ServiceNow Cloud Observability powered by Lightstep to manage the growing scale and complexity of cloud infrastructure, bringing observability metrics, tracing, and logging together in a single solution. 

• ServiceNow.org, an initiative to digitally transform non-profits’ critical work.  

• New partner courses for ServiceNow’s Rise Up training and development program with Microsoft as the first partner. Individuals can build foundational knowledge on ServiceNow and Microsoft that expands the skills ecosystem from which organizations can find and hire talent to excel on both platforms.  

• Its annual Global Impact Report and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Report, providing an update on the company’s progress against its commitments and plans to drive meaningful, sustainable change going forward. 

The new solutions and initiatives address the complex needs of businesses today for ServiceNow’s 7,700+ customers—targeting growth and speed, while boosting cost efficiency; investing in technology while advancing talent development; and increasing productivity without slowing innovation. 

ServiceNow today announced the release of one of the world’s most responsibly developed and strongest‑performing open‑access large language model (LLM) for code generation. Led by ServiceNow Research and Hugging Face, the open‑access, open‑science, and open‑governance 15 billion parameter StarCoder LLM makes generative AI more transparent and accessible to enable responsible innovation at scale.

The StarCoder model is designed to level the playing field so developers from organizations of all sizes can harness the power of generative AI and maximize the business impact of automation with the proper governance, safety, and compliance protocols. This new LLM marks the next major milestone in the BigCode Project, an ambitious initiative to develop state‑of‑the‑art AI systems for code in an open and responsible manner with the support of the open‑scientific AI research community.

Trained with a trillion tokens of permissively licensed source code covering over 80 programming languages from BigCode’s The Stack v1.2 dataset, StarCoder can be deployed to bring pair‑programing like generative AI to applications with capabilities like text‑to‑code and text‑to‑workflow. With this, StarCoder gives professional software engineers the power to tackle the most complex programming challenges and empowers citizen developers to build new software regardless of technical ability—accelerating AI innovation at scale. The model will be released with open‑access on the Hugging Face platform Code Open RAIL‑M license to permit royalty‑free distribution. Unlike traditional open‑source software released without use case restrictions, BigCode releases the model with a responsible AI model license that includes use case restrictions that apply to modifications of the model, and applications using the model ‑ for example, to restrict the models from being used to generate or distribute malicious code to harm electronic systems. Supporting code has been open sourced on the BigCode project’s GitHub.

ServiceNow Research and Hugging Face, which works on some of the world’s largest AI and LLM initiatives, launched the joint BigCode Project in September 2022. The project continues to operate as an open scientific collaboration, as the two companies harness the collective brainpower and resources from the open‑source community through BigCode working groups, task forces, and meetups.

Through partnerships with leading research organizations like Hugging Face, ServiceNow is fueling the development of state‑of‑the‑art generative AI with socially responsible contributions back to the AI research and development community. This includes the company’s partnership with Mila, the Quebec AI Institute, to bridge the demands of advanced AI research. The Mila collaboration will nurture ties with academia by providing the broader research community with enterprise AI experience. ServiceNow also continues to invest internally in AI research and development to build AI‑powered experiences that are reliable and safe, and that users can trust.

Beyond key partnerships and collaborations, ServiceNow is continuously embedding enterprise AI capabilities across the Now Platform to fulfill its mission of being the world’s most intelligent platform for end‑to‑end digital transformation. In the last three years alone, ServiceNow has expanded its portfolio with several notable AI acquisitions, including Attivio, Element AI, and Hitch Works, bringing practical, purpose‑built AI capabilities to the Now Platform. Most recently, ServiceNow introduced new AI‑based tools within the Now Platform Utah release to help organizations maximize efficiency, accelerate ROI, and create more simplified, connected experiences.

For more information on StarCoder, please visit https://huggingface.co/bigcode.

ServiceNow, the leading digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, today announced a major platform expansion with the Now Platform Utah release. Utah is built to help organizations future‑proof their businesses and drive outcomes faster in the face of continued economic uncertainty. The latest version of the intelligent, end‑to‑end platform for digital transformation includes AI‑powered process mining with robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities, additional search enhancements, expanded Workforce Optimization, and Health and Safety Incident Management, all designed to help increase automation, simplify experiences, and offer greater organizational agility.

According to IDC, spending on digital technology will grow eight times faster than the economy in 202¹, and by 2026, 40% of total revenue for G2000 organizations will be generated by digital products, services, and experiences. Even as technology budgets increase, leaders are going through a “great reprioritization” of tech investments based on the need for near‑term organizational impact and time to value.

Accelerating impact with purposeful automation

According to the 2023 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey, 46% of the organizations polled expect to increase spend on application modernization, and 50% will increase their spend on cloud platforms. As organizations increasingly digitize, ServiceNow helps deliver more value by orchestrating work across silos to multiply productivity and accelerate automation, now with new AI‑powered features including:

• AI Search, now built into ServiceNow’s Next Experience, uses AI and natural language processing to help service delivery workers find the information they need to do their jobs more effectively and resolve customer issues faster. AI Search also includes advanced features like auto‑complete suggestions, exact match, and typo handling – allowing users to go directly to a record, to more quickly identify relevant materials that can help them resolve an issue.
• Process Optimization has been expanded to support workflows beyond IT Service Management (ITSM) to other workflows within the Now Platform, such as Field Service Management (FSM) and more. With improved, AI‑powered visibility into hidden inefficiencies, organizations can apply those recommendations with ServiceNow’s RPA solution to optimize process efficiencies and performance to help cut costs and improve customer satisfaction. 
• Workforce Optimization capabilities have been enhanced and expanded to support workflows beyond ITSM and Customer Service Management, into areas like HR Service Delivery and more. For example, Workforce Optimization now also gives HR managers a central place to understand and optimize their employee bases (or teams). Leaders and managers can maximize the quality of work performed by employees, teams, and departments so businesses can perform at the highest level without significantly increasing costs.
• Document Intelligence allows customers to accelerate and automate AI‑enabled text extraction from documents, saving time and eliminating human errors. The Utah release includes a more streamlined user experience so process owners can easily build, personalize, and monitor document processing. Document Intelligence also can automatically pull massive amounts of data from long tables in documents like invoices and purchase orders to expedite things like payroll, finance, and procurement processes.
• ServiceNow Impact is the industry’s first solution designed to help customers accelerate the return on their digital transformation investments. Enhancements to performance tools, as well as new Impact accelerators, are available in the Utah release. These additions help platform owners better manage system health and reduce the time it takes to bring critical dashboards online, for better visibility into the status of digital transformation initiatives.

Minimizing operational and security risk with solutions to boost agility

“Globally, the constant barrage of risk events, incidents, and disruptions have become so frequent that the increased level of risk is the ’new normal,’” according to Forrester. To help organizations navigate an increasingly complex threat environment in the hybrid world of work, the Utah release empowers customers to innovate faster, operate with more agility, and manage increasing operational and cyber risk. New capabilities include:

• Health and Safety Incident Management helps leaders foster a culture of wellness and productivity with tools that make it easier to report and resolve safety incidents and assign corrective and preventative actions for those incidents, while connecting siloes and reducing costs.

• Security Incident Response Workspace, part of ServiceNow’s Next Experience, allows security analysts to examine incidents within a central workspace, so they can be more efficient in urgent moments and analyze the growing volume of data associated with security incidents. Customers can build assessments and analyze reports within one workspace, and leverage Process Automation Designer to manage multiple workflows with no‑code playbooks.
• Operational Resilience Workspace, also part of ServiceNow’s Next Experience, provides an enterprise‑wide view of critical risk information, such as issues, vulnerabilities, outages, and failed controls, for greater visibility, fast decision‑making, and improved organizational performance. The new product experience increases productivity and simplifies navigation while a 360‑degree view of dependencies and resilience metrics provides contextual understanding of upstream and downstream impacts across the organization.
• Log Export Service simplifies security and performance monitoring for Now Platform implementations. Building on ServiceNow Vault – which protects business‑critical applications – this solution seamlessly incorporates ServiceNow system and application logs into enterprise security analytics tools.

Simplifying experiences for smarter ways of working

To succeed in today’s highly competitive environment, organizations must find new ways to realize the full potential of their workforces and maximize engagement and productivity. The Now Platform Utah release introduces more simplified, unified admin and agent experiences across Next Experience, so employees work smarter and get more done, while delivering excellent experiences for customers. It also introduces a better way to create a connected workplace with insights to inform planning and make the most of office space. New capabilities include:

• Theme Builder allows customers to easily create and manage branded themes via an intuitive interface that helps users create and preview a branded, personalized look and feel. These capabilities help organizations deliver consumer‑grade experiences that work for everyone.
• Enterprise Architect Workspace allows users to gain control of app redundancy and limit unnecessary spending as organizations look to do more with less. This workspace provides a consolidated user experience for enterprise architects to make smarter decisions across their app portfolios while reducing risk and cost.
• Workplace Lease Administration arms facility managers with powerful data and insights so they can more effectively track contracts and make informed decisions about office space while controlling costs. As the role of the physical office continues to evolve with the reality of hybrid work, additional enhancements to Workplace Space Management unlock insights for workplace leaders to re‑design workspaces that respond to employee needs.

Availability

The Now Platform Utah release is generally available today.

Additional information:

• Check out our Now Platform Utah release landing page
• Watch a demo on:
  • Process Optimization
  • Workforce Optimization
  • Health and Safety
  • Next Experience – Security Incident Response Workspace
  • Next Experience – Service Operations
  • Next Experience – ITAM
  • Theme Builder
• ServiceNow’s SVP of Platform, Jon Sigler, shares additional insights and innovations from the latest Now Platform Utah release in his blog.