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Enterprise workflow solutions provider ServiceNow plans to release updates to its Now Assist AI platform, including a new feature enabling enterprises to bring AI agents to workflows.
Now Assist, ServiceNow’s AI productivity platform, will offer a library of AI agents and the ability for clients to build prompts and skills into AI agents through the Now Assist Skill Kit. The feature will let them “build, test, and deploy new generative AI skills and their underlying prompts, and assign these skills to applications.”
Now Assist Skill Kit will let companies assign these gen AI skills to AI agents, where the agent essentially becomes customized to their workflows because the agents learn how to manage the business alongside employees.
Dorit Zilbershot, vice president of AI at ServiceNow, told VentureBeat in an interview that ServiceNow wanted to give clients as much control as they wish around the agents and how much work it will do for them.
“We’re building in a way that is human-centric, making sure that our customers have true collaboration between AI and people,” Zilbershot said. “Our customers have all the control to decide how much or how little human oversight they want, from having the agent always asking for approval to the AI agent figuring it out itself.”
ServiceNow senior vice president for Platform Engineering Joe Davis said the company will provide a collection of expert agents “for these specific tasks that users can turn on very easily or create custom solutions.”
As part of that collection of agents, ServiceNow will launch its first two AI agent use cases, one for customer service management and another for IT service management, in November 2024. Davis said ServiceNow agents will pull information from multimodal inputs like voice and images in the future.
Orchestrating agents
Zilbershot said ServiceNow’s approach to agentic AI involves taking multiple AI agents that talk to each other and have knowledge of the company’s underlying data. This way, users can fully automate some workflows or have AI agents working on only one thing.
“We’re taking the true agentic AI approach, meaning that you have a multi-agent system that is able to operate on your behalf, so you have an AI agent who’s the orchestrator, and then you have AI agents specializing in a specific task,” she said.
AI agents, of course, have been a hot topic for many companies, and many AI developers are coming out with agents that are either specifically trained to do one thing or a larger framework for enterprises to customize their agents.
And it’s getting investor attention. In the past week alone, the Texas-based startup Fastn announced $2.6 million in seed funding for its data integration AI agent, and the Y Combinator-backed Paradigm received $2 million for its spreadsheet agent that can fill in 500 cells per minute.
The AI search and productivity platform You.com, which raised $50 million last week on the back of higher demand for AI-based workplace productivity offerings, had predicted a future where most web searches are done by AI agents rather than humans.
ServiceNow’s AI agent feature is more of a way for enterprises to create or customize an already-built AI agent rather than an agent itself. In this, ServiceNow follows other companies that have slowly begun to roll out similar features. Amazon announced Agents for Bedrock in July last year, which makes automated API calls on behalf of developers.
What else is in the Now Assist updates
The ability to customize AI agents is not the only update to Now Assist.
The platform will now have data visualization generation, chat and email reply generation, change summarization specifically so IT teams can follow change requests quickly, and LLM-based prompts that will send employees and managers timely HR reminders.
Now Assist can also “talk” to Microsoft’s Copilot for Microsoft 365. The feature, now generally available, connects tasks on Now Assist to Copilot. For example, users on Microsoft Teams can call up Copilot and ask it to order a new laptop or find company policies on Now Assist.
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