Digital workflow company ServiceNow yesterday introduced the Utah release of its Now Platform, which it said is designed to help organizations future-proof their businesses and drive outcomes faster in times of economic uncertainty.
This upgrade to Tokyo, which was released in September 2022, the company said, “includes AI-powered process mining, expanded Workforce Optimization, and Health and Safety Incident Management,” designed to increase automation and improve organizational agility.
CJ Desai, president and chief operating officer (COO) with the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, said that organizations “no longer need to choose between speed and innovation, or great experiences and business growth.
“Our latest release is designed for this moment – empowering organizations to maximize efficiency, accelerate ROI on digital spend, and create simplified, connected experiences across their entire value chain.”
New features include:
- AI Search, now built into ServiceNow’s Next Experience, which 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, the company said. AI Search also includes “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, which has been expanded to support workflows beyond IT Service Management (ITSM) to other capabilities within the Now Platform, such as Field Service Management (FSM). With improved visibility into hidden inefficiencies, organizations can leverage ServiceNow’s AI-powered process mining offering to maximize process performance and deliver actionable insights, helping cut costs and improving 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. 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, the company said.
- Service Now Impact, which the company described as the “first” offering designed to help organizations “accelerate the return on their digital transformation investments. Enhancements to performance tools, as well as new impact accelerators, are available in the Utah release.”
In an interview with IT World Canada on Tuesday, Jon Sigler, the senior vice president who oversees Now Platform development, said there were two key areas, “we really wanted to focus on” with the upgrade.
One, he said was to “continue to build out the new user interface (UI) layer, and you’re seeing a lot of workspaces come out of our product teams, that is based off of that technology. We (also) worked with our customers, to figure out exactly what we should be doing to provide what we now call the Intelligent Platform.”
Enhancements have been made after dialogue with not only ServiceNow customers, he said, but with the organization’s partner channel, adding that both are critical to the company’s overall success.
To that end, new capabilities in the final release of Utah include:
- Health and Safety Incident Management, designed to help company executives foster a culture of wellness and productivity with tools that make it easier to report and resolve safety incidents and assign corrective and preventive actions for those incidents, while connecting silos and reducing costs.
- Workplace Lease Administration, which arms facility managers with 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.
- 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, according to a release, can build assessments and analyze reports within one workspace, and leverage Process Automation Designer to manage multiple workflows with no-code playbooks.
In terms of customers transitioning to Utah from Tokyo (in keeping with the naming of each version after a city and in alphabetic order, Vancouver will be next), Sigler said he expects a “very high percentage of customers” to make the move, but conceded “they do need time to test, so typically they will install the Utah release into a sub product before they start rolling it out.”
Asked about the company’s plans for Generative AI, Sigler said, “believe me, there will be things around Gen AI” added when the quarterly upgrade release of Utah occurs later this year.
“From a timing perspective, for Utah, our drive path to getting it to GA (general availability)-ready, meaning fixing bugs and performance (happened) a long time ago. And so for me, it’s this interesting period of time, because we’re heads down figuring out exactly what we’re going to do with Gen AI. But in Utah, we wanted to make to make sure that the platform does what it does really well.”
In terms of Canadian pricing, a spokesperson for the company said “every enterprise customer has different needs. ServiceNow customers can reach out to their ServiceNow rep for specific pricing details.”