ServiceNow today added a range of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to its Now platform, including a Creator Studio no-code tool designed to enable anyone to build applications for the ServiceNow App Engine platform.
Announced at the ServiceNow Knowledge 2024 conference, Creator Studio provides a means for end users to build and deploy applications with little to no intervention required on the part of professional developers or an internal IT team.
In addition, ServiceNow has also bolstered task automation via deeper integration with its robotic process automation (RPA) platform to enable, for example, the automatic runs of a playbook created with the help of large language models (LLMs) in response to a specific event.
ServiceNow is extending its Automation Center to streamline the onboarding of services in addition to adding tools to track return on investment (ROI).
The overall goal is to reduce that current level of application development backlog that exists in organizations such as NASCAR, says Jithin Bhasker, general manager and vice president for App Engine at ServiceNow. In fact, many applications that organizations would like to deploy are never built because there simply isn’t enough expertise, he adds. “We want to drive and empower every employee in an enterprise,” says Bhasker.
The challenge is enabling organizations to achieve that goal in a way that ensures governance policies that, for example, ensure compliance requirements are met, notes Bhasker. ServiceNow today extended its alliances with Genesys, Fujitsu Ltd. and Infosys to enable organizations to achieve that goal.
ServiceNow is also extending the scope of the AI capabilities of Now Assist, its core service management platform. Now Assist for Creator, for example, provides a no-code tool to access manage prompts and invoke LLMs to generate service catalogs and knowledge articles, playbooks, summarizations and build associated applications. ServiceNow is also using generative AI to streamline the management of alerts across its platform for using AI to automate IT Operations, dubbed Now Assist for ITOM AIOps.
Additionally, ServiceNow is fulfilling a promise to enable organizations to bring your own (BYO) GenAI model to its Now Assist applications, which, depending on the use cases, are designed to invoke multiple LLMs.
It’s not clear how the rise of AI will transform the role of IT teams, but the number of applications that are about to be deployed will soon increase exponentially. Historically, application developers have acted as an intermediary between humans and machines using tools and programming languages, but with the rise of generative AI it’s now possible for machines to interact directly with humans. ServiceNow is making a case for an integrated software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that makes it simpler to centrally apply generative AI using multiple LLMs as required across a more integrated set of workflows, based on a common set of data.
Exactly how many applications might be created using tools such as Creator Studio is unclear, but there may soon come a day when every workflow is automated to varying degrees using AI. Many applications, in fact, are simply never created because the existing application development backlog is too large for organizations to even consider building them.
The one thing that is certain is IT teams will be needed to govern what soon may become thousands of applications that in many ways are becoming increasingly disposable as it becomes much simpler to iteratively build them in near real time.
