ServiceNow introduces new version of the Now Platform

ServiceNow has unveiled the Now Platform Quebec release. This latest version of the Now Platform features expanded native AI capabilities and new low-code app development tools, empowering customers to innovate quickly, realise fast time-to-value, improve productivity and deliver great experiences. With companies radically changing the way they operate and accelerating digital transformation, the Now Platform is enabling the digital speed, agility and resilience every business needs to create the future of work.

Nearly 80% of the Fortune 500 and thousands of organisations worldwide are relying on the Now Platform to help protect revenue, maintain business continuity, stay productive and safe, and deliver great experiences for their customers and employees. As organizations plan for supporting distributed workforces long-term, cross-functional workflows that create great experiences for customers and employees are critical. Digital investments are at an all-time high. According to IDC, worldwide digital transformation investments will total more than $7.8 trillion by 2024.¹

Industry leaders, including Nike, Adobe, Deutsche Telekom, Logitech, Medtronic, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and others are using the Now Platform to accelerate their digital transformation programs to deliver innovation, agility and productivity.

" In today’s challenging environment, organizations worldwide are pivoting fast, adopting new, distributed models of working and creating new workflow-enabled ways of operating with more agile, resilient, digital enterprise value chains,” said Chirantan “CJ” Desai, chief product officer at ServiceNow. “Customers are relying on ServiceNow's Now Platform to deliver enterprise digital workflows, create new business models, enhance productivity and enable great customer and employee experiences in any operating environment. This newest version of the Now Platform further enhances the must-have enterprise digital tools customers need today.”

“As businesses shift from emergency response to long-term recovery and distributed work becomes the norm, organizations are accelerating digital transformation efforts and investing in new technologies that promote continuity and agility,” said Philip Carter, Group Vice President, European Chief Analyst and WW C-Suite Tech Research lead at IDC. “The ability to deliver end-to-end digital experiences for employees and customers alike will be a crucial competitive differentiator. There is significant customer traction, accelerated by the pandemic, for unified technology platforms that connect systems, silos and processes to enable these connected, digital-first enterprise models.”

The low-code workflow revolution

ServiceNow today introduced Creator Workflows to join its existing IT, Employee and Customer Workflow portfolios to put the power of automation in the hands of the business, enabling people at every technical skill level to build apps at speed.

Creator Workflows feature ServiceNow’s low-code development tools, App Engine and IntegrationHub, which allow businesses to transform old, manual processes into modern, digital workflows at scale. With the Now Platform Quebec release, ServiceNow has introduced new products within Creator Workflows that let developers of every skill level build workflow apps fast:

• App Engine Studio accelerates app development at scale with a fast, intuitive and guided low-code visual development environment that empowers people with no coding experience to collaborate and build applications.
• App Engine Templates give teams access to pre-built workflow building blocks so that citizen developers can get a head start on building apps without having to start from scratch.

Low-code is becoming a strategic imperative for businesses to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. According to Gartner, “by 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity.”²

Several organizations, including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the City of Los Angeles, have turned to ServiceNow’s low-code App Engine to build custom end-to-end workflows that ensure these organisations can focus on delivering critical, lifesaving services to patients and citizens at scale during COVID.

With the Now Platform Quebec release, ServiceNow is helping organisations be more agile and adept at new ways of working. Leveraging one unified platform and data model, customers can continually monitor and optimize business processes to proactively identify and avoid bottlenecks and empower employees to work in an increasingly distributed fashion, as returning to the office becomes an option for some organizations. Three additional new workflow solutions include:

• Process Optimization enables IT and customer service organisations to visually create and improve the underlying processes driving workflows and to proactively identify and avoid process bottlenecks to speed issue resolution.
• Workforce Optimization provides a workspace for IT and customer service managers that helps organizations optimize productivity. The workspace monitors real-time agent productivity, workload and KPIs across multiple channels, resulting in improved customer experiences.
• Engagement Messenger extends self-service to 3rd party portals to enable AI search, Knowledge Management, Case and Virtual Agent interactions, which result in increased case deflection and improved customer satisfaction. 

Machine learning and native AI solutions for digital resiliency and business productivity

The Now Platform Quebec release allows organizations to enhance productivity with powerful, new, native AI capabilities. In addition to the need to innovate fast and deploy quickly at scale, customers need to deliver enterprise-wide, consumer grade digital tools that enhance productivity for more distributed workforces. New capabilities to enhance productivity include:

• ITOM Predictive AIOps predicts issues before they become problems and helps organisations automate resolutions.
• Virtual Agent enhancements accelerate time to value with guided setup and topic recommendations and speed incident resolution with end-to-end AI-powered conversational experiences.
• AI Search delivers a consumer-grade search experience for employees and customers, giving people the personalized, relevant, and actionable information they need right from their search window in service portals, on mobile, and Virtual Agent.

These new capabilities represent the AI functionality acquired with Loom Systems and Attivio, which have been incorporated in the Quebec release. The Now Platform Quebec release keeps work flowing with advanced AIOps capabilities and gives customers deeper insights into their digital operations to minimize and fix incidents before they become issues, delivering consumer-grade AI-driven experiences that harness personalized insights to help organizations work smarter and faster.

Great employee experiences for the new world of work

ServiceNow continues to create great employee experiences by helping employees find answers to questions and fulfilling employee requests across the enterprise – from HR and IT to legal and facilities. In addition to providing consumer-grade search experiences with AI search, ServiceNow announced new innovations to help organisations boost employee engagement across the enterprise, including Universal Request. Universal Request enables agents to collaborate and transfer tickets across departments while keeping employees informed of the status of their ticket so that employees can stay focused on their work without being concerned where the request is supposed to go.