“There’s always a moment when the line is drawn between yesterday and tomorrow. This is that moment.”
Those are the words of Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, as he celebrated the recent launch of the AI Experience by ServiceNow.
Essentially, AI Experience by ServiceNow is a multi-modal interface that stretches across the ServiceNow AI Platform.
From the interface, employees may tap AI agents, which can access ServiceNow apps, workflows, and data.
In this sense, the AI Experience by ServiceNow becomes an enterprise’s operational center point.
Businesses can consolidate AI agents working across applications from this center point, and users can tap them to complete tasks – relevant to their jobs – via a conversational, role-based interface.
As McDermott summarized:
Now, the way you work changes forever because AI is the new UI.
ServiceNow customers can deploy AI Experience via its AI Control Tower, enabling AI agents that don’t just work within the ServiceNow ecosystem but across third-party solutions, too.
These AI agents fit into three distinct groups:
- AI Web Agents that navigate the web like a human would.
- AI Voice Agents that enable conversational self-service experiences.
- Build Agents that “instantly” create apps via natural language prompts.
Yet, the interface also offers two more fascinating features.
First is an AI Data Explorer that pulls out data from the ServiceNow ecosystem for analysis.
Second is an AI Lens that extracts data from screens, forms, and images, which ServiceNow customers can inject into their various workflows.
All this may seem quite technical. However, it won’t just change how IT works. Ultimately, ServiceNow aims to empower various business users with role-based AI agents and solutions.
Consider sales and service leaders who use ServiceNow CRM. From a new role-based UI, they can extract ticket data and utilize AI agents to spot patterns and suggest remedial action.
That’s a powerful vision for customer experience technology, and technology in a much broader sense.
ServiceNow Is Investing in AI Usability
ServiceNow isn’t the first to consider laying an AI interface over its applications. For instance, Salesforce has a similar vision with its freshly revamped Slack. Meanwhile, Workday scooped Sana to provide that UI for AI.
However, given that ServiceNow is already in many enterprise IT departments and has built “thousands” of AI agents to complete tasks across its ecosystem and beyond, this is an especially significant move.
Indeed, Rebecca Wettemann, CEO & Principal Analyst at Valoir, believes the AI Experience by ServiceNow could be a real shot in the arm for AI adoption.
“When we think about AI today, the focus is really on adoption, how to get people using it productively and achieving business outcomes,” she told CX Today for an upcoming episode of its Big News Show.
ServiceNow is investing in usability: making AI more intuitive and embedded in the flow of work.
Wetteman concluded: “Everyone’s moving beyond just the technical aspects – the LLMs and algorithms – to ask: How do I get users to actually use this and make it stick?” Now, ServiceNow hopes to provide the answer.
The Role-Based User Interfaces
What’s really new with the AI Experience by ServiceNow is the user experience.
As Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, stressed: “ServiceNow is introducing role-aware, functionally focused interfaces. So if you’re in CRM, you’ll see CRM-specific insights and recommendations.
The UI itself will increasingly be generated by AI, contextual, adaptive, and built around the user’s role. That’s how you drive adoption.
As SAP and Oracle also touted “role-based AI” in big announcements earlier this month, expect this to become a term much more widely used, with ServiceNow ahead of the curve.
ServiceNow’s Control Tower Remains Critical
As noted, enterprises can deploy AI Experience via the ServiceNow AI Control Tower.
With these two innovations, ServiceNow customers can centralize security, governance, and monitoring.
Moreover, ServiceNow customers will be able to deliver a better understanding of AI use and demonstrate value.
Making this point, Wetteman added:
Through Control Tower, customers can see dashboards showing how many workflows they’ve automated, what productivity gains they’ve achieved, and where adoption is strong or lagging.
“It’s not just a quarterly report, it’s visibility right in the product,” she continued. “That’s going to be a differentiator and push others to catch up.”
That ties into ServiceNow’s broader mission. After all, it has long called itself the platform of platforms. Whether the platform is data, workflow, or now AI, ServiceNow wants to be the layer that unites them all.
The biggest barrier to AI adoption has been understanding, and visibility like this – seeing exactly how AI is performing – is what helps overcome that.
For more from Wetteman, Miller, and several other respected industry analysts on this announcement, Oracle’s new role-based AI agents, and the big PG Forsta takeover by Qualtrics, stay tuned for CX Today’s next Big News Update.
Don’t want to miss it? Subscribe to the CX Today Newsletter.
