ServiceNow is a powerful AI-driven platform that accelerates digital transformation by streamlining workflows, automating processes, and enhancing collaboration across enterprises.
Being one of the leading enterprise platforms, ServiceNow keeps adding new features with yearly updates on the names of famous cities like Washington, Vancouver, Utah, and so on. Recently, ServiceNow introduced the Xanadu release with expanded features and solutions, enabling smarter experiences and faster deployments.
Xanadu includes new products, applications, and key enhancements to existing tools, making it one of the most comprehensive ServiceNow releases yet. The rollout begins with Early Availability on August 1, 2024, in Q3, with additional updates, including patches and security improvements, arrived on September 10, 2024.
Xanadu optimized the AI-ready Now Platform for enhanced speed and scalability, empowering employees, customers, and developers in every industry to leverage actionable AI for greater productivity and innovation.
Key Highlights of ServiceNow Xanadu
The latest ServiceNow Xanadu release is one of the biggest releases of ServiceNow, with hundreds of features and capabilities to enhance productivity and improve employee experiences. Let’s have a look at some of the mission-critical platform’s enhancements for connected experiences:
1. AI-purpose built for every industry
ServiceNow has developed a strategy for utilizing the full potential of Now Assist automation for tailored needs in industries such as retail, operations, telecommunications, technology, public sector, and banking.
2. Making AI actionable
The Xanadu release has made Now Assist take measurable actions with all built-on-a-single-platform features like new analytics generation, custom AI skills development, reply recommendations, and native integration with Microsoft 365 and Slack.
3. Service and operational resiliency
The new Xanadu release is focused on improving responsiveness with dynamic alert tagging. Event and Service Reliability Management can help you better manage your work by delivering operational insights to service delivery teams.
4. Speed, scale, and data for ServiceNow customers
Quickly process and analyze any data at a massive scale, feeding AI models and improving workflows across operations, employees, and customers with RaptorDB.
12 AI-Driven Capabilities of ServiceNow Xanadu for Enhanced Business Efficiency
1. Agentic AI
With this release ServiceNow plans to integrate agentic AI which will be available 24/7 to assist you, perform tasks autonomously, and make decisions on their own within set parameters.
2. Data visualization generation
Xanadu’s release includes interactive visualizations in a simple conversational experience through data visualization generation to allow businesses to make faster decision-making & smarter insights. It has also:
- Empowered users with any level of data expertise to easily create analytics visualizations.
- Facilitate informed decision-making through instant access to dynamically updated analytics.
- Unlock continuous data exploration and refinement of analytics insights for business users.
3. Chat and email reply generation
To improve MTTR and customer satisfaction with faster responses, Xanadu increased agent productivity with auto-generated, context-aware reply recommendations and quickly refined generated responses if needed for chat, emails, and knowledge articles.
4. Now Assist skill kit
Previous Now Assist releases did not allow customers to create or configure custom Now Assist skills. Now, the platform feature will enable partners and customers to develop new, custom prompts & skills for agent use cases. The Now Assist Skill Kit empowers AI practitioners through a single-UI development experience. Custom prompts & skills for agent use cases can be augmented with data across the ServiceNow platform, which can be exposed across core UI components. With the Now Assist Skill Kit, you can:
- Easily build, test, configure, and publish Now Assist skills.
- Create GenAI skills and underlying prompts.
- Connect to platform data seamlessly to improve context and accuracy.
- Select providers (models) and deployment locations.
5. Microsoft Copilot integration
ServiceNow and Microsoft partnered to elevate work experience with integrated GenAI experience for unmatched productivity. The collaboration introduces an innovative paradigm where GenAI solutions, each expert in specific tasks, can communicate and seamlessly hand off tasks to one another. This increases productivity and ensures that employees have the support they need when they need it. The seamless and native integration allows employees to tap into the vast capabilities of ServiceNow directly from within MS Teams Copilot. Whether it’s increasing deflection intelligently, automating service requests, or engaging with ServiceNow’s rich data and GenAI capabilities.
6. Slack integration
ServiceNow’s Slack integration is a native, out-of-the-box connection with Now Assist and the Now Platform. With the integration, customers can request catalog items conversationally directly in Slack, search for KB, or interact with the Virtual Agent or live agent.
7. RaptorDB
As customers continue to introduce additional workloads from their enterprise into the Now Platform, RaptorDB Pro is uniquely positioned to support those customers with a database that is optimized for speed and scale when compared to the existing database, MariaDB. With RaptorDB Pro, companies can improve their overall transaction times, run reports, analytics, and list views faster, and increase transactional throughput so they can support more users and more workflows on their ServiceNow instance.
8. ServiceNow IDE
ServiceNow IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a tightly integrated code development experience for the Now Platform. With the Xanadu release, you can empower your Visual Studio developers to partner with the business and innovate on the ServiceNow platform. You can create author-scoped applications with source code and compile and execute code directly within the IDE. The new version easily integrates with familiar Git providers and authentication methods.
9. 350+ Out-of-the-box Now Assist capabilities
Along with data visualization, chat and email reply generation, change summaries, LLM-based proactive prompts in Virtual Agent, and hundreds of other features, the Xanadu release has majorly added Now Assist for SecOps and Sourcing and Procurement Operations.
1. Now Assist for SecOps: Now Assist for SecOps promises to boost response times to security threats by transferring interactions with AI-driven incident summarizations and interactive Q&A to prioritize and respond to each security event automatically. As a result, they can better scale incident response protocols, accelerating the assessment, prioritization, and response process for critical security threats.
2. Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations: Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations makes the procurement intake process simple and seamless for submitting requests, which results in greater compliance and accuracy while minimizing friction with fulfillment. Employees can initiate a procurement request or access information through a conversational prompt. It also reduces the time it takes to receive, review, and complete tasks, freeing up more of their day to focus on higher-level work.
10. Process summarization – Change, incident, case, and problem summarization
Powered by Now Assist ITSM, it allows teams to summarize change requests, incidents, cases, and problem summarization to assess related data quickly. This enables IT teams to make more informed decisions about the impacts of processes, improving agent productivity and decreasing cycle times while minimizing risks.
11. LLM- based proactive prompts
LLM-based proactive prompts, powered by Now Assist HRSD, proactively engage employees and managers with relevant and timely reminders to complete tasks like approving a travel request, finishing mandatory training, or submitting career goals. It is designed to provide more streamlined work experience through conversational GenAI-enabled prompts by Virtual Agent.
12. Knowledge Article summarization
Xanadu has upgraded its Knowledge Dashboard features so that authors and agents can quickly draft knowledge articles from their workspace or classic environment with the help of Now Assist. It can be generated by selecting a list of similar cases or case numbers or searching keywords specific to cases.
Overall upgrading to ServiceNow Xanadu is essential for any business who wants to boost customer agility, enhance productivity, and improve employee experiences. Some of the upcoming ServiceNow release is Yokohama which will release in 2025. Refer here for more detailed notes on Xanadu.
Upgrade your ServiceNow with a trusted ServiceNow Premier Partner
Upgrading to ServiceNow Xanadu is the best option when it comes to improve experiences with AI and stay ahead of the competition. The improved performance and enhanced conversational capabilities facilitate smooth chats, greater customer satisfaction, and faster issue resolution, enabling businesses to streamline workflows and maintain a competitive edge.
As an expert ServiceNow Premier Partner, Aelum Consulting has specializations across ServiceNow ITSM, ITOM, HRSD, TSM and more. Along with our 150+ certified ServiceNow technical consultants and architects, we help you bring together the best of ServiceNow’s capabilities.
