ServiceNow Brings Generative AI to IT Workflows, Lucid Upgrades Visual Collaboration Platform, More News
Many of the vendors that have charged into the generative AI space have focused on productivity applications, but ServiceNow has taken a slightly different approach.
The company announced a partnership this week with Nvidia to use generative AI to improve workflow automation in key areas of the enterprise, including IT departments, customer service and HR.
The partnership between the two Santa Clara, Calif.-based companies was announced at ServiceNow's Knowledge 2023 conference in Las Vegas. The two will work together to develop custom large language models trained on data specifically for its ServiceNow Platform. According to a statement from the company, ServiceNow will use Nvidia’s NeMo foundation models as a starting point.
The NeMo service is a cloud-based service that offers customizable models in specific areas that enterprises can build on. This approach avoids building models on data from the public domain, thus avoiding the "hallucinations" common to ChatGPT and the like, a problem for any industry where high degrees of accuracy in AI outputs are needed.
By using domain-specific enterprise data to train models for specific industries, this partnership avoids such problems.
The partnership will expand ServiceNow’s existing AI functionality and apply generative AI to the IT workflows to start, with plans for use in employee and developer workflows in the works.
As cited by VentureBeat, Nvidia's VP of AI/ML for IT Rama Akkiraju said the partnership and the LLMs it develops will offer Nvidia targeted IT service management and IT operations management including support ticket summarization and resolution, incident predictions and the likely severity of those incidents as well as semantic search for IT polices using a centralized chatbot.
For its part, ServiceNow will streamline Nvidia’s IT operations by using Nvidia data to customize NeMo foundation models. The companies also expect to adapt the technology to enhance employee experiences by identifying possible areas of employee development and training possibilities.
ServiceNow's $1B AI Fund
That wasn't the only digital workplace news coming out of Knowledge 2023. Another item worth flagging is the company's plan to invest $1 billion into its venture arm by 2026. Created in 2015, the venture arm has already invested $300 million in 45 companies.
Last month, it became a strategic partner and anchor investor in Smith Point Capital Fund I, an enterprise software-focused venture investment firm founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block.
A statement from the company explained it would use the money to focus on three specific areas:
- Investing in emerging companies that are developing innovative technologies that will complete and add value to ServiceNow’s platform, workflows and end markets.
- Expanding the ServiceNow ecosystem.
- Scaling industry-leading software companies.
At a time when high interest rates and inflation are making fundraising difficult, this is welcome news. For companies specifically adapting cutting-edge technology for the digital workplace, the fund is particularly interesting. The statement adds, “Core investment areas include AI, ML, hyper automation, distributed cloud, total experience, and data intelligence.”
While this clearly addresses emerging generative AI technologies, it also promises help for those working in areas like edge computing and the cloud.
Though 2026 is a long time away in technology development years, the demand for investment will be, if anything, greater than it is now.
Lucid Updates Visual Collaboration Platform
Elsewhere, South Jordan, Utah-based Lucid Software has also made several upgrades to its visual collaboration suite.
Most notably, Lucid announced the addition of Collaborative AI to its Lucid Intelligence Platform, which brings AI to brainstorming. The platform already offers capabilities that automate the creation of visuals and connects visuals with data. The new capabilities include:
- Collaborative AI: Introduces AI-enhanced brainstorming and collaboration features that integrate seamlessly into existing workflows.
- Visual Activities: Provides a library of dynamic activity templates to help facilitators engage and gather feedback from their teams.
- Universal Canvas: Connects work, ideas and documentation so teams can easily switch between Lucidchart and Lucidspark as they move throughout a project workflow.
- Team Space: Brings together all project resources, centralizes communication and collaboration around both Lucid and other documents.
According to Lucid, the updates address one of the major issues identified in a new survey that the company unveiled with the release: lack of team alignment.
The company conducted an online survey of 2,196 knowledge workers between April 21 and May 2, 2023, and screened from a population of 5,829 full-time staff, aged 25- to 64-years-old.
The survey found that 46% of employees are frustrated or annoyed by the lack of team alignment, and spend five hours per week searching for information they need to do their jobs. Some of the other findings are also telling. They show that:
- Nearly half of the respondents (47%) reported that some projects fail to meet their objectives due to alignment issues.
- Half of respondents (50%) are asking for time to align before embarking on a new project.
- 46% express annoyance or frustration as a result of the lack of alignment.
- 36% say talented staff members are leaving organizations due to alignment problems.
The competitive market Lucid is part of includes other established collaboration vendors also pursing visual collaboration strategies.
Learning Opportunities
For example, San Francisco-based Box began rolling out Box Canvas at the end of April, a virtual whiteboarding and visual collaboration tool built natively into Box. It had been out in beta since the beginning of the year, and the company has since added new formatting tools and communication options to help hybrid teams hold better brainstorming and ideation sessions.
Lucid was founded in 2010 and has raised $670.5 million to date, according to Crunchbase.
Zoom Partners with Anthropic for Claude Chatbot
Following the early April announcement that it was bring OpenAI’s GPT to Zoom IQ, Zoom has now announced a partnership with San Francisco-based Anthropic to bring its Claude chatbot into the Zoom platform and specifically, to the Zoom Contact Center.
Zoom plans to add Claude to Team Chat, Meetings, Phone, Whiteboard and Zoom IQ next. ZoomIQ is due to add GPT-4 sometime this month.
In a post about the partnership, Zoom’s new chief product officer Smita Hashim said the Anthropic partnerships “furthers our aim to provide customers with our federated approach to AI."
Zoom's “federated” AI approach, the company explained, allows it to use its own proprietary AI models, along with those from other AI companies and other customers’ models.
In the case of Zoom Contact Center, Claude will surface actionable insights that companies can use to train their agents and improve productivity.
As part of the partnership, Zoom Ventures will invest in Anthropic.
There is no set date for the launch of Anthropic-based functionality, but Zoom says it will work on it until it feels ready to bring it to market.
Boomi Launches Generative AI-driven Boomi AI
Finally this week, intelligent integration and automation solution provider Boomi launched Boomi AI. The company describes it as a solution that uses generative AI to connect and integrate applications, data, processes and people among other things across the platform.
Powered by Boomi’s approximately 20,000 customer base, Boomi AI uses anonymized metadata, patterns and best practices from the 200 million integrations made with the Boomi platform to train Boomi AI.
In doing so, it can create high-quality integrations, enabling customers to achieve tremendous gains in efficiency, operational improvements and other business outcomes. With it, organizations will be able to:
- Design Connections: It can design integration processes, application programming interfaces and master data models.
- Optimize Operations: Enables users to proactively facilitate predictive maintenance, automation updates and allocated resources.
- Orchestrate Experiences: Understands intent behind desired business outcomes to build processes across applications.
The Chesterbrook, Penn.-based company also stated it allows for responsible AI development as Boomi’s AI algorithms are trained to avoid biases and unfairness with what it says are “established ethical guidelines.”
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About the Author
David is a European-based journalist of 35 years who has spent the last 15 following the development of workplace technologies, from the early days of document management, enterprise content management and content services. Now, with the development of new remote and hybrid work models, he covers the evolution of technologies that enable collaboration, communications and work and has recently spent a great deal of time exploring the far reaches of AI, generative AI and General AI.
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