ServiceNow Targets AI Business Value with Acquisition

A person of the means that enterprises have utilized the technologies powering artificial intelligence is as a usually means to gaining insights. For instance, they use it to listen for early warnings of modifying customer preferences or to detect a trouble with the source chain or to forecast when an IT asset will have to have routine maintenance or have to have to be taken out of provider.

But the insight alone won’t supply business price. If corporations want to recognize that business price, they must act on the insight. All those actions aren’t an automatic portion of AI.

Picture: Andrei – inventory.adobe.com

But ServiceNow’s Main AI Officer Vijay Narayanan believes they must be. He joined the ITSM firm in March 2020 with a vision to do just that.

Read through a lot more about AI in the enterprise right here:

How to Generate a Thriving AI Method

The Point out of Chatbots: Pandemic Version

5 Chatbot Use Scenarios to Steal

Top rated 10 Data and Analytics Tendencies for 2021

“The greatest obstacle of AI is the very last mile,” he advised InformationWeek. Turning all those AI insights into workflow is what drives price. His objective is to construct AI capabilities into the workflow platform itself and optimize them for ServiceNow’s customer use scenarios.

Vijay Narayanan

That vision and objective is powering ServiceNow’s declared acquisition of Canadian AI pioneer Ingredient AI, a firm whose mission is to construct artificial intelligence into workflow for enterprise corporations.

The acquisition is as significantly about the talent as it is about the technology, Narayanan stated. Yoshua Bengio will be a part of ServiceNow as a technical advisor as portion of the acquisition. The Ingredient AI co-founder and guide fellow is also a winner of an ACM A.M. Turing Award for his contributions to modern AI. Ingredient AI co-founder and CEO Jean-Francois Gagne will also be a part of ServiceNow.

“Ingredient AI’s vision has usually been to redefine how organizations use AI to help people today operate smarter,” Gagne stated in a organized assertion.

The offer is a single of a handful of AI-concentrated acquisitions built by ServiceNow because previous SAP CEO Monthly bill McDermott joined the firm as CEO in October 2019. In early 2020 ServiceNow declared programs to obtain conversational AI platform firm Passage AI and AIOps firm Loom Units. In June, ServiceNow declared programs to obtain configuration info administration firm Sweagle. These acquisitions and the Ingredient AI offer are created to help ServiceNow construct in intelligence that underpins ServiceNow’s ITSM and workflow platforms.

Narayanan stated that portion of ServiceNow’s vision, specially with the latest acquisition, is to make AI better.

“It really is straightforward to do dumb AI,” he stated. “It really is difficult to do anything that’s extremely high high-quality.”

For instance, if you request Google to explain to you the peak of Mount Everest, Google won’t stage you to a link or a document. It gives you an actual range. It has the ability to go into a link or document and extract the content you are on the lookout for and existing it to you in a way that you can quickly recognize.

ServiceNow’s next stage of AI will incorporate a greater stage of contextual being familiar with to the artificial intelligence beneath its platform, and also incorporate automatic workflow to execute on the insights. In an enterprise context that may acquire the variety of inquiring a voice assistant to reserve a convention home, without demanding the consumer to open up an application and click by quite a few options to total the endeavor.

“You say book this home for 3 p.m. tomorrow,” Narayanan stated. “It understands the availability and guides it for you.”

Or perhaps you spilled coffee on your keyboard and have to have a substitution. In the scenario Narayanan envisions, the digital agent understands that your keyboard is broken, is familiar with which a single you have to have, is familiar with in which to order it from, and is familiar with your address so it can have it delivered instantly to you at your property office.

“There is no have to have to have a human in the loop,” he stated.

As portion of the Ingredient AI acquisition, ServiceNow will produce an AI innovation Hub in Canada to speed up customer-concentrated AI innovation in the ServiceNow platform. The firm operates similar technology progress centers in Chicago Hyderabad Kirkland, Washington San Diego, and Silicon Valley.

“This acquisition will allow us to continue to be on the major edge solving the very last mile trouble of AI,” Narayanan stated. “These are the workflows that travel business price.”

Jessica Davis has expended a job covering the intersection of business and technology at titles which include IDG’s Infoworld, Ziff Davis Enterprise’s eWeek and Channel Insider, and Penton Technology’s MSPmentor. She’s passionate about the practical use of business intelligence, … Check out Whole Bio

A lot more Insights