Now Assist Skill Kit: Democratizing GenAI skills in the workplace

Generative AI (GenAI) has the potential to improve productivity and efficiency across an organization. Many business leaders are wrestling with how to extend the benefits of GenAI to their entire workforce while maintaining the integrity of their data and operations. Innovations in the Now Platform Xanadu release help provide answers.

We sat down with Sumeet Mathur, managing director of ServiceNow’s India Technology and Business Center, where many of the Xanadu innovations originated, to learn more.

How does Xanadu make GenAI more accessible?

The short answer is that it enables any employee to create their own GenAI tools that seamlessly fit into how they already use ServiceNow.

Our GenAI experiences, called Now Assist, have always aimed to deliver immediate assistance to every user in their specific business vocabulary—be it role, function, or industry—to support fast, quality actions.

Now Assist is available for a range of personas, including IT, customer service, HR service delivery, and creators, along with applications in field management, operations, and some specific industries. Innovations in our Xanadu release extend those benefits to security and sourcing and procurement teams, with specific solutions for those business areas.

Staying true to our vision to make the world work better for everyone, we also introduced Now Assist Skill Kit in our Xanadu release. Now Assist Skill Kit enables users to create custom GenAI skills for their specific business needs and use cases that aren’t available out of the box.

Now Assist Skill Kit gives developers an easy way to build, test, and deploy new GenAI skills and their underlying prompts for an array of AI use cases, including building skills on ServiceNow. It connects seamlessly to data and knowledge within the Now Platform for enhanced context and offers powerful options for customization—whether one wants to choose ServiceNow, third-party, or custom large language models (LLMs).

How does Now Assist Skill Kit help employees?

Essentially, Now Assist Skill Kit allows users to create custom GenAI skills tailored to their specific business needs.

For example, IT service agents typically want a full case history when they’re assigned a new case. With Now Assist for IT Service Management, they can use GenAI to summarize all related records and build a concise case history with a single click.

If they’ve noticed customer satisfaction decreasing, they may want to monitor customer sentiment on the fly. Although this specific feature doesn’t exist out of the box, they can build it themselves with Now Assist Skill Kit. They can choose the LLM, the inputs, and the prompt for their feature, then add it to their existing console so it fits the context of their work.

There are a lot of similarly niche problems that teams face in their day-to-day work. Often these get overlooked by developers or managers prioritizing solutions to much bigger problems. But imagine what your employees could produce if they had the ability to create their own solutions to help solve these problems. They could improve productivity and craft entirely new revenue models and customer experiences.

Why do GenAI skills matter to enterprises?

Creating a common vocabulary of GenAI skills addresses two problems that many of the enterprises we speak with face. First, it helps eliminate the repetition of work among different departments in adopting GenAI.

Second, it helps mitigate “solution sprawl,” the overabundance of point solutions and fragmented data that arises when every department tries to create its own use cases independently.

We’ve seen the latter become an increasingly prevalent issue in Asia Pacific. Because everyone wants to use GenAI to do specific tasks unique to their roles, they tend to select tools that are excellent at one task, whether or not that tool fits with the broader organizational ecosystem.

According to ServiceNow’s Enterprise AI Maturity Index, less than half of all Asia Pacific enterprises have made significant progress connecting data and operational silos in their AI adoption journeys.

Because ServiceNow extends across the entire organization and its traditional silos, we have a unique position from which to make GenAI skills that were developed in one area available to all the others. And we can do so in a way that’s operationally consistent but also functionally tailored to what the specific persona requires.

This can significantly reduce the costs, risks, and systems fragmentation that enterprises might otherwise incur when trying to make GenAI accessible organizationwide. At the same time, it can enable every line of business to build solutions that meet their own functional requirements.

How can enterprises keep up with demand for GenAI?

If every department is using and building with GenAI, you need a data engine that can keep up with demand for speed and volume. That’s why, as part of the Xanadu release, we upgraded the ServiceNow back end to RaptorDB, which enables faster data transactions in higher quantities—almost three times the number of transactions than previously possible.¹

This provides a crucial foundation for solutions such as Now Assist Skill Kit that are helping anyone in any organization build custom GenAI use cases far easier. GenAI is first and foremost about data, with the LLM layering on top of that consistent foundation.

The logical conclusion from this is users should be able to use the LLM of their choice with their data—and be able to switch or alter that decision at any time, especially if the performance or compliance implications around that LLM start to go against the organization’s best interests.

The ServiceNow platform is architected to do just that—to absorb all the data inputs and allow for models that we curate or models that people bring to enable customers to run the use cases they want.

Find out more about the innovations in the latest Now Platform release.

¹ ServiceNow benchmark of Raptor DB Professional versus MariaDB