An example of generative AI on the ServiceNow people team

Generative AI (GenAI) is here, in all its exciting use cases, playing the part of the precocious, attention-seeking toddler. Business will never be the same.

While AI has been a feature of ServiceNow products for years, the Now Platform Vancouver release builds GenAI into all aspects of Now Platform adoption. In doing so, it empowers employees, customers and partners to save time, minimise repetitive tasks and increase productivity.

Along with predictive AI and general AI, the ServiceNow people team is an example of generative AI, putting GenAI to work in areas such as case summarisation, automatically creating case and incident summary notes for our agents in seconds.

As we continue to learn, working with our legal team partners, we're building an implementation approach for use cases where we think GenAI will make the biggest impact.

We're all in the same boat…in uncharted waters

Most modern businesses are facing the same challenge: how to integrate GenAI quickly, safely and seamlessly into workflows without compromising security, privacy or compliance.

For us, that involves figuring out how this exciting new technology will help accelerate the continuing development of HR Service Delivery so that we can provide the best experience for users and free our agents to work on bigger, more important tasks.

If we can train GenAI to handle simple case summarisations and the rote questions that come in several times a day, it will give our team time to be more human.

Where to start with GenAI

At ServiceNow, we started simply and safely. We identified the most straightforward use cases with the lowest risk: predominantly agent-facing situations.

We also knew we wanted to address slightly more complicated tasks, such as conversation summaries and skills tagging. For each new use case, we're carefully considering the internal steps needed to implement the tasks safely and compliantly.

Each iteration includes evaluating and addressing privacy-related issues. We scrutinise how the data will be used to determine what changes are needed, ensuring we're asking the right questions along the way.

We continually assess risks for each of these situations and take steps to mitigate them, moving quickly but carefully. It may not always be smooth sailing, but if we can navigate the risks, we anticipate reaping great rewards.

What about privacy?

Many questions remain regarding private and public large language models (LLMs) and what each means for data privacy and security. We work hand in hand with our legal teams, including our global privacy and employment colleagues, to develop and deploy GenAI technology in a fully compliant way.

We keep individuals' privacy rights and our obligations under privacy regulations (such as data minimisation) top of mind throughout the process.

We're prioritising flexibility as well as privacy. While our customers will be able to use the LLMs of their choice, we're building our GenAI solutions within the people team using our own domain-specific, purpose-built Now LLM. This keeps all of our employees' data in-house for increased privacy.

Skin in the game

We see GenAI allowing us to significantly reduce the amount of time humans spend on administrative work, such as Tier 1 enquiries. This enables us to be more efficient, more consultative and more available to focus on the moments that matter. Imagine how much time can be saved by automatically sourced and summarised knowledge articles when searching a topic.

As customer zero, we pressure-test ServiceNow products and use them to help us run our business better. We work directly with the product teams to essentially co-create and help develop new features and capabilities.

We're excited to play a part in the development of GenAI and help shepherd this technology that's transforming how we help employees and keep them engaged.

Find out more about the benefits of GenAI in HR Service Delivery.