What enterprise software vendors are doing with generative AI

ServiceNow expands Now Assist virtual assistant to help coders

Now Assist will soon gain some new generative AI features to help ServiceNow customers make greater use of the Now Platform. A case summarization tool will spare agents in IT, HR, and customer service the hassle of writing up their interactions with clients, while a text-to-code function will make it easier to automate new processes using natural language to describe how they should work. Both additions use LLMs developed in-house by ServiceNow, and should be generally available in September with the Vancouver update to Now Platform.

June 2023

Oracle’s generative AI investment surfaces in HCM tools

Oracle is taking a three-pronged approach to generative AI adoption. At the hardware level it’s adding new instances to its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service tailored for AI workloads. OCI Supercluster will combine thousands of Nvidia GPUs and high-speed memory for training LLMs. On top of that, it’ll offer cloud services that it, other SaaS providers, and enterprises can use to build generative AI into their own applications. The first of those applications in which the capabilities will show up is Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), where it will help users by writing, summarizing or recommending content.

ServiceNow puts gen AI in Now Assist for Virtual Agent

Now Assist for Virtual Agent will eventually allow ServiceNow customers choose from a range of generative AI tools (initially, only OpenAI and Microsoft Azure tools are supported) to help them design self-service business processes by accessing relevant pieces of enterprise content. Already in testing with a small number of customers, Now Assist for Virtual Agent will be generally available from September.

Salesforce bundles generative AI tools in one AI Cloud blanket

For $360,000 a year, Salesforce’s AI Cloud Starter Pack bundles all its generative AI services in a single offering. It includes Slack GPT, Tableau GPT, Apex GPT, Mulesoft GPT, Flow GPT, Service GPT, Marketing GPT, Commerce GPT, and a couple of other tools to wrangle data and train models. Analysts don’t expect AI Cloud to attract many customers, though, as there’s no unified interface for all the disparate tools, and many customers will already have access to the ones they most need as part of other Salesforce offerings.

Salesforce’s Einstein GPT learns about marketing and e-commerce

Salesforce said its Einstein GPT generative AI toolkit will soon be able to personalize marketing emails by automatically segmenting audiences, resolving customer identities, and creating relevant content for them — although most of the new features in Marketing GPT aren’t slated for release until October. It’ll also lend a hand with e-commerce, delivering a multi-channel “concierge” experience from February 2024. One feature of its Commerce GPT almost ready to go is a tool to fill in missing catalog data called Dynamic Product Descriptions, which will be available from July, the company said.

May 2023

Alteryx generates data visualizations with AI

Analytics automation vendor Alteryx uses generative AI to add three new functions to its data visualization platform. Magic Documents, a feature of Alteryx Auto Insights, uses generative AI behind the scenes to deliver data visualization summaries and automatically generate targeted PowerPoints and emails based on them. The other two additions are in Alteryx Designer: Workflow Summary enables users to automatically document processes and related metadata in natural language, while the OpenAI connector lets them incorporate ChatGPT interactions in their data workflows.