ServiceNow offers virtual agent to assist with generative AI

That public-private distinction is crucial, said Neil Ward-Dutton, a VP at analyst IDC covering AI and intelligent process automation.

“We see a lot of confusion between the public foundation models promoted by the likes of OpenAI—GPT-4 and so on—and the generative AI models that we see ultimately delivering value to corporates, which will not necessarily be public,” he said.

Many uses of generative AI will only become attractive to enterprises when they can access specialized models, protected from public access, that are trained and tuned for their industry or even just for their organization alone. Other applications, with no need for company-specific data or high levels of accuracy, can be built on public models.

“Vendors like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and others don’t always do a good job of clearly distinguishing between these two approaches,” he said. “They’re all hedging their bets, partnering with the likes of OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic for access to public models, but also partnering with Nvidia, Hugging Face, and Cohere to help them implement specialized models for customers.”

ServiceNow runs shared services internally on its Now Platform, and recently began piloting the use of generative AI in virtual agent conversations, according to the company’s CIO, Chris Bedi (pictured). It’s being used by go-to-market teams to access knowledge bases about policies and processes to facilitate contract renewals, he said.

The idea is that, rather than the virtual agent producing links to a stack of knowledge base articles that workers have to read for themselves, “We’re saying ‘here’s the bite-sized pieces of content that can help you’ at each different point in this conversation, which should boost productivity and speed,” he said.