After a few weeks spent collecting our thoughts from ServiceNow Knowledge 2024 in Las Vegas, there are a handful of powerful ideas that are still resonating in the minds of our clients and the AHEAD team who attended the event. With an impressive 20,000 attendees and an incredibly wide array of sessions, we wanted to share our key takeaways for those who missed the conference or could not attend everything they wanted to.

AI Everywhere

The opening keynote to Knowledge 2024 was focused on AI, and this would be a trend throughout the conference. ServiceNow is investing heavily with the goal of transforming the conversation around AI and data into a deeper focus on the ways AI can help drive workflow and user experience throughout the platform.

Generative AI within the platform is called ‘Now Assist,’ and can be leveraged in the following ways:

• Now Assist for IT Service Management
• Now Assist for Customer Service Management
• Now Assist for HR Service Delivery
• Now Assist for Creator
• Now Assist for Field Service Management
• Now Assist for IT Operations Management
• Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management

What excited the AHEAD team?

• Now Assist for Asset Management allows an AI-powered virtual agent to guide end users through the request of a new device and fill out a catalog item for them. The same virtual agent can be used for software provisioning to eliminate manual effort and touch for deployment.
• Now Assist for CMDB and ITOM enables automated de-duplication and the elimination of stale CI data, minimizing governance efforts and speeding up the growth curve for CMDB maturity.
• Cloud Observability and ITOM Health Log Analytics can be used together to find anomalies and identify Incidents to drive down MTTR, reduce telemetry costs, and find the ‘unknown unknowns.’
• Updates to prompt management that will allow low/no-code solutions for managing agent and user prompts.
• Knowledge article generation using Now Assist for ITSM, CSM, and HRSD will draft knowledge articles and eliminate the initial manual effort required for keeping the Knowledge Bases up to date.
• Feedback summarization, where customer comments within SPM will be analyzed and summarized for easy management of backlog and priorities.

Partnerships

The theme we can’t do it alone was expressed throughout the keynotes, and a focus on extended partnerships with organizations such as Microsoft and Nvidia are driving that point home. ServiceNow and Genesys also announced a strategic partnership aimed at driving a unified experience within customer service management via AI-powered experience orchestration.

Developer Sandboxes

“We’re unlocking developer collaboration!” During CreatorCon, ServiceNow announced developer sandboxes, which will allow multiple developers to collaborate on the same instance and components by merging workflows. This will enable streamlined PoC development within a shared environment and will be available through Xanadu in the second half of 2024.

Improvements in Developer Productivity

We heard about further improvements to developer learning and certification paths, which will better align developers to the needs of their organizations. The infusion of GenAI into developer workflows, such as Story Assist, can assist development teams in writing good stories. Additionally, test case generation via GenAI will eliminate the heavy manual steps for writing and executing test cases. Managing good requirements and stories and streamlining testing are constant customer pain points that GenAI can drastically improve.

FinOps & Cloud Cost Management

While Hardware Access Management (HAM) and Software Access Management (SAM) has allowed organizations to gain visibility and control of their processes and costs for on-prem assets, a notable missing component has been cost visibility into cloud assets. As demonstrated at the event, ServiceNow has made great strides with their Cloud Cost Management (CCM) solution. Being an early adopter and partner in this area, AHEAD is excited to see this quantum step forward from ServiceNow in the FinOps space.

Moving to Industry

Building on momentum gained over the last year, we saw a continued focus on Industry Workflows around Public Sector (PSDS), Healthcare (HCLS) and Financial Services (FSO). This is welcome news, as the productivity and efficiency gains we have seen in IT are moving into the core lines of business. This will continue to be a major focus of ServiceNow.

Relentless Automation

Time and cost savings are always a focus, and Integration Hub and RPA are being expanded upon continually to accomplish these goals. RPA Hub is helping customers eliminate repetitive tasks, and the Automation Center is facilitating a clear view into automation throughout the platform. Integration Hub and the growth of out-of-the-box spokes continue to accelerate the delivery of automation.

And Plenty More…

In addition to the above, there were incredible sessions on the continued use of ServiceNow across SecOps, transitioning to the cloud, streamlining cross-department processes (e.g., Source to Pay), integrating with everything, driving visibility, improving employee experiences, enhancing intimacy with customers, and so on. It is impossible to communicate in one article all of the exciting innovations that ServiceNow put on display at Knowledge ‘24. As such, we recommend attending in 2025 – it is absolutely worth the investment!