At its recent annual customer and partner event, Knowledge 24, ServiceNow showcased AI avatars of the future together with NVIDIA, leveraging NVIDIA’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) speech, large language model (LLM) and animation technologies that bring digital characters to life using generative AI. The AI avatars were revealed on stage at Knowledge 24 during ServiceNow President and Chief Operating Officer CJ Desai’s keynote, with a special appearance from NVIDIA Founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, highlighting the potential for even more engaging, personal, employee and customer experiences.
The visionary demo is part of the strategic collaboration between ServiceNow and NVIDIA to advance and expand options for workflow engagements across organisations. This comes amid a Gartner prediction that “by 2026, 60% of GenAI solutions will be multimodal, up from 1% in 2023”.[1]
Expanding on the companies’ partnership, the interactive, real‑time avatars demoed leveraging Now Assist showcase the potential to provide another communication option for Virtual Agent experiences to users who prefer visual interactions. Similar to other Now Assist capabilities, they leverage NVIDIA technology, including NVIDIA NIM micro-services and NVIDIA ACE, all available with the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform.
The ServiceNow Now Assist demo highlights the potential for digital avatars to enhance customer and employee interactions across various industries, particularly those where customer service, engagement and personalised communication are critical, including retail, travel and more.
At Knowledge 2023 last year, NVIDIA and ServiceNow partnered to develop powerful enterprise‑grade generative AI capabilities. These capabilities leverage NVIDIA infrastructure for custom LLMs trained for the Now Platform and have launched new GenAI use cases that can boost productivity for IT operations, customer service teams and employees.
“As AI becomes deeply ingrained in our everyday lives, customers and employees expect technology to intelligently learn and adapt to their individual work and communication styles,” said Desai. “We’re continuously expanding our collaboration with NVIDIA to explore new ways for people to interact with generative AI through Now Assist, to help ensure AI is a friendly, engaging, and empathetic experience for everyone, based on users’ preferences.”
“Customer service is essential to healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, and many other industries, making it one of the largest generative AI use cases,” said Manuvir Das, vice-president, enterprise computing at NVIDIA. “ServiceNow is at the forefront of bringing generative AI to the world’s enterprises to support billions of hours of service requests, and our work together can help us identify new ways to interact with Now Assist so users quickly get the help they need.”
Putting a face to Now Assist generative AI experiences across the enterprise
The avatars signal the potential to use speech and animation GenAI technology to enhance user interactions for Now Assist across a broad range of business functions. This includes any AI‑assisted interaction across HR, finance, IT and more to add a personal touch to customer and employee requests. Rather than simply typing questions into a chat, users may prefer to speak to, type or digitally interact with these avatars. For example, when a customer inquires about upgrading their internet package, an on‑screen avatar can simulate a human interaction, guiding them through their options and next steps for executing the upgrade. It could also be used for retail experiences, travel, or even for employees to better understand and be guided through work policies and software capabilities.
The avatar demo showcased at Knowledge was powered by NVIDIA ACE – a suite of technologies that enable lifelike and engaging digital avatars for customer service and more. In the proof of concept, NVIDIA ACE connected to Now Assist via the Now Platform to power the avatars. ACE includes NVIDIA Riva multilingual automatic speech recognition and language translation to understand human speech, NVIDIA Audio2Face for facial animation and lip syncing, and NVIDIA Omniverse Renderer for physically based ray-traced rendering to bring lifelike visuals to the avatars. ServiceNow ran the capabilities on NVIDIA-accelerated infrastructure, which includes the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform for production grade, secure and reliable AI software.
The Now Assist avatar demo builds on the ServiceNow and NVIDIA collaboration to drive GenAI-powered industry innovations. This includes powering AI research and ServiceNow AI model development with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, NVIDIA H100 and A100 Tensor Core GPUs for intelligent workflows; Now Assist for Telecommunications Service Management (TSM); as well as collaborations with Hugging Face and the Big Code Community on StarCoder2, a family of open-access LLMs for code generation that sets new standards for performance, transparency and cost‑effectiveness. NVIDIA also uses ServiceNow Now Assist to streamline its IT operations and improve the employee experience with conversational capabilities, empowering employees with self‑service. Earlier this year, ServiceNow became one of the first platform providers to access NVIDIA NIM, enabling faster, scalable and more cost‑effective LLM development and deployment for customers.
Now Assist – ServiceNow’s GenAI experience – puts AI to work for people across the Now Platform, connecting formerly siloed departments, people, data and processes, all on the single secure, trusted AI platform for business transformation. Now Assist is embedded across the Now Platform and ServiceNow workflows to deliver intelligent self-service for employees and customers, boost productivity for agents and developers, and help give customers actionable insights for an even faster path to success. Many of ServiceNow’s Now Assist features are powered by a Now AI multimodal model that is fast, cost-effective and secure, powering the best possible GenAI solutions for the ServiceNow platform.
As Now Assist continues to transform how we work, ServiceNow is committed to charting the future of impactful, responsible and secure AI – embracing open-science, open-governance development. ServiceNow is a founding member of the AI Alliance led by IBM and Meta, to join forces with other pioneering organisations in advancing the principles of open, safe and responsible AI globally.
Watch the avatar demo from the Knowledge 24 keynote address, where Desai will be joined by Huang.
[1] Gartner, Emerging Tech: Multimodal Generative AI Interfaces Transform User Experiences, December 2023. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the US and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
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ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is putting AI to work for people. We move with the pace of innovation to help customers transform organizations across every industry while upholding a trustworthy, human centered approach to deploying our products and services at scale. Our AI platform for business transformation connects people, processes, data, and devices to increase productivity and maximize business outcomes. For more information, visit: www.servicenow.com.