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ZDNET's key takeaways
AI Experience aggregates businesses' AI tools in a single UI.
The new platform comes with "Voice Agents" and "Web Agents."
Broadly, companies are selling AI management tools to businesses.
On Tuesday, software company ServiceNow announced the launch of its new AI Experience platform, designed to make businesses' myriad internal AI tools accessible through a single and intuitive user interface.
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The picture the company paints of the modern office worker is someone who's juggling a growing number of AI systems -- as more get added, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage them all. Instead, ServiceNow is offering to help by telling those workers to simply drop the juggling act and let their own AI software pick up where they left off.
"AI Experience from ServiceNow is addressing one of the biggest challenges enterprises face today: fragmented, clunky user experiences that slow down work," Amy Lokey, the company's Executive Vice President and Chief Experience Officer, said in a statement. "By creating a unified, contextual, and intuitive AI Experience for the enterprise, we're putting AI into the flow of work."
ServiceNow is promoting its new service to industries like customer service and sales, promising productivity gains for employees.
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"AI agents take on the manual, repetitive work, like scanning tickets, flagging patterns, and recommending response plans," the company wrote in a press release. "This allows [humans] to focus on complex decisions and real-time improvements."
What does the platform offer?
AI Experience is populated by two categories of AI agents, both of which are expected to be made available by the end of this year. The first, dubbed Voice Agents, appear to be more or less your typical chatbot, capable of responding to natural language prompts to retrieve and update data from within a business's internal records.
The second, which ServiceNow is calling Web Agents, can pull information from third-party apps, fill out forms, and complete other agentic tasks.
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The platform also comes with "AI Data Explorer" and "AI Lens" features, both of which create visual representations of trends taking shape within an organization. AI Lens is available now, while the AI Data Explorer tool will also be made available later this year, according to ServiceNow.
Zooming out
ServiceNow is essentially marketing AI Experience as a tool that can help businesses manage an ever-growing manifest of AI tools. Other tech developers have had a similar idea: Both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, for example, recently launched virtual marketplaces through which enterprise customers can shop for AI agents.
Each of these efforts assumes that businesses, overwhelmed by the sheer variety of AI tools that are now available to them, will be willing to pay to use a service that simplifies the selection, deployment, and governance processes.