ServiceNow launches AI avatars in partnership with NVIDIA. The company harnesses NVIDIA’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) speech, large language model (LLM) and animation technologies that animate digital characters with generative AI.

It is a significant initiative in a collaboration between ServiceNow and NVIDIA to enhance and make improvements for engagements in workflows across organizations. The Gartner prediction that 60% of GenAI solutions will be multimodal by 2026 which is an increase of 1% of the GenAI solutions in 2023.

At Knowledge 24, the AI Avatars were launched in the presence of Chief Operating Officer CJ Desai, ServiceNow President. NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang were also present in the launch event. They talked about the potentiality of the AI Service Agents, share their vision for an even more engaging, personalized, employee and customer experience.

Continuing the partnership between ServiceNow and NVIDIA, the real-time, interactive avatars were demoed using Now Assist demonstrating the potential to provide an additional communication channel for Virtual Agent experiences for users who prefer visual interaction. Like other Now Assist features, these avatars are powered by NVIDIA technology, including: NVIDIA NIM microservices NVIDIA ACE All of these are available with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software.

The demo of ServiceNow Now Assist showcases how digital avatars can improve customer and employee experiences across a wide range of industries, especially those where customer support, engagement, and personalization are essential, such as retail, travel, etc. built in collaboration with ServiceNow and NVIDIA.

Customer service is essential to healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, and many other industries, making it one of the largest generative AI use cases," stated the vice president of enterprise computing at NVIDIA, Manuvir Das. "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."

These AI Service Agents indicate the use of speech and animation GenAI technology to improve user experiences and, for Now, Assist across the entire business function. This could include any AI-assisted interactions across human resources, finance, IT and more to personalize customer and employee needs. Instead of typing questions into the chat, users may choose to talk to, type, or digitally interact with the avatars. For instance, when a customer wants to upgrade their internet package, the on-screen avatar could simulate a human interaction to guide them through the options and next steps to execute the upgrade. This could also be used in retail experiences, travel or even for employees, to better understand and guide them through work policies or software capabilities.

Speaking in the launch event Desai said "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,". He further added "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."

The avatar demo exhibited at Knowledge, the avatars were powered by NVIDIAACE—a collection of technologies that allow for lifelike, interactive digital avatars to be used for customer support and more. The avatars were powered in a proof of concept by connecting to Now Assist through the Now Platform. In addition to NVIDIA ACE, the avatars are powered by NVIDIA Riva (Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition and Language Translation to Understand Human Speech) NVIDIA Audio2Face (Facial Animation and Lip Syncing) And NVIDIA Omniverse (Physical Based Ray-Traced Renderer) (Bringing Life-Like Visuals to the Avatars) ServiceNow ran these capabilities on NVIDIA’s accelerated infrastructure. This infrastructure includes the production grade, safe, and robust AI software platform, NVIDIA AI Enterprise.

Now Assist – the ServiceNow GenAI experience – brings AI to the people across the ServiceNow Platform, unifying previously siloed functions, people, information, and processes on the single, secure, and trusted AI platform that accelerates business transformation. Now Assist is built into the ServiceNow Platform and the ServiceNow workflow to deliver smart self-service to employees, customers, agents, and developers, increase productivity for agents, and provide actionable insights to customers for an even more accelerated journey to success. A lot of ServiceNow's Now Assist features run on a fast, cost-effective, and secure ABI model that powers the fastest, most powerful GenAI solution for ServiceNow.

The partnership between ServiceNow and NVIDIA has driven development of AI research and ServiceNow AI model. The company used NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, NVIDIA H100, and A100 Tensor Core GPUs for advanced options in workflows through GenAI solutions. Now Assist leveraged for Telecommunications Service Management (TSM), In addition, NVIDIA uses ServiceNow’s Now Assist to simplify its IT operations and enhance the employee experience through conversational capabilities, allowing employees to be self-efficient in their tasks. They also partnered with collaborations with Hugging Face and the Big Code Community on StarCoder2.

Now Assist is integrated into both the ServiceNow Platform and the ServiceNow workflow to provide intelligent employee and customer self-service, increase agent and developer productivity, and provide actionable insights to customers for an even more accelerated journey to success. Most of ServiceNow's Now Assist functionality is built on top of a fast, cost-effective, and secure Now AI multi-modal model that powers the highest quality GenAI solutions across the ServiceNow ecosystem. This year, ServiceNow became the first platform provider to gain access to NVIDIA NIM, allowing faster, scalable, and more cost-effective development and deployment of LLM for customers.

ServiceNow is dedicated to creating effective and safe future GenAI solutions for open-governance, and open-science as Now Assist continues to revolutionize the way we operate.