The News: ServiceNow made a number of partnership announcements at its Knowledge 2024 conference in mid-May, focusing on expanding the breadth and depth of its ecosystem through agreements with Genesys, Fujitsu, Infosys, and Microsoft. The goal is to help customers accelerate end-to-end digital transformation initiatives by ensuring that customers can access a variety of solutions and expertise beyond ServiceNow’s offerings. You can read the releases detailing the partnership announcements with Genesys, Fujitsu, and Infosys, or you can check out the announcement of the Microsoft partnership here.
ServiceNow Leverages Partnerships to Meet Customers Where They Are
Analyst Take: ServiceNow announced a series of partnership deals with Genesys, Fujitsu, Infosys, and Microsoft as part of its Knowledge 2024 conference, with the goal of expanding the ecosystem of services, solutions, and expertise to its customers as they continue to implement digital transformation projects. The partnership agreements reflect a growing trend within the SaaS space, in which organizations are striking agreements with companies that have both complementary and competitive offerings to provide more choice and a more complete ecosystem of tools.
ServiceNow Partnering with Genesys to Drive More Personalized CX and Simplified EX
ServiceNow announced a strategic partnership with Genesys with a goal of combining the artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and digital capabilities from both companies. Under the agreement, features from Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow will be brought together to unify customer service teams through a single desktop, centralize routing across departments and channels, and optimize workforce engagement for more personalized customer experiences and simplified employee experiences, all powered by AI.
These integrated capabilities are planned to be rolled out under controlled availability starting in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2024 and are intended to be sold by both Genesys and ServiceNow. In addition, organizations can access the Genesys Cloud ServiceNow Connector today on the ServiceNow Store and Genesys AppFoundry Marketplace.
The partnership solves a key issue for many organizations by integrating all critical service experience data and agent performance information into a single workspace. This approach enables more efficient management and coordination of both front-end and back-end activities and enables AI algorithms to work across all relevant data.
Focusing on Cross-Industry Solutions via a ServiceNow and Fujitsu Partnership
ServiceNow also announced the expansion of a partnership with Fujitsu to work together to launch cross industry solution, including the opening of a new Fujitsu‑ServiceNow innovation center for digital transformation and customer success. Furthermore, Fujitsu will expand its own use of the Now Platform on its way to provide even greater value to customers.
ServiceNow and Fujitsu will use automation to help businesses streamline siloed enterprise systems, applications, and complex business processes, and the companies will first target the manufacturing sector and bring to the market solutions to manage overall Engineering Chain Management (ECM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) operations.
This announcement is reflective of the SaaS industry’s focus on developing platform-based solutions that target specific industries. Manufacturing organizations, which are often faced with managing complex processes and a large ecosystem of stakeholders, are increasingly seeking out solutions to manage workflows that touch a variety of contractors and subcontractors, while enabling AI and automation to act upon data held within each of these organizations.
ServiceNow and Infosys
Another partnership announcement coming out of Knowledge 2024 is the combination of ServiceNow’s Now Assist’s generative AI capabilities and Infosys Cobalt, a set of tools that accelerate cloud-powered enterprise transformation. In addition, Infosys will double its training investment by certifying more than 3,500 employees with ServiceNow generative AI skills.
In collaboration with ServiceNow, Infosys will develop new industry applications (telecom, financial services, manufacturing, and retail) into the Infosys Enterprise Service Management (ESM) Café. Infosys is also investing in the creation of a Pro Plus BOT factory, which can offer more than 100,000 Now Assist‑powered chatbots so that customers can realize value in their AI journey.
Like the Fujitsu announcement, this partnership will help ServiceNow penetrate further into specific verticals, capturing both market share and domain expertise. As customers within specific verticals look to large SaaS vendors, they are expecting them to provide workflows, processes, and AI technology that has been specifically designed or tuned for their industry and the unique challenges within.
ServiceNow and Microsoft to Combine Generative AI Capabilities
ServiceNow announced that Now Assist and Microsoft Copilot will integrate, enabling the two generative AI assistants to interact together, enabling enterprise workers to leverage the power of both tools to enhance productivity and efficiency, while working within the application they are most comfortable using.
Through the integration, Now Assist and Microsoft Copilot are designed to intuitively interact by integrating the intelligence of Now Assist with ServiceNow’s AI‑powered workflows within Microsoft applications. According to ServiceNow, Now Assist will provide employees with responses to questions as well as recommend actions and next steps in a conversational manner. These actions combine Now Assist’s domain knowledge of the enterprise and awareness of the user’s context and organizational data from Microsoft 365 chats, email, calendar, and files.
In the future, employees will be able to engage Copilot for Microsoft 365 from ServiceNow to create documents, such as a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, based on ServiceNow prompts, empowering AI‑driven digital business. The Now Assist and Microsoft Copilot integration is planned to be generally available in fall of 2024.
This partnership represents the acknowledgement that organizations will continue to utilize a range of applications to accomplish work and are unlikely to migrate to a single vendor, no matter how compelling the single-platform message may be. ServiceNow and Microsoft have realized that each brings something to the table, and it is advantageous to capture incremental revenue through partnership deals. From the customers’ perspective, the deal is a win all the way around, as they will now be able to leverage data across both platforms, as well as enable workers to use the tools they prefer, improving application utilization and ROI.
I suspect we will continue to see similar deals being struck across the ecosystem as the “meet the worker where they are” trend continues. Both vendors and organizations have begun to realize the workflow friction—particularly the kind that is artificially created through a desire to wall off ecosystems—does not benefit any stakeholder in the long term. Moreover, the ability to track workflows across platforms provides even more insights and data that can be used to refine and improve AI-powered workflows that have become essential to driving efficiency and productivity.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
ServiceNow Posts Strong Q1, Driven by Big Deals and Subscriptions
ServiceNow Releases Now Platform Washington D.C. Update
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
