James Cook University augments ServiceNow platform with AI

James Cook University is introducing generative AI into various parts of its ServiceNow platform, which is used by 10 business units across the institution.

Image credit: James Cook University

IT helpdesk team lead Anthony Warrell told a ServiceNow AI readiness digital summit that the work aligns with a broader ‘AI everywhere’ initiative being championed by vice chancellor Simon Biggs.

“We explored AI as a way to modernise service delivery for James Cook University on a unified platform using built-in capabilities such as Predictive Intelligence and Now Assist to streamline our shared service front door, enhancing the client experience,” Warrell said.

Both Predictive Intelligence and Now Assist are AI capabilities that ServiceNow offers, both to improve backend service delivery and the frontend experience.

The former is more machine learning-based, while the latter utilises generative AI and large language models.

The university initially implemented ServiceNow for IT service management in 2011.

The platform’s usage has expanded over time to cover knowledge management, HR service delivery and customer service management.

In the past year, the university has upgraded the ServiceNow self-service portal through which staff engage with shared services, introducing – among other things – a virtual agent offering AI-powered search.

“At the start of this year, we [then] introduced Predictive Intelligence, which we implemented in the platform to help automate and streamline some of our services,” Warrell said.

“Now Assist was really just a natural extension of that when it came to introducing more platform capabilities.”

The university made use of a “customer success program” run by ServiceNow called ‘Impact’, embarking on a pair of “jumpstarts” to prepare internal teams to stand up the AI capabilities quickly.

In terms of implementing Now Assist, ServiceNow’s generative AI tools, participating in the ‘Impact’ program meant that the first use case was in production within 30 days.

AI capabilities are being introduced into the ServiceNow environment using a phased approach.

Warrell said that after a preparatory ‘phase zero’, the first phase went after client experience improvements, primarily through ‘Now Assist for Virtual Agent’ and an integration of ServiceNow with Teams.

The Teams integration was pursued because the university had a goal of “meeting people where they work”.

“Rather than expecting people to come to you – logging into the ServiceNow portal to engage with the platform, things like Teams integration [means] coming to where they work,” Warrell said.

“Most of our staff spend a lot of their day within the Microsoft Teams environment and the Microsoft Office ecosystem.”

With first phase activity completed, efforts have since expanded “into implementing Now Assist for IT service management, and we're in the process of doing the Now Assist for customer service management implementation [as well],” Warrell said.

AI capabilities in Now Assist are described as “skills”.

The university is using seven such skills around “incident or case summarisation, sentiment analysis, suggested steps, email recommendation, resolution generation and knowledge generation”, in the first instance.

These could help the university to draft knowledge base articles based on lessons from an incident or to learn how a support issue was resolved.

While relatively early, Warrell said there had been time savings from the self-service and AI work so far.

“We want to gather some [more] metrics and analytics around the adoption and what we're seeing to date,” Warrell said.

“It's been quite positive, which is great.”

The university is also looking at making the content on its public-facing website searchable using AI search; currently, that is only looking internally at its ServiceNow knowledge stores and service catalog.

Additionally, Warrell said there were plans to surface the virtual agent through some public web pages and possibly also the student app.

“Being able to integrate the virtual agent in there so that it's more readily available to our student population as well as staff, [is one of] the things we're looking at,” Warrell said.

The university will also consider introducing Now Assist into its HR service delivery portion of ServiceNow.