ServiceNow, a digital workflow technology developer, has acquired UltimateSuite to improve its automation and AI capabilities and enhance customer operations. UltimateSuite is a task-mining data developer, a sector that ServiceNow’s vice president of NowX product management, Eric Schroeder, feels was previously a “blind spot”. Task mining observes steps taken outside of a process, providing insights that can be leveraged to optimize and automate those processes.
- The acquisition aims to support the elimination of bottlenecks in customer processes.
- Task mining provides visibility into employee steps outside the platform, presenting opportunities for optimization and automation.
- ServiceNow’s robotic process automation technology will benefit from the acquisition, capturing steps to be automated by the company’s own bots.
- The UltimateSuite technology is expected to help capture many of the external steps at the API level, following integration into the Now platform.
- ServiceNow hopes to automate the creation of bots as they align more closely with their own technology. Initially, insights from UltimateSuite will allow administrators to more accurately and rapidly contemplate the automation of long-running tasks.
The integration of UltimateSuite into the Now platform will happen between the second half of 2024 and the first half of 2025. The process is expected to be smooth, with Schroeder describing UltimateSuite as a “nice pure-play acquisition” that already “integrates almost seamlessly just as it is right now”.
The acquisition represents a significant step in ServiceNow’s commitment to intelligent or hyper automation. Process mining, a feature native to the ServiceNow Now platform, has been an area of focus for several years. The addition of UltimateSuite will augment this by allowing the capture of steps employees take outside the system, providing actionable insights for optimization and automation.