News Analysis: ServiceNow Gets Serious About AI With Element AI Acquisition

On November 30th, ServiceNow announced an estimated $500 (CAD) million acquisition of Montreal, Canada based startup, Element AI. Key products include an AI-assisted insurance underwriting workflow software known as Underwriting Partner and a data set management platform for manufacturers known as Knowledge Scout. In a blog post, Element AI"s co-founder and CEO noted "Element AI will help ServiceNow deliver workflows that learn more efficiently from smaller datasets, improve the quality of existing AI capabilities like content and language understanding, and expand new capabilities like image recognition and cognitive search." Gagné also pointed out this level of integration would help users "summarize information, make predictions and recommendations, and automate repetitive tasks," As ServiceNow's fourth AI acquisition in 2020, CEO Bill McDermott and Chief AI Officer, Vijay K Narayanan, has doubled down on the investment and future of the platform with the build out of Now Intelligence capabilities along with the acquisitions of Loom Systems, Passage AI, and Sweagle. For ServiceNow, that is on the quest to become the universal workflow platform for the enterprise, it is the game changer that will attract CxOs to its platform.