Slack partners with ServiceNow to bring machine learning into chat app

by Kavya Sahu developer

Team communications developer Slack and enterprise company ServiceNow today announced a partnership to bring their products closer together. A Slack app integration will launch this fall to provide ServiceNow notifications in a Slack channel. And in the spring, new software from ServiceNow will allow its customers to approve or deny automated processes in Slack including some powered by predictive machine learning.

The announcement was made onstage as part of a keynote address at Frontiers, Slack’s developer conference being held in San Francisco on September 12 and 13. On the first day of the conference, Slack debuted shared channels for businesses to communicate with each other, as well as versions of the app in French, Spanish, and German. The Conversations API for the management of shared channels also made its debut yesterday.

The ServiceNow integration brings Slack closer to its overarching goal to have all work activity inside the chat app, Slack VP of product April Underwood told VentureBeat in an interview at Frontiers.

“We have a belief that channels will replace email as the primary way people get work done over the next decade, let’s say by 2025, so when you think about that, people are already getting all of their work done inside channels in Slack within their team,” she said.

“For our joint customers, just the fact that we have a ServiceNow app is going to immediately make Slack more valuable. But it’s also going to make ServiceNow more valuable, so it’s really mutually beneficial and right in line with why we did the platform in the first place, which is that we want our customers to be able to get work done in Slack using all of the tools that they use,” Underwood added.

Since the launch of the App Directory in December 2015, Slack has added more than 1,000 services, which includes enterprise leaders like Google’s G Suite and customer service platforms like Zendesk, but also bots from startups like Polly and Growthbot from Hubspot. About 155,000 developers use Slack APIs on a weekly basis, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat.

ServiceNow helps its more than 4,000 customers automate tasks and workflows like IT help desk activity or HR processes. Machine learning on the way this spring invites customers to choose the AI models they want built from their own datasets. Those models then make predictions around processes like onboarding a new employee or security incidents.

“It’s supervised machine learning specifically for producing predictions, and the customer can specify based on the data the confidence level of their predictions they’d like to have as a result,” ServiceNow CTO Allan Leinwand told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “Then the model delivered back to their instance is only relevant if it has a confidence level greater than what the customer specified.”

ServiceNow has its own chat solution called Connect but will begin to make its services available in more real-time team communication apps, starting with Slack.

“You’ll see us add more principally because we want to be able to allow people to collaborate with whatever tools they’re collaborating in, but we think that collaboration should drive the automation back to our platform where the work gets done,” Leinwand said. “We’re not sort of wedded to one real-time communication platform. Our goal is to go where the enterprise is getting work done, and if they’re communicating with other platforms, then we want to do integrations into that.”

Leinwand did not state whether the ServiceNow integration will be available in shared channels.