During Knowledge 25 in Las Vegas, ServiceNow announced Core Business Suite, an AI-powered process tool for HR, procurement, finance, facilities, and legal. Core Business Suite allows organizations to work with partners more effectively, and importantly, it brings data for all those disparate groups together into one location.
Core Business Suite is positioned as the groundwork for automation, orchestration, and real-time metrics that power smarter, faster decisions. Basically, the plan is for it to be the entry point for everything non-technical in your organization. It’s an exciting development, which is why our editorial team asked me to step in and share my thoughts on how it advances our idea of workflow.
Core Business Suite focuses on changing that by bringing a business-first lens to workflow design, aligning terminology and processes with how people outside of IT think and operate. That shift improves adoption, reduces friction, and gets people the help they need faster.
To accomplish this, Core Business Suite removes the IT trappings from the workflow processes within ServiceNow. A previous challenge had been that labels, decisions, and mechanisms for people getting things done in the platform were technology-based.
Core Business Suite was built to expand outside of technology and encompasses everything from case and ticket management to serving as an experience platform. It’s not too far a reach to say that these new technologies can help increase employee morale by facilitating effective communication, and providing a platform to solve issues that might exist across multiple business areas.
Take facilities management as an example. Core Business Suite brings delivery and health and safety together in the workplace taking those groups and accompanying disparate activities into one area, then taking all the groups within the enterprise and those disparate activities and applications into a solitary platform, as well.
By doing this, ServiceNow is helping to collapse organizational silos, connect teams, and drive cross-functional efficiency.
AI and automation are an important aspect of the Core Business Suite. The main takeaway for your business? Leveraging this platform element allows users to more efficiently find answers and create solutions.
Pre-AI and pre-automation, users would create knowledge objects and communications data in their own vernacular and talk track terminology. Now Assist allows for continuous improvement based on experience.
A hypothetical example of what this looks like is searching for a soft drink. I live in the Midwest so I would type into my knowledge base how to go find a pop. Someone creating that knowledge base in the South would type in how to go find a Coke. And in the Northeast? How to go find a soda.
AI allows for continuous improvement of the accuracy and searchability of knowledge bases based on experience and interactions.
The value of data is improved by AI. We now have all this data from all of these enterprise areas in one place and we can more effectively start to recognize trends and opportunities for proactive leadership and proactive management.
AI can automatically update knowledge objects, create reports based on data, and start to recognize indicators and trends across the enterprise environment.
HR in Core Business Suite provides an interesting use case because it illustrates strengths in areas like user experience and communication. When people come into the HR service delivery area asking questions, Core Business Suite allows us to see:
We can look at calendars and create knowledge there, and we can improve our employee experience. An example would be if someone is engaged in something sensitive, like searching for how to make a life insurance claim. That gets flagged as an opportunity to send a person to handle the request rather than sending the knowledge searcher down a rabbit hole of automation and auto-canned responses.
In turn, we can use AI to recognize major events in people's lives to get them the service and support that they need in a manner they require or desire. It’s empathy built into automation, something the modern workforce has come to expect.
ServiceNow’s official announcement of Core Business Suite called out the Finance Case Management solution and how it addresses unstructured work that leads to inefficiency, such as checking the status of vendor invoices, creating new cost centers, etc.
This is another example of Core Business Suite’s focus on employee experience within whole organizational tiers and applications. It allows employees to go out to a common place to get support for daily activities -- ultimately not just for finance, but also for a wide range of global business services, including HR service delivery, procurement requests, facilities requests, health and safety, and legal review.
In procurement, Finance Case Management brings all the data into one place for multiple activities like streamlining the process from order to receipt and increasing buying power.
A lot of companies don’t use procurement case management and instead allow each facility (or even individual) to use their application to buy something. Bringing this into a repository creates efficiencies. For instance, instead of five different orders for 100 software licenses, now there’s one order for 500 licenses, and buying power is leveraged.
Core Business Suite is poised to significantly streamline operations, particularly for organizations operating at Level 0 and Level 1 support. Level 0 typically includes self-service tools like knowledge bases and chatbots, while Level 1 involves generalist support staff who handle routine inquiries. By unifying multiple departments and functions into a centralized knowledge repository, Core Business Suite creates a common entry point in which users can easily check statuses or find answers to straightforward questions, reducing the need for manual intervention and eliminating redundancy across teams.
Core Business Suite will enable organizations to optimize their operations by reducing the need to overstaff during peak periods, relying instead on automation and smarter workflows to handle increased demand. For HR, this might be when interns start after the school year in early summer; in procurement case management, that might be end-of-quarter and end-of-year, when customers are re-signing deals.
This lowered cost of support will rely on knowledge management and solving issues through a support level in Core Business Suite that covers every function, rather than requiring level 1 support for HR, legal service delivery, and procurement.
ServiceNow is doubling down on collapsing all things needed in your day-to-day life to do your job or do your tasks in your job. No longer do I have to spend 10 to 20 minutes trying to figure out what portal to go to, or what environment to ask a question, or where forms are located.
Now, when I need something in my day-to-day life, I know I'm going to go to the ServiceNow employee center to ask that question. And what it's going to do is it's going to allow me to eliminate the confusion when finding something. It's going to stop me from asking the person sitting next to me or management where I need to go to do something. More importantly, it's going to stop me from calling the wrong group two or three times.
Core Business Suite is about speed, simplicity, and empowerment. Employees shouldn't waste time tracking down forms, deciphering technical terminology, or ping-ponging between departments. They should have a dedicated place to ask questions, submit requests, and move forward.
And that’s what ServiceNow is delivering: a platform in which every part of your business, technical and non-technical, works together with intelligence and efficiency.