ServiceNow recently announced the acquisition of Intellibot, a chatbot building platform with approximately 40 team members in India. From an HR chatbot perspective, I figured I could help unbundle what this means to HR leadership and the future of HR RPA.

In an article from Unleash Chris Pope, ServiceNow’s Global VP of Innovation describes the future of HR and RPA (Robotic Process Automation).

I figured I’d use my whiteboard desk to draw out what this means to enterprise teams looking to implement HR Chatbots.

Here’s what it means to HR and IT teams looking to understand the investment.

1. Intellibot is a chatbot building framework, it competes against the DialogFlow, Watson, and Azure Chat services.
2. By purchasing Intellibot, ServiceNow is essentially buying a team of 40 engineers in India, as well as a chatbot authoring and NLP engine, that will allow them to connect to their client’s primary enterprise sources of records, like HRIS, HCM, ATS, Payroll, etc., which is often software companies like Oracle, Workday, SAP, and others.
3. Once ServiceNow integrates these disparate HR and IT solutions, employers will be able to extend their employee support with chatbots. Currently, most HR and IT Customer Support includes human agents and a knowledge base.
   What this will allow midmarket and enterprise customers to do, is leverage the existing framework from ServiceNow, and their chatbot, to integrate transactions into conversational ai solutions.

The end goal is easy to understand… take the standard Frequently Asked Questions and a static knowledgebase, into a conversational AI chatbot solution available 24/7 that will tie directly into enterprise solutions like employee HCM data, something that might have taken a phone call to a Level II support person to accomplish.

This is definitely going to be interesting to watch how ServiceNow provides these integration points.
It could be a great opportunity, but there are risks, like all HR tech and especially enterprise functionality often leads to loads of customization.
So, the jury is out to see how deep ServiceNow can provide a service, or are enterprise teams better off building and owning it themselves?