Servicenow acquires Element AI, a deep learning expert

Servicenow acquired Element AI, a Canadian artificial intelligence startup. As stated in the message, this solution provider specializing in workflow management hopes to purchase more artificial intelligence into its platform. Its purpose is to further develop the Servicenow platform so that it “supports employees to work more efficiently and quickly, rationalizes decision-making and achieves a new level of productivity.”

Servicenow does not provide any official information about the purchase price. However, the professional magazine “Techcrunch” quoted several unspecified sources as saying that the price was about US$500 million. According to a company spokesperson, Servicenow will take over most of Element AI’s employees, but will stop providing services.

Speech understanding and image recognition

Servicenow should benefit from Element AI technology in many areas. The company uses artificial intelligence and deep learning to evaluate text and voice, chats or images, and also for intelligent search functions, questions and answers or to create summaries. “Element AI will support Servicenow to provide business processes that can learn from small data sets more effectively, improve the quality of existing AI skills (such as content and language understanding), and open up new possibilities, such as image recognition and cognitive search. “Jean wrote. -François Gagné, CEO and founder of Element AI, wrote in a blog post.

Element AI was founded by world-renowned scientists and experts in the field of artificial intelligence. One of them is Yoshua Bengio, who will serve as Servicenow’s technical consultant in the future. Yoshua Bengio and two colleagues won the prestigious Turing Prize in 2018, which is considered the Nobel Prize in the field of computer science.

According to the announcement, the acquisition of Servicenow is expected to be completed in early 2021. After that, Servicenow hopes to establish a new artificial intelligence research center in Canada to accelerate the customer-oriented innovative development of its Now platform.

Servicenow has been a new CEO for one year. The company appointed former SAP CEO Bill McDermott to replace John Donahoe.