OpenAI Partners With ServiceNow – Will It Impact Legal Tech?

ServiceNow and OpenAI have announced a deep partnership to ‘accelerate enterprise AI outcomes’. And ServiceNow works, in part, in the legal tech field of inhouse workflow provision. Will it have an impact?

There is a voice-based ‘speech to speech’ aspect, and also this: ‘Under the agreement, OpenAI models will be a preferred intelligence capability offered to ServiceNow enterprise customers’. But, it’s how this and other aspects might connect to legal matters inside companies that people will be looking at.

As shown in this AL article from 2022, ServiceNow has been quite serious about the inhouse legal world. Back then they told this site that they were going to provide three new features in addition to their more standard workflows:

• ‘Legal Executive Dashboard – This leverages a Performance Analytics engine to give practice area-specific metrics and KPIs over any time window. This they say will provide ‘the quick identification of legal service trends that can help show legal’s value to the business’.
• Simple Contracts Enhancements – the contract building application already exists, but they have sought to improve the workflow.
• Legal Counsel Centre Enhancements – The initial goal of this centralised workspace is to provide ‘a true legal home base’. The new version provides: the ability to assign delegates to current and future work if the lawyer or practitioner is not available, and a simple email acknowledgement feature that may be required for privacy guidelines with a full audit trail.’

And here is what they want to do together now. In particular, there is this statement about applying AI to documents – and of course, what are some of the key documents in any company? Contracts……

‘By turning unstructured documents into actionable data, this capability extends secure, context-aware automation across more environments — enabling autonomous orchestration of workplace tools like email and chat, automation of legacy systems including mainframes, and greater efficiency across complex IT landscapes.’

Along with that are some other areas they’re looking at – none of which are specifically legal, but could connect to it:

• ‘AI assistance that lets employees ask questions in natural language and get clear, actionable answers through speech-to-text capabilities.
• AI-powered summarization and content generation for incidents, cases, knowledge articles, and service interactions — helping teams resolve issues faster with less manual effort.
• Developer and admin tools that turn intent into workflows, logic, and automation, dramatically speeding how business processes are built and updated.
• Intelligent search and discovery that pulls the right information from across enterprise systems exactly when it’s needed.’

Plus, here’s what execs at both companies are saying:

Amit Zavery, president, chief operating officer, and chief product officer at ServiceNow, commented: ‘ServiceNow leads the market in AI-powered workflows, setting the enterprise standard for real-world AI outcomes. With OpenAI, ServiceNow is building the future of AI experiences: deploying AI that takes end-to-end action in complex enterprise environments.’

Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer at OpenAI, added: ‘With OpenAI frontier models and multimodal capabilities in ServiceNow, enterprises across every industry will benefit from intelligence that handles work end to end in even the most complex environments.’

So, if OpenAI works closely with ServiceNow, and ServiceNow in turn has some legal tech capabilities, what does this mean?

First, despite ServiceNow’s huge size and reach, just based on general feedback from the market, their legal tech push has not had a major effect. But, if turbo-charged with OpenAI LLMs and agentic capabilities they could perhaps take a second run at this and make more of an impact.

This doesn’t necessarily mean ‘OpenAI wants to do legal tech’ via the partnership. Although they are clearly interested in the medical sector as a separate vertical, for example; and AL has been told they have talked directly to a least one large law firm about providing an enterprise-level offering to the lawyers without any legal tech intermediaries as part of the deal. Despite this they have not said they want to do legal as a vertical sub-division of their offering, or work toward that by engaging with companies that do handle legal tech. (Note: OpenAI is an investor in Harvey.)

Moreover, ServiceNow is not ‘a legal tech company’ as such either, they cover many kinds of enterprise workflows, with legal as a small subset of that.

In short, it’s something that legal tech observers need to keep an eye on, but for now it’s several steps removed from a direct intervention by OpenAI into the legal world. However, it is indeed an indirect path into legal for the genAI giant – and that could expand once Sam Altman and team have seen what’s possible. As many have said, OpenAI needs lots of revenue, and perhaps at some point they might see a distinct legal capability as a way to achieve a boost. That said, they could do that now – and as noted, they have not done so. We shall see.

More about ServiceNow here.