Robotic Automations

ServiceNow announced this morning that it was acquiring Czech Republic task mining company UltimateSuite, giving the company a new way to capture and understand how work flows through a business. The companies did not reveal the price, but it was a three-year-old startup that had raised €768,000 (approximately $839,000), so likely not a huge number.

Task mining is a part of process mining, a growing worldwide market that helps companies understand how work flows through an organization, looking for bottlenecks in order to increase efficiency. Consider that Celonis, one of the leading startups in this space, has raised $2.4 billion and was valued at $13 billion as of October 2022. UltimateSuite is substantially smaller, having raised less than $1 million, but it gives ServiceNow another tool in its task mining arsenal, says Eduardo Chiocconi, VP and GM for process mining at ServiceNow.

Prior to acquisition of UltimateSuite, the company had the ability to drill down into a workflow, but lacked the ability to get down to the user task level. “And as we zoomed in and discovered where a specific inefficiency may be, we were lacking the ability to inspect or understand what individual users are doing. And that’s exactly what UltimateSuite task mining is coming in to help us with,” Chiocconi told TechCrunch.

He says it’s really about building more efficient business processes, and the addition of UltimateSuite is giving it greater capability to do that. “Insight without action has little value, so the idea is that as you find out exactly what needs to get fixed, then we also provide you on the same platform, the ability to automate some of those inefficiencies for better streamlining that end-to-end business process.”

The plan is to merge UltimateSuite functionality into ServiceNow’s process mining capabilities. “If you look at how ServiceNow been doing acquisitions in the past, we pride ourselves on organically surfacing these capabilities into our unified platform,” Chiocconi said. That means it won’t be sold as a separate product in the future. “Our whole objective is to bring more value to our customers by replatforming all this IP and know how that comes from UltimateSuite and surfacing it as an organic extension of process mining.”

This is the third acquisition for ServiceNow over the last several years involving AI and automation. It acquired AI-powered workflow tool G2K in May this year and Element AI, a Canadian startup at the end of 2020.