ServiceNow

ServiceNow AI Research, part of the Advanced Technology Group, focuses on enterprise AI agents and efficient language models. The team originated from Element AI (acquired 2020), Montreal's pioneering AI startup co-founded by Yoshua Bengio. Key researchers include Alexandre Drouin and Christopher Pal (Polytechnique Montreal, Mila founding faculty).

ServiceNow co-created StarCoder (2023, 15.5B) and StarCoder2 (2024, up to 15B) through the BigCode collaboration with HuggingFace. The Apriel model family (2025) is ServiceNow's own SLM line: Apriel-5B (4.8B, 4.5T tokens) and Apriel-Nemotron-15B-Thinker (reasoning model with NVIDIA, matches o1-mini at half the memory). Apache 2.0.