Hidden Now Intelligence Gems in the Quebec release

[dangrady510]

I've been to Quebec (both Quebec City and Montreal) a number of times over the years to deliver a number of different presentations, and have some very distinct memories of those trips (some that can be shared here, others that should not).  Most of these memories are influenced by one of three main factors:  the fact that wine was always served with lunch(which unfortunately didn't always have the desired impact on my in-presentation attempts at humor); the fact that I would always be reminded by my host that French was the primary language and that I should slow down my New York-paced delivery for the audience; and the fact that it was always significantly colder than I had anticipated when packing for the trip.

On one of my first trips to Montreal - it was early Spring and I hadn't packed a coat - on our walk from the hotel to dinner I was freezing and had quicken my pace to an almost spring(some would say it matched my delivery) to get to the restaurant and get out of the cold.  Suddenly, I was stopped in my tracks when I came across this beautiful building - the Notre-Dame Basilica.  Regardless of how cold I was, I was compelled to spend the time to admire some of the smaller architectural details that made this church special.

That is what I'm going to ask you to do for the rest of this post.

Slow down and take in a few of the more detailed Now Intelligence enhancements in the Quebec release that may not be getting the headlines, but will likely be the ones that make a memorable impact as you look to get more value out of the digital workflows your are running on the Now Platform.

From a Virtual Agent perspective, the expansion of NLU support to 16 languages, Topic Recommendations to identify which Virtual Agent conversations will make the biggest impact, and Incident Auto Resolution are some big ticket items getting lots of attention.

However, "Custom Chat Experiences" is an enhancement that is getting less attention but will have immediate benefit to customers who are using Virtual Agent to provide an AI-powered conversational interface as a self-service option to their organization.  In Quebec, you now have the ability to provide tailored chat experiences to employees and customers based on where the conversation was initiated from.  Adjust setup topics like greetings and live agent transfers, quickly connect users to relevant conversations with promoted topics, and use AI Search to optimize fallback scenarios.

For example, if someone was visiting an office location and wasn't in but was interacting with the Virtual Agent on a mobile device or via a portal in the lobby they may get an experience like this one:

Whereas, a logged in employee may be presented with this personalized Virtual Agent experience: 

The more personalized and contextual the Virtual Agent experience is, the higher your engagement levels will be - maximizing your return.

Another Quebec enhancement designed to increase Virtual Agent engagement is the ability to create proactive actionable notifications.  The Virtual Agent can be used to reach out to users and remind them about an Employee Voice Survey that needs to be taken or an upcoming password expiration that needs to be addressed.  The user can then start a conversation with the Virtual Agent to complete the task right from the notification itself.

This last Virtual Agent enhancement I want to draw attention to is the ability to more easily connect conversations to the powerful workflows authored in Flow Designer.  This is something that was possible prior to Quebec but required a bit of scripting to accomplish.  Now there is a specific Action node available to topic authors that allows quick access to Subflows and Actions.  This not only makes it easier to use the Virtual Agent to facilitate work in the Now Platform, but it also exposes the 100s of IntegrationHub spokes so Virtual Agent can be the front end to cross enterprise workflows as well.

When it comes to Predictive Intelligence, most of the Quebec conversation has been focused on the improvements to the natural language understanding(NLU) framework - NLU Workbench enhancements, increased multilanguage support(16 langugages), prebuilt software/hardware vocabulary, improved performance reporting and more - but there are two adds outside of the NLU framework I want to highlight.

The first is the ability to call trained Predictive Intelligence solutions as part of your digital workflows being au...  There are prebuilt actions for each of the Predictive Intelligence frameworks, this will allow you to embed machine learning directly into a workflow creating smarter experiences that will continually learn and improve over time.

The second Predictive Intelligence enhancement I'd like to focus on is the ability to take the result of a clustering solution and turn it into a data source for further analysis.  ServiceNow customers use the clustering framework to automate the process of analyzing unstructured data to identify automation opportunities.  In Paris, we added a Tree Map visualization to help you better understand different aspects of the clusters and provide direction in terms of which clusters to focus on first.

But once you identified an individual cluster there was limited ability to further work with the data other than drilling into the records with the clusters themselves.  In Quebec, you now have the option to create a Cluster Insight table for each clustering solution definition which then allows you to use the Report Designer to further understand the opportunities within individual clusters.

Information tends to be addictive.  You give someone access to a little they tend to want more.  The ability to work with Cluster Insights data helps satisfy that addiction.

Finally, there is NLQ.  In the Paris release we introduced Natural Language Query(NLQ), which allows people to interact with the valuable data in the Now Platform by entering plain language requests rather than having to create a report in the Report Designer.  In the Paris release, NLQ was only exposed via the Analytics Center in a Workspace, requiring Performance Analytics entitlement.  In Quebec, NLQ is available on lists in the core platform.  Once activated, the list in the platform will have a new "Ask" option.  Simply enter a phrase like "hardware and software p1 incidents opened by me" and click the Ask button.

The NLQ engine will interpret the ask and generate the appropriate conditions for you and apply them to the list.

The Report Designer has also been equipped with this same NLQ front end.

Hit "Ask" and NLQ will jump start the report creation process for you.

At ServiceNow we have increased the pace of innovation to help meet the digital urgency all of our customers are facing these days.  With this increased pace, the speed and volume of information that is being presented to all of us is almost unconsumable.  It's important to remember to stop, catch our breath(maybe have a glass of wine at lunch) and take in some of what is going on around us.  Because it's often in those short, sometimes unexpected pauses we find something worth remembering.

If you found something worth remembering in this post, I encourage you to check out Hidden Now Intelligence gems of the Paris release.

I'm interested in hearing about the value add Now Intelligence capabilities you're looking forward to in the Quebec release and how you plan to apply them.  Please share those in the comments below.

Some other Now Intelligence posts:

What do the Virtual Agent and Cobra Kai have in common?

The Unexpected Similarity between this years holiday season and Predictive Intelligence

The Digital Ensemble that helps create great Virtual Agent experiences 

AI Search in Quebec