Now Assist Conversational Catalog Request in practice

[Mark Roethof]

Articles, Blogs, Videos, Podcasts, Share projects - Experiences from the field

Hi there,

"Generative AI" or "Now Assist", without doubt the hype of this moment. If it's at Knowledge, World Forum, people posting content, Meetups, etcetera: Now Assist. Though at the same time... for most of us, if wanting to get our hands dirty on Now Assist, play around, do a proof of concept for your employer or customers... how? Since you can't get Now Assist on your Personal Developer Instance, and also installing on a subproduction instance is not possible for most companies.

Luckely one of my customers managed to get a temporary instance from ServiceNow with Now Assist entitlement. From my first exploration of Now Assist, I will try to share some insights gained in a few articles. First up: Now Assist Conversational Catalog Request.

Setup

Installing plugins, adding roles, etcetera is ofcourse part if the initial setup to get different parts of Now Assist up and running. Rather than describing that here, I would just like to reference a really nice Now Learning course that I found: Now Assist for Creator Implementation Bootcamp. This (free) course contains detailed steps on getting Now Assist up and running, and if you actually don't have a customer instance with Now Assist entitlement: this course allows you to request a lab instance for a few days! Without any background or going properly through the Now Learning course, I managed to get Now Assist up and running for most parts within a few minutes. 

Conversational Catalog Request

One of the Now Assist capabilities is about "Enable your requesters to have a streamlined, conversational experience that is based on generative AI as they submit a catalog item request in Virtual Agent. By offering this generative AI experience, your organization can increase self-service and reduce operating costs." 

Or in short, using the Virtual Agent client, based on the end-user input, Catalog Items can be displayed and every question will be queried. Something that is already kind of possible with Virtual Agent, though Now Assist will interpret the user input, and no separate huge generic Virtual Agent topic is needed to build and maintain.  

Possitives

When trying out some out-of-the-box Catalog Items you will notice that this works pretty fine. Questions are being prompted, questions where the answer is already known are not promoted, slot filling recognizes answers to one or more questions on the end-users input, contextual question prompts feels human-like, answers can be changed at any time, and answers to questions are validated. The only thing needed to get this working is that on the Catalog Item itself the value for field "Turn off Now Assist conversation for this item" is cleared. 

Limitations

When trying out some more complex out-of-the-box Catalog Items or Catalog Items from the customer that contain commonly used techniques, we run quickly into limitations of Now Assist Conversational Catalog Request. Some of these limitations are similar to the out-of-the-box Virtual Agent "Request Catalog Item" topic block to query Catalog Items. When this happens, instead of Now Assist querying the questions for the Catalog Item concerned one by one, the end-user will only be presented with a tile and link to the Catalog Item.

One of the first limitations you will encounter: the number of questions. Out-of-the-box, only for Catalog Items with 15 Variables or less (this includes Variable Sets) the questions will be queried. Any higher number of Variables in your Catalog Item: the end-user will only be presented with a tile and link to the Catalog Item. Luckily you can influence this upper limit of 15 through System Property "glide.sc.conversational.request.question.limit".

Another limitation you will encounter quickly: Client side scripting. If there is any form of Client side scripting present in your Catalog Item (Catalog Client Script, Catalog UI Policy using script): the end-user will only be presented with a tile and link to the Catalog Item.

There are more small limitations that you will run into which will result in the end-user only being presented with a tile and link to the Catalog Item. For example: Some Variable types are not supported (one of them is type "Custom"), using Catalog Data Lookup Definitions is not supported, using the Auto-populate section on Variables is not supported, using Dynamic Reference Qualifiers is not supported. 

Workarounds / Rethinking logic

Some of the limitations are by customers their own choice. For some of the limitations we might have to rethink logic used. For some of the limitations there won't be an alternative.

For automatically populating questions onChange, there's no alternative. Even using the newer out-of-the-box functionality like the Auto-populate section on Variables is not supported with Now Assist. What might be an alternative: do you need all questions presented to end-users, is it really needed to populate hidden variables onChange already? What I see at multiple customers, questions with email, phone, cost center, manager, address, name, etcetera. Variables with values that are already known in ServiceNow. If these variables are for cross-checking so a end-user might update the auto-populated values, oke that won't be possible with Now Assist. Maybe an alternative could be, after submitting the request, to display these values in a notification to the user, asking if any of the information is incorrect contact the Service Desk, etcetera. Eliminating all auto-populated questions completely though... I don't think that will be achievable.

Another example I see at customers is not allowing to submit a Catalog Item, because a combination of questions filled should not allow this, or because they already requested the same item (for example a laptop or mobile phone) less then x months ago. Perhaps for Catalog Items like these, the validation can be shifted to Server side after submitting the Catalog Item. Automatically canceling the request and adding a work note, or adding an additional manager approval.

Other common Client side scripting I see often is for making questions conditional mandatory / read-only / visible. A lot of these situations though should be shifted using Catalog UI Policies or using newer out-of-the-box options like the "Read only" / "Hidden" checkboxes on Variables and therefore not be an issue anymore with Now Assist. Those checkboxes for example, for this customer I saw this not being used because 1) some developers were not up-to-date about new features from the last few releases 2) skipped updates were handled incorrectly and these new checkboxes were not added to the form lay-out.  

Sumup

The setup and positives of Now Assist Conversational Catalog Request are pretty clear: There's not much work involved to get Now Assist Conversational Catalog Request up and running, first end-user impression looks well, and the effort from developers will be way less than before. The limitations though... there are a bit too many at this moment I think. Ofcourse not every Catalog Item needs to work with Now Assist, though at least the majority should.

Who knows one or two ServiceNow Store releases from now this will nicely improve (as we are used to with ServiceNow 😀). Especially the limitations on Client side scripting might be a deal breaker. Some of the Client side scripting at customers should definitely be revised like I mentioned. Though even some newer out-of-the-box functionalities are not supported with Now Assist which I personally find hard to accept.

The first impressions of Now Assist Conversational Catalog Request looks nice, though when having a closer look, perhaps it's production worthy in a few Store releases from now. 

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That's it. Hope you like it. If any questions or remarks, let me know!

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Kind regards,

Mark Roethof

Independent ServiceNow Consultant
4x ServiceNow Developer MVP

4x ServiceNow Community MVP

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LinkedIn

[Rene El Hamzh]

Great insights! I hope Now Assist will also be available on PDIs at some point.

[Victor Chen]

Great article Mark. I detail what's supported and not in Now Assist in Virtual Agent for catalog ordering in this article. It includes tips and best practices to enable your catalog items for Now Assist: https://www.servicenow.com/community/virtual-agent-nlu-articles/how-to-request-catalog-items-in-virt...

We are also delivering enhancements in 2024 that will increase coverage of catalog items for Now Assist in Virtual Agent, stay tuned! [Safe harbor applies for forward looking statements.] 

[James Downs]

Mark, fantastic article and sums up my thoughts exactly.  It is clear, this is only the beginning - I look forward to new updates.

[Sridhar10]

Thanks Mark for sharing those details. Looking forward to see how Now Assist does in other areas like Incident mgmt, Knowledge mgmt etc.

Does anyone know if there is any GenAI or Now Assist features coming to Walk-Up Experience?