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Victor Chen
New version of this article can be found: here.
Now Assist in AI Search is the next evolution of enterprise search from ServiceNow and was first announced on May 16, 2023.
Building off the success and learnings from the limited access controlled go-to-market release, the Vancouver release of Now Assist in AI Search supports generating actionable answers and resolutions from knowledge articles via Global Search (in Next Experience), Service Portal, Employee Center, or Virtual Agent. The Now Assist in AI Search plugin is automatically installed when you install any of these feature plugins from Now Assist Admin:
User experience
Imagine asking for guidance on a problem and getting a concise list of immediately actionable steps to follow instead of a list of documents to study – this is what Now Assist in AI Search does, by responding to user questions with an actionable Now Assist Q&A Genius Results card, along with the most relevant search results.
Now Assist in AI Search uses what is known as a Retrieval Augmented Generation architecture. Here is how it works:
- At query time (when a user asks a question), AI Search filters search results by evaluating user access to indexed tables and records from the ServiceNow Knowledge Base - this is the Retrieval step.
- Now Assist in AI Search then passes the query with the HTML body from the top KB article as input to the ServiceNow LLM - this is the Augmentation step.
- Finally, Now LLM creates an answer for the user's question - this is the Generation step.
With ServiceNow's AI Search as the foundation, Now Assist in AI Search maintains the same high-trust integration with ServiceNow content security models to govern data access for each user, addressing an important concern of system administrators.
Since the RAG architecture uses the trusted knowledge base article content for context, this allows Now Assist for Search to return highly relevant and actionable answers without having to retrain the model and helps to minimize the chances of hallucinations.
As long as a highly relevant article is found (that the user has permission to access), Now Assist in AI Search will generate a Now Assist for Search Q&A Result Card, in addition to displaying other related classic AI Search results in a list.
If the knowledge base does not contain highly relevant content on the instance, a user will simply see a list of related AI Search results in a list, or will show that no content was found for the user (because of content security permissions).
Now Assist in AI Search configuration
Now Assist in AI Search is enabled through the Now Assist Admin and uses the ServiceNow search Q&A LLM to generate Now Assist for Search Q&A genius results.
AI Search administrators can use machine learning relevancy and result improvement rules to control AI Search results, ensuring that only the most relevant content is sent to the Now LLM for processing.
With the Vancouver release, admins can configure encoded query strings to limit which articles can be sent to the LLM for processing, an important aspect of our shared responsibility towards how ServiceNow and our customers manage the responsible use of generative AI on the ServiceNow Platform. (Note: This property was removed in Washington DC Patch 5+, and another way to filter results for Genius Results is targeted in November '24.)
Simply add a True/False "Approved for Now Assist" field to your Knowledge table and form configuration to specify whether the content is approved or not and set your encoded query to only allow the approved knowledge articles to be used as a source for processing by Now LLM. When a result is generated by Now Assist in AI Search, the Genius Result Card will display a sparkle icon along with the text "Answer generated by Now Assist".
Since all LLMs add a slight increase in processing time, it is a good practice to set a value for the encoded query string, otherwise an empty Value field will always send the topmost relevant article from the knowledge base to the LLM - this may or may not be desirable, so it is an important decision to make during the initial configuration.
Searches will only generate a Q&A - Now Assist for Search Genius Result response if:
- the article is published,
- the user has permission to view the article,
- the user’s session language is set to English,
- the genius result configuration is enabled for that experience,
- the article is included in the Knowledge table encoded query string results,
- the search phrase matches the regex configured query condition.
The occasional bad answer is to be expected with LLMs:
- All LLMs are known to have a risk of producing Hallucinations.
- Customers are encouraged to participate in AI data sharing so that our models can be improved to reduce the chance of hallucinations.
- Users can provide feedback using the "Was this suggestion helpful?" feedback mechanism on the result card.
If everything has been correctly setup and configured and the user is still not seeing any results:
- Genius result card may not be configured correctly
- Article does not provide an obvious solution to the question
Articles that do not meet the criteria will still be able use the regular "Q&A" Genius Results Configuration for other content that matches the AI Search criteria. Articles that are marked as "Approved for Now Assist" in this example may not trigger a Q&A - Now Assist for Search genius result if all criteria are not met and could still trigger a fallback to a regular Q&A genius result.
Note that these AI Search Genius Results will show the sparkle icon along with the text "AI Suggestion".
The RAG architecture used in Now Assist in AI Search supports ServiceNow's approach to Responsible AI that is transparent, responsible, auditable, and secure.
- The Q&A Result Card content that is AI generated will show the label: “Powered by Now Assist”. (Transparent)
- ServiceNow experts have carefully curated a handful of prompts to guide and control the inputs and outputs of the LLM to reduce hallucinations. (Responsible)
- Using RAG to focus Now Assist in AI Search on trusted content, the risk of hallucination is designed to be reduced because the responses are grounded in content that the user has permission to access. (Responsible)
- Using encoded query strings during pre-processing to exclude certain content from being sent to the LLM reduces unnecessary compute that has cumulative financial and environmental costs. (Responsible)
- The Q&A Result Card includes both the AI generated answer to the user’s question, along with a link to the source article. (Auditable)
- AI Search preserves Access Control List settings, and content security is automatically enabled and isn't configurable. (Secure)
Please see the Now Assist in AI Search Frequently Asked Questions for more information on installation and getting started troubleshooting tips.
Watch the AI Academy replay of Get started with Now Assist in AI Search (or skip ahead to the demo).
Hello @Sean Hughes @Lener Pacania1
What are the possible reasons why the Q&A Genius Result answer card in the portal doesn't show?
I tried to follow the instructions given in this article and looked for the "Approved for Now Assist" field but it is not available when I configure the form or the list view.
I want to report on whether or not the answer generated by AI was helpful or not. What table in servicenow has this data? thanks!
Please check Table KB_FEEDBACK , I assume this will store the Given Value.
Regards
RP
