Create cross-enterprise apps fast and govern for scale
The Washington Q2 store release updates for ServiceNow® App Engine and Now Assist for Creator are now available! These innovations include a new citizen developer studio to optimize the app dev lifecycle, and enhancements to Now Assist for Creator with more capabilities driven by simple natural language guidance. This allows you to efficiently put “yes” to work.
Let’s look more closely at these new innovations!
Introducing Creator Studio
Creator Studio is a no-code tool that allows anyone to create the intelligent workflows they need in a guided, focused environment. Designed with all developers in mind, it offers a guided application development experience, allowing process owners to create applications without the barriers of traditional low-code development. This tool is not intended to replace existing development tools like App Engine Studio but to complement them by lowering the barrier for app creation. Creator Studio is more than just a new tool; it’s a new way of thinking about application development on ServiceNow. It promises to open up development on the platform to a broader audience, enabling more users to contribute to their organization’s digital transformation journey.
Here is some insight into what it offers:
- User-Friendly Interface: Drag-and-drop form builders and a curated set of form components make application creation straightforward and efficient.
- Guided Automations: Leverage a curated set of automation components from Process Automation Designer, allowing for easy automation of workflows.
- Comprehensive Preview and Deployment Options: Before deploying, users can preview how applications will appear across various platforms, including the ServiceNow portal and mobile app. Deployments undergo a review process, ensuring governance and compliance.
- Enhanced Collaboration: With a native integration to App Engine Management Center, Creator Studio encourages collaboration between non-developers and professional developers. It enables the former to create the foundation of an application, which developers can then extend or integrate with more complex functionalities.
Now Assist for Creator enhancements
Now Assist for Creator is a powerful tool that revolutionizes the app platform experience by enhancing productivity and efficiency during the app development lifecycle. Leveraging app, playbook, flow, and code generation capabilities, Now Assist for Creator significantly reduces app development time, while creating more seamless coding experiences. Platform users save time by eliminating syntax errors, enabling faster completion of app development and management tasks.
App generation
App developers often struggle with envisioning how to structure their app when they first get started. Most professional developers start off their studies by learning how to write a “skeleton” program to test their application’s logic and ensure it covers the main goal of the app before spending time filling in the skeleton with proverbial meat, muscles, and tendons. Just creating a skeleton app is time consuming!
Now, with the new app generation capability, app creators can simply describe in natural language the outcome of their desired app, and the skeleton will be generated for them! The GenAI logic in Now Assist will ask follow-up questions to better tailor its understanding for the request it’s interpreting, until it feels it has enough information to generate the app as described. That generated app, after only 2 to 5 minutes of conversation, provides the working skeleton needed to jump right into the additional app ‘bulking’ process to ensure the resulting app achieves the purpose for which it was designed. This saves countless hours and avoids common programming pitfalls by leveraging programming best practices in app design and creation.
Playbook generation
Many people innately understand how processes work, yet authoring a process playbook requires substantial ServiceNow knowledge, which hinders the adoption of this feature. In today’s fast-paced IT environment, there’s a constant need to increase the speed of process authoring with a starting point for process design. Doing so increases the adoption of playbooks driving consistent, repeatable services.
With playbook generation, a process analyst can now generate a playbook simply by describing the process! They simply use natural language to auto-generate a playbook skeleton, and each stage of the playbook is mapped out and populated with placeholder activities. This capability streamlines service delivery while lowering the barrier to entry for process creation!
Service Catalog item generation
Service owners rely on developers and IT teams to create/manage catalog items which translates into higher turn-around time and engagement costs. This is not sustainable. They are looking for ways to reduce time to value and cost.
This new feature is tailored for this situation. Service Catalog item generation leverages LLMs to generate catalog item content, questions and fulfilment flows, all driven by natural language input, greatly simplifying the overall catalog item creation process even for non-technical service owners. This reduces time to value by accelerating and simplifying catalog item creation to make products and services available faster!
Want to learn more about the power of low-code apps and these latest features? Check out our App Engine community forum.
