On today's episode of the Developer Passport, I was joined by Brian Bimschleger - Director of Inbound Product Management at ServiceNow - to walk through the latest enhancements coming to flows in the Australia release.
Flows in ServiceNow are automated workflows, allowing developers and administrators the ability to connect triggers, logic, and actions to emulate buisness processes both on and off of ServiceNow's platform. Here are some highlights from what we covered.
🤖 Bringing AI Agents into Flow Designer
One of the most exciting updates is the ability to use AI agents directly inside a flow. Developers can now add a Use an AI Agent action to their flows, allowing them to enhance existing automation with AI-powered decision-making.
Key capabilities include...
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Calling any AI agent available on your instance directly from a flow
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Passing data pills from earlier steps into the agent as inputs
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Defining expected outputs so the flow can reuse AI-generated results in later steps
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Choosing whether the flow should wait for the AI agent to complete or allow it to run asynchronously
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Allowing agents to operate autonomously or with human approval
⚡ Building Flows Faster with Build Agent
We also looked at how Build Agent, ServiceNow’s conversational development assistant, can now create and edit flows using natural language.
Instead of manually building out the logic step-by-step, developers can...
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Describe the automation they want in a prompt
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Have Build Agent generate the entire flow structure
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Preview a diagram of the flow logic before opening it in Flow Designer
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Automatically populate conditions, triggers, and data references
Once generated, the flow is fully editable in Workflow Studio, making it easy to refine or extend.
Brian also shared a preview of upcoming enhancements, including support for...
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Creating custom actions
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Dynamically generating subflows
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Handling more advanced logic like loops and data streams
🐛 AI-Powered Flow Execution Analysis
Debugging automation can often take longer than building it. To help with that, the Australia release introduces Flow Execution Analysis.
When a flow execution fails, developers can run an analysis that:
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Reviews the execution logs and reporting data
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Identifies the likely root cause
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Provides recommended steps to resolve the issue
This significantly reduces the time spent digging through logs and action outputs to understand what went wrong.
🔍 Comparing Flow Versions with Flow History
Another feature we highlighted was Flow History, originally introduced in the Zurich release, which provides version tracking for flows.
With Flow History, developers can:
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See how a flow has changed over time
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Compare different versions of a flow side-by-side
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Identify exactly what steps, conditions, or logic were modified
This makes it significantly easier to troubleshoot issues introduced during updates, understand how a flow has evolved, and collaborate more effectively across teams.
Across all of these updates, the goal is clear: make automation faster to build, easier to troubleshoot, and smarter with AI.
From embedding AI agents directly into flows, to generating automation with natural language, to analyzing failures and comparing versions, the Flow ecosystem continues to evolve in ways that help developers build and maintain automation with greater speed and confidence.
If you missed the livestream, be sure to watch the full session to see these features in action!
