Knowledge Management Academy - June 11th, 2024 - Now Assist in Knowledge Management

cavila · ‎06-12-2024

When will the recording for the June 11, 2024 session be available?

Ashley Snyder · ‎06-13-2024

Here's the transcript of the Q&A from the event:

1. Is this feature available with the knowledge management advanced plugin or is it from something else?

Now Assist in Knowledge Management, or knowledge generation is included with the Now Assist for CSM, ITSM, and HRSD applications as of May 2024. You must be entitled to these applications to be able to use this functionality.

2. Does the published on date factor into its relevance for AI Search? For example, if an accurate process was published 3 years ago and is still used successfully, does it help the system to re-publish, even without making changes, the article so that the published on date is more recent?

The updated date does factor into the relevance score for AI Search. Re-publishing an accurate and still relevant article with a more recent date can help maintain its relevance in search results. See the AI Search product documentation, and our AI Search and Knowledge Management best practices webinar for more information.

3. Will the knowledge generation feature eventually target other personas, such as knowledge writers/authors? For example, if they wanted to improve an existing article or write a brand new article.

The knowledge generation feature as of May 2024 targets the agent persona. Only new articles can be drafted from an incident, case, or HR case. This is a 1:1 relationship. Articles need to be updated manually as of this release. We plan to expand functionality and add capabilities for more personas in future releases.

4. What license does Now Assist require?

Now Assist requires a specific licensing agreement. Contact your ServiceNow account representative for more information on licensing requirements.

5. Is it the KCS OOTB template? Will it work on KCS customer template, but using the same KCS headings/fields?

Now Assist is designed to work with the KCS (Knowledge-Centered Service) template if you have the required KCS plugins and properties installed and configured in your instance. See the KCS product documentation for more information: Activate Knowledge Management KCS Capabilities, Activate KCS Integration for Incident Management.

6. I see it works with the KCS template, but does it also work within the KCS approval workflow? i.e., if someone submits an article will it still go to the review workflow before being published?

Knowledge generation uses the approval or publish workflows associated with the knowledge base, so if you have approval workflows set up for your KCS processes, you’ll continue to use those workflows.

7. Will the existing articles be searched for the same/similar content before recommending to create a new one?

Not as of the May release. We’ll communicate more about this functionality in future releases. Agents should utilize Agent Assist and Recommended Actions to search early and often for knowledge articles prior to creating an article for a task.

8. Customers at times enter erroneous/vague case details. I find agents spend a lot of time manually updating the case info and details to make the KB it makes sense. Curious how AI can solve for this?

Now Assist uses AI and natural language processing (NLP) to interpret and refine case details, reducing the time agents spend manually updating information and ensuring that knowledge base articles are clear and accurate. It is strongly recommended that agents and authors review the generated article for errors and correct any information found in the article prior to publishing.

9. Is KM v.3.0 the latest version?

Knowledge Management v3 is the current version, but be sure to check your instance for updates to Knowledge Management and its associated plugins.

10. Will AI scan for duplicates before offering to generate new knowledge?

No, knowledge generation at this time will not currently scan for duplicates before generating a new article. We do have licensed Predictive Intelligence solutions to show similar articles when authors are working on the knowledge form itself (which is not correlated to our generative AI functionality at this time) and when agents are searching for articles within Agent Assist.

11. Will assist be able to index other sources other than case or incident to generate the article?

Not at this time. As of the May release, Knowledge generation is only available for Customer Service Cases, HR Cases, and Incidents. We’ll update our communications as the capability expands in future releases.

12. What is PDI?

PDI stands for Personal Developer Instance, which is a free instance of ServiceNow provided to developers for learning, experimentation, and development purposes.

13. Would Now Assist pull in screenshots into the article?

Not currently, it generates plain text with basic styling. Currently, our Q&A model interprets plain text and basic styling to summarize articles with Now Assist in AI Search and Now Assist in Virtual Agent. See this support article on using images with articles.

14. Are there metrics available in Knowledge to measure deflection?

Yes, ServiceNow provides various metrics and analytics tools within the Knowledge Management module to measure deflection, effectiveness, and usage of knowledge articles, including views, feedback, and relevancy scores. See the product documentation on the knowledge dashboards, as well as our success indicator dashboards.

15. When you say most used KBs, do you mean a KB article or a knowledge base?

'Most used KBs' typically refers to the most frequently accessed and utilized knowledge base articles within the knowledge base.

16. At Knowledge24 you stated that having active AI Search and KM Assist would result in agents potentially seeing differing content depending on where they search. Can you elaborate on that?

I believe this question refers to Agent Assist as there is no feature called KM Assist. Agent Assist in a workspace uses Zing search, which is an older and more limited search functionality from AI Search that is commonly used in our portal solutions. We recommend implementing Recommended Actions within your workspace to use AI Search solutions.

17. Any recommendation to keep ownership group to a minimal number of people to manage knowledge articles?

It is recommended to keep the ownership group to a minimal number of knowledgeable and trained individuals to ensure consistency and quality in the management of knowledge articles. This helps maintain a high standard and reduces the risk of outdated or incorrect information being published.

18. If my ownership group members are 1:1 with my domain experts, is that a good setup?

Having a 1:1 ratio of ownership group members to domain experts may be a good setup for your organization. Keep in mind that ownership groups were created to reduce the 1:1 reliance on an author for an article in case the author cannot perform the duties needed for article maintenance such as review, approvals, and feedback review. You may find that the 1:1 domain expert relationship may produce bottlenecks, but if your domain experts are able to manage the workflow effectively then this strategy may work for your organization, and you can use the ownership group to scale and add more domain experts as needed.

19. Do you have any best practices on how often we should review the generated articles?

There are no hard and fast rules for review, it depends on the ability of your organization to perform the reviews. We recommend identifying high-value (high use and views) articles and ensuring there is at least a 6-month or quarterly review on these articles to ensure accuracy and relevancy. You may find this cadence works for all articles in your knowledge base, or you may extend the review period to yearly for articles that are not as highly trafficked. The cadence depends on your organization and how efficiently your authors or ownership groups can review articles.

20. How is access to be able to generate these articles controlled?

Access to generate articles using Now Assist is controlled through 2 avenues:

The author must have Can Contribute user criteria on the knowledge base they are generating the article in.
The author must have the roles defined in the Display section when configuring the skill in the Now Assist admin console.

21. How can we get access to the ServiceNow knowledge generation feature?

Access to the ServiceNow knowledge generation feature can be obtained by entitling and installing the Now Assist for ITSM, CSM, or HRSD applications and ensuring the appropriate licensing and configurations are in place. Contact your ServiceNow account representative for more details.

22. The data pool for article creation is the customer incidents and cases?

Knowledge generation uses the context from the incident, case, or HR case the agent is creating the article from. The NowLLM model itself is trained on large datasets. For more information on our models, see the product documentation. Knowledge generation uses the Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct model as of this recording.

23. Can you repeat the two article templates that were mentioned?

Currently, knowledge generation supports the Standard and KCS templates. We have roadmap items to expand to more templates in the future.

24. Did you mention that it can only be used on an incident?

Knowledge generation is currently supported on incidents, cases, and HR cases. Usage depends on your licensing for the related applications: Now Assist for ITSM, CSM, and HRSD. Contact your account representative for licensing questions.

25. How do you plan to avoid duplication of content?

We’ll have more information on this in future communication, currently you’ll need to continue using your organizations knowledge governance strategies for training agents on checking for articles prior to creation, and managing duplicate articles.

26. If some group (tech/content writers) other than the ownership group is supposed to create articles, how should that be managed?

Knowledge generation as of May 2024 is geared towards the agent use case for generating articles from incidents, cases, or HR cases. We will support more personas and use cases in future releases.

27. Can you assign the article you are drafting to another user?

The author of an article can be changed. This process does not differ when using knowledge generation. See this support article for more information.

28. Does it generate in English only?

The primary language for article generation in Now Assist is English as of May 2024, contact your account representative for more information on future supported languages.

29. Does Now Assist article creation check for existing articles on the same topic?

Not currently, keep an eye out for future communication on this feature.

30. So the resolution outcome for the articles reads from the resolution field and we cannot change the prompt?

Generative AI is not field mapping. We do have the capability of using field mapping to grab verbose what’s in the resolution field and map it to a knowledge article template without generative AI. Generative AI takes the context of the short description, description, activity (work notes and comments) and resolution/close notes to draft the article. The more context you must provide generative AI the more defined outcome you will see. Generative AI can use what’s in the resolution field within a resolution section of an article, the context isn’t solely limited to this field.

31. Can I select the User criteria in the instant process to manage user access?

User criteria are defined at the knowledge base and knowledge article levels. For more information, see this product documentation on user criteria.

32. Does ServiceNow have spell-check functionality?

The TinyMCE editor does provide options for spell check, generative AI takes this a step further by producing drafts that are -free from spelling errors and typos.

33. Is the Assist panel you just used to generate an article available for all ITSM users?

The availability of the Now Assist panel for generating articles depends on user roles and permissions. It may be restricted to certain ITSM users who have the necessary permissions to create and manage knowledge articles. The users must have Can Contribute user criteria to the respective knowledge base, as well as the roles defined in the configuration for Now Assist panel.

34. Will it also update the category field of the article based on the incident it is generated from?

No, knowledge generation only generates the body or text of an article. Categories must be set manually at this time.

35. Is it possible to modify the prompt? Our KCS articles follow a certain format.

You cannot modify the prompt for Now Assist knowledge generation at this time.

36. Can we change the template format used by AI once it is set?

You can change the text within the article, but if the question can the article be set to use a new template, this is not possible at this time. Technically, each article template is a unique table that extends kb_knowledge. Changing a template for an existing article means moving it to another table. While the sys_class_name attribute of an article record can be changed, you risk losing the values in the fields that are specific to the old template that do not exist in the new template. To avoid data loss it’s suggested to create a new article rather than attempting to convert templates.

37. How is the article title handled? Is there consideration on the quality of the short description or is it simply copied over as the title?

The article title is usually generated based on the content and context of the record it is derived from, but it can be edited and customized as needed to ensure clarity and relevance. It is not a 1:1 field mapping.

38. Who should use this feature of creating knowledge articles?

Now Assist for Knowledge Management is geared towards the agent persona as of May 2024.

Kohei Tominaga1 · ‎06-17-2024

@Ashley Snyder
Thanks for sharing release information around Knowledge Management.

Is this feature designed to be used synergistically with Knowledge Demand Insight, or is it intended to be an alternative to Knowledge Demand Insight in the future?

I need this information to determine whether or not I should use Knowledge Demand Insight going forward.