The 12 Platform Academy Sessions That Developers Actually Watched in 2025

Sharon_Barnes

We analyzed the Platform Academy sessions from 2025 to see what resonated with the community. From AI agent workflows to debugging Flow performance, here's a look at the episodes that developers found most valuable this year.

As 2025 wraps up, we wanted to take a moment to look back at the Platform Academy sessions that connected with you all this year. It's been great seeing the community engage with the content, and the viewing patterns tell an interesting story about what matters to developers right now.

We looked at three metrics to understand engagement: total views, watch time, and completion rate. These helped us see not just which sessions got attention, but which ones delivered enough value that people stuck around. Here's what we found.

What Made the Cut

Turns out, you all had pretty good taste. The top performer? Building workflows for AI agents—no surprise there given where the industry's headed. But what's interesting is the mix: we've got deep technical sessions (looking at you, sys_audit), practical troubleshooting (Flow debugging had the highest engagement at 37.9%), and a healthy dose of "what's new in Zurich" content.

Let's break it down chronologically, because context matters when you're learning this stuff.

January: Starting Strong with sys_audit

Unlocking the Power of sys_audit for Effective System Auditing (Jan 16)
📊 918 views | 146.2 hours watched | #3 overall

Kicked off the year with something foundational. If you've ever needed to track down what changed, when, and by whom—or worse, restore something that got deleted—this session covered it all. History views, timeline features for CMDB tables, analytics, reporting. The works.

Why it landed: sys_audit is one of those features that seems simple until you actually need to use it in production. This session went beyond "here's how you turn it on" and got into the real-world stuff: debugging issues, building meaningful reports, and not accidentally ballooning your database.

February: Cloning Done Right

Clone Admin Console and Best Practices for Efficient Cloning (Feb 20)
📊 960 views | 116.6 hours watched | #6 overall

Instance cloning is one of those things you probably do a few times a year, mess up at least once, and then forget the details until next time. This session on the new Clone Admin Console UI, optimization tips, and data preservers/exclusions hit at the right time.

The real value here was learning what to exclude and what to preserve—getting that balance right can save you significant time and storage costs.

June: UI Builder Updates and Mobile Insights

What's New in UI Builder for Yokohama (Jun 5)
📊 1,048 views | 103.3 hours watched | #4 overall

UI Builder keeps getting better, and this session showed off the Yokohama improvements: visual data binding, responsive authoring, user presence indicators, and some genuinely clever AI-driven features for summarizing client scripts and configuring events.

If you're still on the fence about moving from classic UI to Next Experience, this was the session that probably pushed a lot of people over. The tooling's matured enough that the trade-offs are starting to tilt heavily in favor of the new framework.

Mobile Lessons Learned from the Field (Jun 24)
📊 1,083 views | 95.2 hours watched | #5 overall

This one was gold for mobile developers. Instead of marketing fluff, we got real talk about what actually works and what doesn't when building mobile experiences. Lessons straight from Knowledge 2025 feedback: the gotchas, the patterns that scale, and how to improve adoption.

Worth watching just for the "here's what people complained about and here's how to fix it" segments.

July: AI Takes Center Stage

An Admin's Guide to Now Assist (Jul 10)
📊 761 views | 90.4 hours watched | #9 overall

Now Assist is everywhere now, but back in July, a lot of teams were still figuring out how to actually implement it. This session walked through the Admin Console setup, usage tracking, and best practices for rollout.

Practical stuff: how to monitor what your AI is actually doing, how to tune it, and how to keep it from going off the rails.

Building Workflows to be Used as Tools in AI Agents (Jul 17)
📊 1,367 views | 168.4 hours watched | #1 OVERALL 🏆

And here's the winner. This session on embedding workflows into AI agents hit a nerve. Views, watch time, engagement—crushed it across the board.

Why? Because this is where the platform is heading. AI agents aren't just chatbots anymore; they're orchestrating real work. And if you can wrap your existing workflows so an AI agent can call them intelligently, you're basically future-proofing your automation strategy.

The technical depth here was legit: how to structure your workflows, what parameters to expose, how to handle errors gracefully when an AI calls your flow with something unexpected. Good stuff.

August: GenAI and Knowledge

Exploring GenAI Features in ServiceNow Mobile (Aug 7)
📊 548 views | 70.6 hours watched | #11 overall

Mobile + GenAI = smarter, more responsive apps. This session covered the key capabilities and use cases for integrating AI-driven features into custom mobile apps. Hands-on examples, real integrations.

If you're building mobile apps, this is the session that'll save you from reinventing wheels. The team already figured out the hard parts; you just need to wire it up.

Ask the Experts: Knowledge Management (Aug 12)
📊 412 views | 67.2 hours watched | #12 overall

Q&A format, straight answers to real Knowledge Management problems. Whether you're setting up your first knowledge base or trying to keep an existing one from going stale, this covered it.

Lower on the list by view count, but the engagement rate (19.6%) suggests the people who needed this content really stuck with it.

September: Debugging Like a Pro

Flow Performance and Debugging (Sep 4)
📊 969 views | 209.8 hours watched (HIGHEST) | #2 OVERALL 🥈

This one was special. Another Ask the Experts format, but focused on Flow performance and debugging. And check those stats: 209.8 hours of total watch time, 37.9% average completion rate. For a technical deep-dive session, that's insane.

Why? Because everyone hits Flow performance issues eventually. And when you do, you need answers fast. This session became the go-to resource for troubleshooting slow flows, debugging execution paths, and optimizing your workflow logic.

The engagement numbers tell the story: people came for help, and they actually got it.

October: Zurich Release Deep Dives

What's New in Zurich for Knowledge Management (Oct 2)
📊 814 views | 125.3 hours watched | #7 overall

Zurich brought some solid improvements to Knowledge Management, including Now Assist integrations and workflow enhancements. This session had a special guest from the Workflow Automation team to explain how it all fits together.

The Now Assist + KM combo is powerful once you understand how to wire it up properly. This session showed you how.

What's New in the Zurich Release for Service Catalog (Oct 16)
📊 632 views | 65.5 hours watched | #10 overall

Service Catalog got some love in Zurich: pre-fill catalog variables, enhanced Catalog Builder with UI Policy support, broader variable types. If you maintain a catalog, these features probably made your life easier.

The demo of the new Catalog Builder experience was worth the watch alone—they cleaned up a lot of the rough edges.

November: ReleaseOps Arrives

Streamlining Enterprise Deployments with ServiceNow ReleaseOps (Nov 6)
📊 674 views | 124.9 hours watched | #8 overall

ReleaseOps is Zurich's answer to deployment pipelines, and this session showed it off properly. Intelligent pipelines, automated gates, orchestrated releases—the whole DevOps-for-ServiceNow vision.

If you're still doing manual deployments or struggling with Update Sets, this is your glimpse into a better world. Live demos of Deployment Requests and Release orchestration made it concrete.

What We Learned

A few patterns jumped out:

AI content dominated. The #1 session was about AI agents, and three of the top 12 involved AI/GenAI features. The platform's moving toward AI-first workflows, and y'all are clearly paying attention.

"Ask the Experts" works. The two Ask the Experts sessions (Flow debugging and Knowledge Management) had engagement rates way above average. Turns out people like getting straight answers from people who actually build the stuff.

Release content has legs. Multiple Zurich-focused sessions made the list. When there's a major release, developers want the details—not marketing decks, but actual "here's how this works and here's how you use it" content.

Foundational topics still matter. sys_audit, cloning, and Service Catalog aren't sexy new features, but they're core to getting work done. The view counts prove it.

Where to Watch

All these sessions (plus the rest of 2025's Platform Academy content) are on the YouTube playlist.

If you're catching up or need to reference something specific, the Community Hub has all the blog recaps and session links organized by date.

Looking Ahead

2025 was a solid year for Platform Academy content. We covered AI agents, debugging, mobile, Zurich features, and a bunch of foundational platform stuff that developers actually need to know.

If you missed any of these, they're all still available. And if there are topics you want to see in 2026, drop a comment. We're always looking for gaps to fill.

Happy building,
The Platform Academy Team

Full Episode List (by date):

Jan 16 - Unlocking the Power of sys_audit | #3 most popular
Feb 20 - Clone Admin Console Best Practices | #6
Jun 5 - What's New in UI Builder for Yokohama | #4
Jun 24 - Mobile Lessons from Knowledge 2025 | #5
Jul 10 - An Admin's Guide to Now Assist | #9
Jul 17 - Building Workflows for AI Agents | #1 🏆
Aug 7 - Exploring GenAI in Mobile | #11
Aug 12 - Ask the Experts: Knowledge Management | #12
Sep 4 - Flow Performance and Debugging | #2 🥈
Oct 2 - What's New in Zurich: Knowledge Management | #7
Oct 16 - What's New in Zurich: Service Catalog | #10
Nov 6 - ReleaseOps for Enterprise Deployments | #8