When to consider using Now Assist in Virtual Agent

[Victor Chen]

Now Assist in Virtual Agent was released in Vancouver. As mentioned in this article: Now Assist in Virtual Agent - What's New, what's different, and what's coming!, there are several differences between this and the existing Virtual Agent. As you evaluate using the new Now Assist in Virtual Agent, consider the following:

😊 Consider using Now Assist in Virtual Agent today (Xanadu):

• If you have not yet deployed Virtual Agent, whether it's because of lack of resources or it's still on your roadmap, then consider deploying Now Assist in VA with its easy low-code setup experience providing fast time to value and little to no technical debt.

• If your main use case is to surface knowledge articles and catalog requests, then this fits Now Assist in Virtual Agent's feature set today. It provides Now Assist in Search for Knowledge articles and multi-turn conversational catalog ordering with little to no additional configuration needed.

• If you have a robust Knowledge Base and Service Catalog in your instance, then Now Assist in Virtual Agent can surface these items to end-users to increase self-service and issues deflection. Learn more about the support abilities and best practices for catalog items in this article: How to request catalog items in Now Assist in Virtual Agent

• If you use Employee Center/portal or Microsoft Teams/Slack as your main service interface, then Now Assist in VA is accessible in these channel. Note that if Now Assist in VA is enabled for Service Portal for example, the original Virtual Agent on Service Portal becomes hidden.

Note: when you turn on Now Assist in Virtual Agent in a portal, it will replace the existing NLU Virtual Agent in that portal interface. The NLU VA topics still exist in the VA Designer.

🤔 Evaluate Further (Xanadu):

• If you already have a mature Virtual Agent implementation with an extensive list of existing NLU topics & workflows, then consider what existing workflows can be migrated to Now Assist in VA. As of the Washington May 2024 release, there is an automated way to migrate NLU topics to Now Assist in Virtual Agent. Notifications are also supported. Migrating more advanced topic node types are on our roadmap.*

Keep checking out our Community Forum later as more information becomes available!

*Safe harbor applies for forward-looking statements​

[Victor Chen]

*Safe harbor applies for forward-looking statements​

[Lynda1]

We use Virtual Agent, exploring Now Assist. If we move to Now Assist, all the Virtual Agent Topics need to be rebuilt? Or is Now Assist upgrading our current Virtual Agent?

[Lynda1]

@claraz I found the answers in ServiceNow documentation

Now Assist (servicenow.com)

We are upgrading to Washington DC and there is a conversation tool coming soon to make the existing topics work with the LLM

[Victor Chen]

Article updated to account for the May release for Washington DC. And yes, the NLU to LLM topic migration tool is now here - Documentation

[BethanyMcCool]

@Victor Chen , if you have not yet implemented VA and have not purchased Now Assist, would you still recommend implementing VA without Now Assist (either still using NLU or implement without NLU or Now Assist)?

[DarshanShah]

@Victor Chen  We have enabled the Now Assist for Virtual Agent but the topic discovery is very slow. It takes approx 10-12 seconds to discover a topic based on the user prompt and start the flow. Any tips on improving this experience?

[eshtilkind]

Hi Victor. Do you know which languages will be supported natively in Q4?

[esebasti]

Hi Victor is there any insight as to when in the road map Slack integration will be supported for Now Assist? Thanks

[Eric Merkle]

very soon 

[esebasti]

Thanks @Eric Merkle much appreciated. Are we thinking like 3 to 6 months, something like that? thanks!

[Eric Merkle]

should be coming next month - Safe Harbor applies 

[esebasti]

ok thanks very much appreciated

[pavithrajrs]

@Victor Chen  

We used our third-party custom Angular bot and integrated it with the Virtual Agent API. we have implemented a Virtual Agent with a list of existing topics and models. If the users utterance does not match any topics, it should search the knowledge articles and retrieve the relevant content.(Note : we used contextual search still through direct utterance its not hitting properly, tried fallback configuration changes but nothing helped) Additionally, I want to implement Q&A-based user search. Is it possible to extend the current application with these functionalities, including Q&A? Is it possible to achieve this functionality using Now Assist along with NLU?

If so can you please give any reference URL?

[alexanderwilken]

Hey all, I'll do my best to share what I've learned as my organization is starting to deploy Now Assist in VA. Keep in mind this is very new for me and others, and change is coming rapidly!

• @esebasti I believe Xanadu release supports integrating Now Assist to Slack. Our organization plans to upgrade soon, we intend to integrate to Slack on Xanadu before releasing VA to all users.
• @DarshanShah Topic Discovery is faster than that in our instance, which is two ~ish years old. There may have been improvements introduced since you last posted, as ours is roughly ~5 seconds. However our topic list is also very short, as we're early in development. Do you have a long topic list?
• @BethanyMcCool Using the old NLU approach takes a significant more amount of development time and is incredibly buggy, so I recommend jumping straight into Now Assist if you're able to do so, or if you have a small team developing VA. However do note that Now Assist in VA is incredibly young in its lifecycle, so it will change rapidly and have bugs, but for our organization the time savings for development and the improved user experience is absolutely worth jumping straight to Now Assist. 

[esebasti]

@alexanderwilken Thanks for the update. we have actually upgraded to Xanadu and have the Slack integration up and running with Now Assist VA. Working pretty good so far. Thanks

[Kristin J]

@Victor Chen , earlier in the chain @Bethany McCool asked about whether it is worth implementing VA without Now Assist.  In my case, we have not implemented VA already because we do not have staff to maintain or enhance it.

Now with GenAi/Now Assist as a possibility, I'm trying to work out whether it is reasonable to say that if you do not have a dedicated VA administrator or staff, Now Assist is a basic substitute for that, simply with multi-turn conversational catalog ordering.

Am I on track with that thinking?

Thanks,

Kristin

[alexanderwilken]

Hey @Kristin J , I see you didn't get a response so I'll do what I can from our experience.

NLU was very labor intensive, Now Assist completely does away with needing to teach VA how to understand most language. It sped up development significantly, I was able to develop VA w/Now Assist mostly on my own, with support from a senior engineer. For the person building VA, I recommend allocating them 100% to Virtual Agent while its being built for the first time, as it is a skillset of its own to learn and maintain. However, once launched its a lot lighter on maintenance than NLU would have been. 

Let me know if that helps, I'm also happy to connect and answer other questions you might have.