Imagen you’re standing in front of a whiteboard with your customer or colleague, sketching out a flowchart for a process or function you want to implement. After a few cups of coffee and some productive discussions, you all agree: this is what we want and also what we need. Now comes the big question: What is the easiest way to transform the whiteboard into a story in ServiceNow? Oh, and don’t forget the developer does not speak the language of your customer. So, the flowchart is useless to him.
Let's use this small example:
I've seen quite a few posts recently about ServiceNow Lens, and it got me thinking, could this be the answer?
In this article, I’ll share my experience trying ServiceNow Lens for the first time. At the end you will see whether I transformed my whiteboard successfully or not.
But before we start our journey, let’s take a moment to talk about what ServiceNow Lens is and what are some use cases, just in case you have not yet heard of it.
ServiceNow Lens is a Window and Mac native application which scans your monitor and uses a vision LLM to understand the content. Because it is fully integrated with ServiceNow the extracted data is used to auto-fill fields on your forms while you are creating or updating records.
While creating an incident it helps you to explain your issue. It can scan your error screens and automatically fill your incident fields using the correct terminology so that the service desk is able to provide a solution immediately.
Need to copy data from an email or an invoice? ServiceNow Lens can support you. And because it uses OpenAIs Vision model it does not need training upfront like you need with traditional OCR solutions.
And theoretically it should also be possible to help me with my flowchart drawn on my whiteboard. So, let’s see how this goes.
First, we need to activate the ServiceNow Lens Now Assist Skill. You can find it in the Platform Category on your Now Assist Admin Panel. Once the skill is active, users with the “lens_user” role can use the application.
The last step for the installation is downloading and installing the Windows or Mac application.
There are different ways you can start and work with the app. In this post I will not cover everything. Maybe that is something for another post. Here I will cover what I did to transform my whiteboard.
You can start ServiceNow Lens from any list. Once you have the role “lens_user” you see a UI Action “Create with Lens” next to the “New” button.
This will open a new record and simultaneously the browser asks you whether you want to open the ServiceNow Lens app.
Sorry for the German screenshot, but you can trust me, it only asks if you want to open ServiceNow Lens.
Once the app is opened, we position it over the photo taken from my whiteboard and hit “Analyze”.
After a few seconds the story form is filled by ServiceNow Lens. The Record is not yet saved. Now we have the opportunity to check if we agree with the information provided or if we want to change something.
As you can see the language is automatically English. It seems like this is because of the language setting of my user in ServiceNow. Once I change the language of my user to German the result will also be in German.
Coming back to my initial question whether I am able to achieve my goal with ServiceNow Lens I would answer it with: Absolutely.
