Playbooks in Workflow Studio release notes
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Summary of Playbooks in Workflow Studio Release Notes - Zurich Release
The ServiceNow® Playbooks builder within Workflow Studio allows playbook owners to create and manage multi-flow processes using diagram or task board interfaces. The Zurich release brings significant enhancements to Playbooks, improving permissions, trigger flexibility, AI integration, and usability. Playbooks are available via the ServiceNow Store as part of the Workflow Studio application, which is essential to update post-Zurich upgrade to access new features.
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Key Features
- Enhanced Permissions: Control author rights for creating, editing, and viewing playbooks, and set runtime user permissions for viewing, restarting, and completing stages.
- Flexible Playbook Activation: Activate playbooks without a trigger to run programmatically; support multiple triggers including scheduled triggers for better automation.
- AI Agent Integration (Agentic Playbooks): Enable AI agents to autonomously or collaboratively complete activities within playbooks, including custom AI agents and AI skills as activities.
- Advanced Playbook Logic: Add decision branches between stages to determine flow paths based on conditions; evaluate child variants later in the playbook rather than immediately.
- Playbook Generation and Summarization: Generate playbooks from triggers or knowledge base articles to reduce manual creation effort; AI-powered summaries provide quick overviews of playbook flows without detailed review.
- Integration with Model Context Protocol (MCP): Expose playbooks as MCP tools for external triggering and execution.
- User Experience Improvements: Enhanced navigation and visualization of decision branches, support for parallel activities within decisions, and improved rich text handling in email bodies.
- Localization and Accessibility: Enhanced keyboard navigation and screen reader support in Diagram view, plus compliance with WCAG color contrast standards. Note that OpenAI LLMs for playbook generation are not available in the APAC region.
Activation and Upgrade Guidance
- Playbooks require downloading or updating the Workflow Studio app from the ServiceNow Store to access Zurich features.
- Playbook generation features require the ServiceNow Otto for Creator application.
- Customers should verify entitlements to determine feature access within the ServiceNow Otto AI product branding.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Create sophisticated, multi-path workflows with improved control over who can author and run playbooks.
- Automate processes efficiently by triggering playbooks on schedules or programmatically, without manual intervention.
- Leverage AI to reduce manual workload by enabling autonomous AI agents and integrating AI skills directly into workflows.
- Quickly generate and understand playbooks from existing documentation or AI summaries, accelerating deployment and iteration.
- Improve user experience and accessibility, ensuring broader usability across your organization.
The ServiceNow® Playbooks builder within the ServiceNow® Workflow Studio application enables playbook owners to create multiple-flow processes in a diagram or task board interface. The Playbooks builder was enhanced and updated in the Zurich release.
Playbooks highlights for the Zurich release
- Add permissions for playbook authors and runtime users.
- Activate a playbook without a trigger. Set multiple potential triggers for a playbook, or trigger a playbook on a schedule.
- Enable AI agents to complete activities without human intervention during runtime.
- Set child variants to evaluate later in a playbook.
- Create decision branches for stages.
See Exploring Playbook for more information.
Important:
Playbooks is available in the ServiceNow Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.
Important information for upgrading Playbooks to Zurich
After you upgrade to Zurich, update the Workflow Studio application in the ServiceNow Store.
New in the Zurich release
- Set child variants to evaluate later in a playbook
- Instead of evaluating immediately after the trigger, set a playbook's child variants to be evaluated after a specific activity in the playbook.
- Agentic Playbooks
- Enable AI agents to assist users with activities during runtime.
- Add permissions for playbook authors
- Control which playbook authors can create, edit, and view playbooks in Workflow Studio
- Add permissions for runtime users
- Control whether runtime users can view a playbook, add optional activities, restart a playbook, and complete work within specific stages.
- Create decision branches for stages
- Add a decision node between stages to determine which stage to run next, based on runtime conditions.
- Set multiple triggers
- Configure a playbook to run based on any one of multiple triggers.
- Schedule when a playbook should trigger
- Configure a playbook to run based on a schedule.
- Choose your LLM for playbook generation and recommendations
- Choose between NowLLM, OpenAI ChatGPT4-o, Gemini, Claude for playbook generation and recommendations.
- Route users to stages based on decisions
- Send runtime users to a stage based off of the trigger record or input that users provide.
- Generate a playbook with a trigger
- Generate a playbook with both a trigger and activities.
- Zurich Patch 10
- Playbook summarization
- Generate an AI-powered summary of a playbook from the Workflow Studio canvas. The summary covers the playbook's stages, activities, triggers, and inputs, helping you understand quickly about its purpose and flow without reading through each activity individually.
- Use AI skill as an activity
- Add an existing AI skill as an activity in your playbook to run lightweight, focused AI tasks as part of the playbook flow. When the playbook reaches the activity, the skill executes, produces structured outputs, and passes those outputs to subsequent activities automatically.
- Use custom agent in Agentic Playbooks
- In addition to the default AI Agents, you can add your custom AI Agent for an activity. Choose how you want to use the AI Agents in the activity- Collaborative or Autonomous.
- Zurich Patch 11
- Playbook generation from a KB article
- Generate a playbook directly from an existing knowledge base article to reduce manual effort when creating playbooks for documented processes.
- Zurich Patch 12
- Playbook as an MCP tool
- Expose a playbook as a tool in an MCP server, enabling MCP clients to trigger and execute the playbook through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
- AI agents autonomous support configurations
- Configure in the activity definition how you want autonomous support from AI agents for that activity. The additional configurations help you gain more control on the activity in a playbook.
Changed in this release
- Activate playbooks without a trigger
- Configure and activate playbooks without specifying triggers, so that playbooks are only triggered programmatically.
- Implement playbooks that are callable by a scriptable API
- Configure a playbook that executes with an input object instead of requiring the configuration of a trigger record reference and trigger conditions.
- Decision activity enhancements
- User experience improvements to decision activities:
- In the Board view, select the branch to see a list of dependent activities and branches, and to navigate to them.
- When a decision or one of its branch nodes is selected in Diagram view, the decision and all of its branches are selected, and the side panel opens.
- Add parallel activities within decision branches.
- Enter a combination of pills and text in an email body
- Enter a combination of text and multiple pills in any rich text / HTML editor container, such as an email body.
- ServiceNow Otto
- ServiceNow Otto is the new AI experience brand. This change is reflected in the name of ServiceNow products, including Playbooks. Your product entitlements remain unchanged. Check your entitlements to determine your access to specific features.
Deprecations
- now.assist.creator role
Activation information
The application comes with the Workflow Studio ServiceNow Store app. Workflow Studio is part of the ServiceNow AI Platform® and is available by default. Get the latest Workflow Studio features by downloading the latest Workflow Studio app in the ServiceNow Store, as well as related applications like the Process Automation Content and Process Automation Experience Demo applications. The application can be downloaded for patch fixes.
To use the playbook generation feature in Workflow Studio, download the ServiceNow Otto for Creator application.
Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.
Additional requirements
Download the latest Workflow Studio app in the ServiceNow Store to access the newest features.
Accessibility information
- In Diagram view, navigate between and configure stages and activities via keyboard.
- Set the action bar to always show in Diagram view. To learn more, see View all buttons without hover.
- In Diagram view, use a screen reader to help navigate the designer.
- Updated color contrast for activities to meet WCAG standards.
Localization information
Using OpenAI LLMs for playbook generation is not available in the APAC region.