Exploring Playbook

Playbook enable process owners to author cross-enterprise workflows and create a single, unified process. Build the underlying processes for playbooks that Playbook Experience agents and fulfillers use.

Playbooks benefits

Workflow Studio Playbooks enables you, as a business playbook owner, to organize Workflow Studio content into unified and digitized cross-enterprise processes. With Playbooks, you gain these benefits:

• Connect multiple flows and actions into an end-to-end business workflow.
• Reuse existing Workflow Studio flows, subflows, or actions to automate playbook activities.
• Organize playbook activities in a digitized task board or diagram interface.
• Guide agents and fulfillers through complicated playbooks from start to finish, improving customer experience and task resolution. Build your playbooks in Workflow Studio, and then design and embed your Playbook Experience in legacy workspace, UI Builder, ServiceNow Mobile Platform, Service Portal, and more.
• Consolidate separate business processes across the organization.
• Define a consistent record life cycle from creation to completion.
• Pass data between the activities and stages of a business process.
• Specify the conditions and the order in which activities and stages run.
• Visualize and manage the activities and stages of your process.

Creating a well-designed playbook

The automated business processes that you design guide your end users and help them focus on the tasks and information that matter to them. A well-designed playbook can do these things:

• Start up, or trigger, automatically for the types of records that your end users care about
• Reuse activities from existing Workflow Studio content
• Has well-defined stages that end users can follow for a record
• Clearly show the next steps that end users must take to move through a record's life cycle

Playbooks content

Playbooks has these components:

Playbooks

A playbook is a ServiceNow AI Platform® representation of a cross-enterprise business process for your organization. A playbook owner is responsible for creating and maintaining a playbook.

Triggers

A trigger specifies when to start running your playbook.

Stages

A stage is a grouped sequence of activities in a playbook. A playbook owner creates a stage to specify a logical grouping of activities. A stage in your overall business process.

Activities

An activity defines the Workflow Studio content that powers the playbook's automation. An activity can also specify the user-facing experience that the playbook produces when it runs.

For more information about how to use and navigate the Playbooks user interface, see Playbook builder.

Playbook Experience

Guide agents and fulfillers through complicated playbooks from start to finish, improving customer experience and task resolution. Build your playbooks in Workflow Studio, and then design and embed your Playbook Experience in legacy workspace, UI Builder, ServiceNow Mobile Platform, Service Portal, and more.

To learn about designing Playbook Experience, see Designing Playbook Experience.

Getting started

Before you get started with Playbooks, Familiarize yourself with any features that your business uses to automate operations on the ServiceNow AI Platform, such as flows, subflows, and actions.

If you're a playbook owner who wants to learn the basics of digitizing your business process, check out the following resources:

• Get started with ServiceNow® Process Automation
• Get started with Playbooks
• Design your first automated process
• View your process executions

If you're a ServiceNow Process Automation administrator who wants to set up and customize Playbooks, check out the following resources:

• Triggers
• Activity definitions

Playbook across ServiceNow AI Platform®

Playbook capabilities are available in other ServiceNow® products and for specific industries. You get the Playbook content when you subscribe to the ServiceNow AI Platform®.

To learn about activating Playbook other applications, see Activate Playbooks.

Integration	Content available
App Engine Studio	Build playbooks from App Engine Studio.
Creator Studio	Create basic request and fulfillment apps without code.
Configure Playbooks for Customer Service Management	Create playbooks for Customer Service Management.
Field Service Management	Create playbooks for Field Service Management.
HR Service Delivery Playbook	Create playbooks for HR services.
Software Asset Management Guided Experiences	Create playbooks for Software Asset Management.
Healthcare and Life Sciences	Create playbooks for Healthcare and Life Science processes.
Playbooks for Financial Services Operations applications	Create playbooks for Financial Services Operations.
Playbooks for Public Sector Digital Services	Create playbooks for Public Sector Digital Services.
Run actions to resolve alert issues in Service Operations Workspace for ITOM	Create playbooks for IT Operations Management.
Account onboarding	Create playbooks for Account Lifecycle Events.
Onboard Jira to DevOps Change Velocity — Workspace	Create playbooks for IT Service Management.
Security Incident Response playbooks	Create playbooks for Security Operations.
Working with SPO playbooks in the Source-to-Pay Workspace	Create playbooks for Procurement Service Management.
Complete publishing checklist and request policy approval	Create playbooks for Governance, Risk, and Compliance processes.

• Playbook builder
  Playbooks is a component in Workflow Studio. Workflow Studio gives you a streamlined way to author, configure, and monitor playbooks, flows, subflows, actions, and decision tables in one place.
• Playbook Experience
  Understand how Playbook work in the ServiceNow AI Platform® to automate cross-functional processes and consolidate them into task-oriented views for your end users.
• Now Assist features for Playbooks
  Now Assist provides AI-powered capabilities across the Playbook experience, from generating and recommending playbooks to enabling autonomous, agentic execution.
• Domain separation in Playbooks
  Data separation is supported for Playbooks. The domain value of the triggering input record determines the domain context. Domain separation enables you to separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called domains. You can control several aspects of this separation, including which users can see and access data.