AI Search in Service Portal
Summarize
Summary of AI Search in Service Portal
The AI Search application enhances the Service Portal search experience by delivering faster, more intelligent, and personalized search results. It replaces the legacy Zing search with features like auto-complete, natural language understanding, typo correction, and user-context awareness to help portal users find relevant answers quickly and efficiently.
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Key Features
- Powerful and flexible search: AI Search supports intuitive query suggestions, handles typos, and enables natural language queries to improve search accuracy and ease of use.
- Relevant and actionable results: Search results are personalized based on user attributes such as role, location, and search history. “Genius results” allow users to take immediate actions directly from the search results list.
- Intelligent search refinement: Users can refine searches using dynamic and static filters (facets and tabs), enabling quick narrowing of results by categories like hardware or user profiles.
- Configurable search experience: Administrators can customize search behavior through search application and search results configurations, update portal records to enable AI Search, and adjust widget options for specific search widgets.
- Customizable theming: The appearance of the AI Search interface can be tailored to align with company branding via CSS variable updates.
- Browser support: AI Search requires users to log in using modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge (Chromium), or Safari for optimal performance.
Activation and Configuration
- AI Search is active by default on the ServiceNow AI Platform and enabled by default for new and zBoot customers on Service Portal.
- Existing customers upgrading to the Xanadu release must manually enable AI Search by updating the portal record.
- Customized or cloned legacy search widgets may require running a fix script to ensure compatibility with AI Search.
- Key configuration elements include defining search application settings (engine, limits), search results display, AI Search results actions to control navigation, and Entity View Action Mapping (EVAM) for action buttons in genius results.
- Relevant search widgets using AI Search include Homepage Search, Typeahead Search, Faceted Search, Catalog Homepage Search, and Knowledge Breadcrumbs widgets.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Improved search speed and accuracy in Service Portal, leading to faster resolution of user queries.
- Personalized and actionable search results that increase user productivity and satisfaction.
- Dynamic filtering options that help users quickly refine and find precise information.
- Flexibility for administrators to tailor the search experience and appearance to organizational needs and branding.
- Guidance on enabling and configuring AI Search ensures smooth adoption and upgrade transitions.
Configure the ServiceNow AI Search application for Service Portal so that portal users can take advantage of intelligent query features and quickly find the answers they need.
AI Search features
- Powerful and flexible search
Unlike the legacy Zing search that was used in previous releases, AI Search is faster and more assistive. Portal users can find answers more quickly and easily with features like auto-complete search queries, natural language support, and typo handling.
Figure 1. Search suggestions Figure 2. Typo handling - Relevant and actionable search results
With AI Search enabled in Service Portal, the portal search engine captures information about the user — such as their role, location, department, assets, and search history — and returns search results that are relevant and personalized.
AI Search also includes genius results that enable users to take action directly from the search results list.
Figure 3. Genius result - Intelligent search refinement
Portal users can refine their search results using dynamic and static filters. For example, if a user searches Mac, they can use facets to filter search results by hardware or user profiles.
Figure 4. Search facets Figure 5. Tab filters 
For more information on using facets and tabs, see Faceted Search widget.
For more information on AI Search features, see Exploring AI Search.
Activation information
AI Search is a ServiceNow AI Platform feature that is active by default.
AI Search is enabled in Service Portal for all new and zBoot customers by default.
If you are upgrading to Xanadu as an existing customer, AI Search is disabled in Service Portal by default. You can enable it by updating the portal record. For more information, see Enable and configure AI Search in Service Portal.
Configuring AI Search for Service Portal
- Search application configuration
- Defines search experience settings, such as the search engine, search results limit, and suggestions limit. For more information on defining a search application configuration, see Defining search application configurations.
- Search results configuration
- Defines how search results are displayed. For more information on defining a search results configuration, see Define a composite dataset.
You can change the search application configuration or search results configuration that your portal uses by updating the portal record. For more information, see Enable and configure AI Search in Service Portal.
To configure the search results payload to navigate to and display the appropriate portal page for a selected data source, define an AI Search results action. For more information, see Define an AI Search Results Action.
You can configure the action buttons in genius results by defining an Entity View Action Mapping (EVAM) action. For more information, see Define an EVAM action.
You can customize the look and feel of the AI Search experience in Service Portal by updating the relevant CSS variables. For more information on these variables, see Theming for AI Search in Service Portal.
Browser support
With AI Search enabled in Service Portal, users must log in with a modern browser such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge (Chromium), or Apple Safari.