Hi, this is Andrew Kincaid, the original co-host of TechNow
for the first 17 episodes. Way back in 2013 and 2014. And yes,
I'm still working here at ServiceNow. It is my honor to wish Chuck
all the best in his retirement and to kick off his final TechNow episode
showcasing the Xanadu release with Lauren, Earl, Pranav, and of course, Chuck. Well, thank you very much, Andrew. It is an honor to be here for episode
98 of TechNow, this is the web series
where we bring you all kinds of ServiceNow platform tips for builders and developers
and admins. We've got our Xanadu release
to look at today. Very,
very cool stuff coming. Lots of GenAI. That was the first question
in the Q&A panel. What's new in Gen AI? You've got an hour to find out. Just joking online when that one came in. So let's do some quick
housekeeping and introductions. First, the safe harbor notice,
this is forward looking. It is early availability date. This is recorded as of August 1st, 2024. And we have general availability
coming out on September 10th. So we invite you to use the link if you're
watching live in the resource panel. Otherwise we will have a link in the description to our Community
release and upgrades pages. Don't base
any purchasing decisions on this. You can read all through it,
I think someone even made a temporary tattoo of this for fun. That's the safe harbor statement. I think I've legally covered it. Let's get on with the introductions. My name is Chuck
Tomasi, senior developer advocate. At least for 36 more days at ServiceNow
as I roar rapidly towards retirement. This is my last TechNow webinar. Very sad, mixed emotions today. And I've been with the company
since 2010, was a customer for a couple of before
that and a long, long history in IT and tech that I am happy to share
with some time, if we ever get together,
our paths cross again. But to keep it short, I am going to
turn it over to the lovely Lauren. Hey everybody. Good morning,
good evening and good afternoon. My name is Lauren Mcmanamon. I am also a senior developer
advocate here at ServiceNow. I am a former ServiceNow customer myself
as well, but spent a lot of time on the Creator
Workflows Solution consulting team prior to joining the advocates two years ago. I have a lot of fun hobbies. I really like photography of all kinds, as evidenced by my Fujifilm
sitting here on my desk. I also am training for my Sake Sommelier
test still, that was there last year. need to make a little bit more progress. and also, you might be graced
with my little bichon frise’s presence here as well. So if you do be sure to say
hi to Bo in the chat. And on to Mr. Earl Duque. Thanks, Lauren. Hi everyone. I am Earl Duque and I'm also your senior
developer advocate here at ServiceNow. I've worked on the platform
as a developer from 2016 to 2021 before joining the company. But before joining,
I was a hackathon aficionado and I was one of the original developer MVPs. But since joining ServiceNow, you can see me helping with developer
and community programs like Hacktoberfest, or assisting the MVP community, or making
silly or technical videos for you all. About me personally,
I love all things games. I love building weird stuff on ServiceNow, and I love any of the things you see
in my video background, like my uh! like Lego or 3D printing. But most importantly,
I am a proud father of two girls who are now one and four years old. And one last fun fact about me
tomorrow is my three year anniversary at ServiceNow
and I will now pass it off to Pranav. Hi everyone! My name is Pranav Bhagat and I'm also a senior
developer advocate here at ServiceNow. I have close to eight years
of ServiceNow experience. I started as a software engineer,
then moved into consulting and just prior to joining ServiceNow,
I was working with a customer and was helping them
with an implementation. I'm also an ex MVP like Earl
and which I'm really proud of. And apart from my work,
I love to walk, to box, play video games, and travel to different places,
and that's pretty much about me now. I'm going to pass it back to Chuck. All righty. We have one other member of the team
that is joining us officially today. She's on the webinar in the background
answering Q&A and happily chatting on our team's chats
there. This is Kristy Merriam. You may know her from CreatorCon
where she's done the IoT garden, the Lego sorter, had a hand in liquor bot,
been on the keynote stage. Not her first rodeo. She just chatted in the other chat,
I'm divulging some information, said “I felt like an honorary member of the team
for a while now, and it's nice to be official.” It is official today,
so please welcome, Kristy, and we will,
bring her on future productions. And you should be seeing a lot more of her
coming up. Very excited to see what she brings to
the team. Lots of new ideas,
lots of creative thoughts. We're very eager to, to put her on the
track and get her rolling. All right, today's agenda real quick. We are going to be covering a lot of stuff mainly centered around GenAI, I'm not going to read
every bullet item to you. You can see there's analytics generation
and app generation along with some lovely developer tools like ServiceNow
Studio and the SDK. So looking forward to that. We will try to answer your questions live. Please put them in the Q&A panel
so we don't miss them in the chat. If they're in the Q&A panel, they're a
little more persistent, a little stickier. We'll see them there
and we will answer them. If we don't get the chance to answer them. I know these webinars
have lots of questions. You guys ask wonderful stuff and we can't always answer it live
or we need to bring in an SME. We will answer those offline
in the next few days and get those posted to the community. You can find the link to this video
and all the Q&A when we get that posted at devlink.sn/TechNow, right at the top of the list
because it's the most recent one. Quick plug for the podcast
if you're not already listening to it, our next episode is going to feature
Guess Who, Kristy! That's right,
we've got that coming up on the 10th. Looking forward
to that devlink.sn/breakpoint is where you can find that. Lauren and I have talked
to a number of people for the last four years, over 100 episodes, and we're going
to keep that rolling into the future. So looking forward to seeing you there
and hearing your feedback. Another quick plug
before we get into the Xanadu content. If you are an App Engine customer,
we would love to hear from you and you get a little token
reward of $25 in reward. Scan the QR code or use the
the link at the bottom to create a G2 review. Think of it like Yelp of Enterprise
software, where you say, I love App Engine and this is
why and others can use that, for... kind of like a mini customer testimonial,
if you will. Some FAQs, we get a lot of questions. Like I said, a lot of great questions. A lot of them are common
and a lot of them, we can't answer like,
how much is this going to cost? We can't answer that
because it will be online forever. Imagine if we had put pricing information
in Dublin in 2013 or 14 or whatever it was like,
that's way out of date. So we're not going to put that in here
because somebody could come along later and say,
why did they say this on TechNow, if you want accurate information
for pricing and packaging and SKUs and all that salesy stuff,
talk to your sales account team. They'll know more information
about your particular situation and your pricing level
and whatever else they do in sales. I don't know, I was in sales for a total of about 18 months
and never got close to a price sheet. So we also, we'll not
be covering all of the features in Xanadu. Man, that would take a long time. That would take a really long time. We have less than one hour
now that I'm rambling on. Let's move on. We are going to be covering the things
that developers and admins are interested in because hey, we're developers
and admins too! We will be having more information
about the other features, whether it's customer service
or employee service or IT...whatever that's coming out closer to that September
10th, event that I talked about earlier. So keep your eye on that community
web page and, smash those reaction buttons
like you already are doing like crazy. There were over a thousand reactions
before we got started. I don't know what you guys
are cheering for, but here it is. It's coming right at you with Xanadu. We are going to bring this in first
with a guest intro, because I am going to be talking
about the new ServiceNow Studio that's coming up in store release two,
and you asked for more demos, we're bringing you more demos. Here we go. Happy day. I'm Andrew Barnes from ServiceNow. You might remember me from my time
as a developer advocate or the developer MVP program. These days, I'm
the director of Product management for our new ServiceNow Studio
coming out in Xanadu store release two. So hold on to your socks as Chuck is going
to highlight some of the great features we have in store for you
and our first release later this year. All right. To get started with ServiceNow Studio,
we are going to go to the all menu type in studio. You can see we've got the old Legacy
Dev studio under System Applications, and we've got ServiceNow Studio, under
of course ServiceNow Studio, comes up in a brand new tab,
nice clean new interface. I'm going to jump right into it
and I'll get to some of these features in just a second. We'll go over here on the upper right
and click Create App. And I can create an application
I'm going to call this one TechNow X will give it an icon of course so we can tell it apart from the other
applications and click continue. And just like App Engine Studio,
just like Guided App Creator, it creates an application. And I can see the actual application
files in here. And if I open any one of those
like this particular role, I get a new tab
and I've got the role definition for that. Very easy. I'd love to show you more, but not all of
it is hooked up in this release. Very, very early version. But what I did do
is I'm going to pull a cooking show on you and take a look at what I did
build in this Xanadu demo app, which I can open that information
on a new tab here. Over on the left. I've got access to it
from the applications menu, and it shows me
all of the individual components between the access controls, rather
than just a straight up list like that. I can look at it in a nice tree structured
format here. So let's open up say the subflow, and I get Workflow Studio
right in ServiceNow Studio. This is the way
it's going to be for Table Builder. And a lot of these different tools
that we use in different locations
will all be centralized right here. If I want to say create a new one, I can go create file, pick the scope, Xanadu Demo, Automation, SubFlow and away
we go brings up that window here as well. And you can see I've got tabs
building along the top. I can mix and match different scopes. So say for example,
I did want to open the role in TechNow I can be looking at one file
from the TechNow X application. I can be looking at one file
from the Xanadu demo application. And I could even I bookmarked earlier. I can even open things
from the global scope, say the sys_user table definition. And if I want to see
those more in a grouped format where they're not so higgledy piggledy
mumbo jumbo, I can go to my profile and turn on this group by
and I get this nice broad color. They're all grouped together. So all the purple stuff
is going to be from one scope. All the orange stuff
is going to be from another scope. You get the idea. They're very easy to organize. Now I want to show you a little bit about searching
and we looked at bookmarks briefly. Anything from this recently opened
I can do as a bookmark anything from the recent over here
I can bookmark as well. Very easy to do. From the search I can look for, a table. Let's say
I want to look for access control. I don't know.
Let's see what it comes up with. And it says, do you want files?
Do you want tables? It will even put in tools and apps
and whatnot in here. If it finds that in those scopes,
I can turn on code search. Let's say, somewhere
I remember seeing the word toaster, and I'm going to turn that on
and look for toaster. I've got my code search in here,
goes back and says, yes, I found that in a script
include would you like to open that up? Yes, I would say
there's a toaster in here. That's it. Found it in the code I love it, I forgot,
I almost forgot almost forgot. When you're ready to deploy, we've got
deployment over here on the front page. Update sets management
there should be familiar. And again I get a list of my applications. So if I ever wanted to jump back
to that page for the TechNow X application files and start looking at them
that way, very easy to navigate. I'm very happy with the way
this is turning out, and I'm sure it's going to be much better
when we get to start release two in Q4. So that's ServiceNow Studio,
and we've got more coming at you. I'm going to turn it over to
Earl to talk about the SDK. Nice. So thanks, Chuck. I'm really excited for what I get to demo
for you coming up next, because I feel like I'm almost doing
as much development outside of ServiceNow
as I am doing inside. So this is actually really exciting stuff
for me. So before I jump into SDK version two
and the Visual Studio IDE or ServiceNow IDE,
another word from one of our guests. Hi everyone. This is Dave Slusher, founding developer advocate
for the developer program at ServiceNow. Now, blissfully retired. I was also TechNow
cohost from 2016 to 2019. When I started with ServiceNow Developer
Program, it's about three weeks before Geneva was released, which introduced
Studio and changed how you did everything. Today I'm introducing Earl Duke [sic],
who will dive into SDK version two and the Visual Studio
IDE coming in Xanadu. Back, when I was doing this,
you had this trade off you had to make in doing ServiceNow development, which is you
have all the great power of the platform and forget every bit of tooling
you've ever used in your career. In my case, 20 years up to that point. So I'm delighted that that is no longer
the case. And I'm envious that you all will
have these tools. Here's Earl. Thanks, Dave. Love you man. So I have two updates
that I want to show you all today. It's going to be really fun. the first is the ServiceNow IDE. That's right. We have a full IDE now
sitting inside of ServiceNow. this is a Visual Studio Code
implemented inside our ServiceNow instances
that we know and love. And I'm going to go ahead and demo it
to you. I'm going to go ahead and start by,
creating a new workspace. While I'm doing this I'm also going to
show off the ServiceNow SDK version two. But anyways, here's my new workspace. If you're familiar with GitHub
or Visual Studio, this is where you'll be able to do
all the normal stuff that you're used to. So full source control, you could, pull from repositories,
you can clone existing repositories. and you'll be able to do all of
that stuff within this IDE. But for this demo, I'm
going to go ahead and create a new app. I'm going to name it TechNow because this is a TechNow demo of course. Give it a short description here. Give it a scope name. And then it's going to bootstrap some of the app for me
including a little bit of a demo. And it's going to create some schema
some underlying files. It's going to incorporate
all of the ServiceNow code that we know and love, including
all the different modules that we'll need like GldieRecord and GlideSystem
and a bunch of extra stuff. So you'll see that in my starter script that it already had given me access
to business rules and client scripts. And so I'm going to write
a client script right now. You'll notice that I'm writing it in a different format
called fluent. It's new in this SDK v2. One of the cool things also is because
this is all inside of our environment. When I start typing,
it has all the cool stuff that we know and love, like, showing us
exactly what is available to us. So when I typed type,
it knew to give me the option of onLoad, and I can write my scripts
directly into this. So if I hit the build button
in the background, our new, fluent way of doing things
inside of the SDK will build my version of this app
and then deploy it immediately. And now within the environment
without having to leave. I can actually go check out my meta
records and actually see them in UI. And it goes both ways. That's right. So what I'm going to be able to do is type
in this script field and then save it. And then when I go back. You'll see that it automatically updates
because we want to make sure there's one source of truth for the records
and that they're always in sync. So it's a really cool
way to edit our client scripts, business rules and different
all via script, all via this new IDE
that is built directly into ServiceNow. So a lot more attractive to
some of us that are used to these traditional development
methods. So on the next example,
I'm going to create a business rule. And the thing I wanted to show you in
this example is that you'll notice that I have, my normal, intellisense,
but I have those red squiggles because it's telling me
that I don't have enough information yet, that it needs for it
to successfully build a business rule. It's all built into this framework. And so you'll see that I keep
having those red squiggles until I finish typing my fourth property, which is when,
and I'm going to put after. And then all that squigglies go away. And so now it knows that I'm going
to be able to create this business rule without causing an error. Okay. Next thing I want to show is that script. I can actually go to this other file that I have script.js, and you'll see that it already has
some ServiceNow script written into it. And instead of having to put it all
in this one file, I can actually call showStateUpdate
from my other file. As long as I say import show state update from this other script.js file. And there you go. Now I'll be able to even control click
or command click through to find that exact function. So I'm going to go ahead and finish
writing this business rule and build. And just like that client script I'm going to go ahead
and reveal it in the other window. And here's my brand new business rule that I made entirely out of script. And just like before, I can add a new change, build it again. And then if I refresh my record. We'll see that
delete was added to my action. And just like we did before, I can go into my script file now and entirely in JavaScript in its own file,
I have the script that I want to use. So I'm going to I can make updates to this
script.js file and build the application and see that it will automatically
get pushed over to the business rule. And now I have a dedicated JavaScript
file just for that script. There it is. Earl says hi
and now I will round this off and say bye. But last thing I want to mention is that in this new fluent framework, we don't just have
client scripts, and business rules, we have are able to actually build
several new things, including ACLs, lists, RestAPI, and even entire tables. We can build an entire table via
this scripting interface. Awesome. And that's the SDK v2
and new ServiceNow IDE. And now I will pass it over to Lauren. Awesome. Thank you Earl. And of course, thank you, Chuck
for kicking off this webinar with a bang. We are going to take a momentary pause,
but there are some fantastic questions rolling in. So we want to keep them coming in and see
if we can address them along the way. But while we wait, we also want to draw your attention
to some recent changes at ServiceNow and also how they're going to affect TechNow moving forward
through Yokohama and beyond. Also, side note
that's not just a random robot. In the city of Yokohama, Japan, They have
a fully scaled, built out, Gundam. And that is a picture of that. So, take a quick peek at that on Google
images, it’s pretty cool. Now simply put, releases don't really look like what they used to
when this series was founded. Not only has there
been a dramatic increase in the confidence of earlier patches, but with the addition
of the ServiceNow store, we as a company are bringing
you more updates more consistently and also,
much more frequently throughout the year versus those two big drops, right,
that we used to always do. Now, you've seen each release
have these two additional store releases for the last year or so, and there's even the potential
for that to become more frequent. So keep an eye on that as well. TechNow for a while has been the place
to go for all things developer for new release,
but with the new speed of development, we realized that we're no longer really
pacing as we should to meet this demand. Because of this, In this episode,
as you've seen already, we are trying out a brand new format, one
that's going deeper and more visually into the biggest aspects
of an upcoming release. And we're really, really excited to hear
your feedback because, case in point, this new format is pretty much based off
of the feedback we had gotten previously. People wanted demos,
people want to see the new stuff. So we're trying this out here. The state of TechNow
is still a bit in flux. So we appreciate your patience, of course,
and welcome any ideas that might be, on the top of your mind
to keep the show as valuable and as timely as it's always been. So I'm going to use this opp
as an opportunity to say, please do not forget to fill out your surveys. And with that, I will also,
bring up my team and say, hey, is there any Q&A questions
that we'd like to address live here today? There's a lot. There's a lot. Chuck or Pranav as well,
did you see any ones you'd like to highlight here live on screen,
or should we move on to the next segment? Okay, quick. Look, we had a few flagged. Go ahead. Earl. Yeah. The one
just because it was the most recent topic. I see a question. It's asking, “Will
we have this, as in the SDK v2, available as a plugin for VS code?” Yes. So you don't need the ServiceNow IDE,
the new IDE, to utilize the new SDK. So if you're used to using npm packages
or anything like that, the new SDK version will be available as a downloadable package that you can use
in VS code on your own machine. You don't actually need the ServiceNow IDE I just did
the demo in the ServiceNow IDE to show off both things at once, so you don't need to have one
for the other, basically. I also see another fun question. lots of questions about PDI stuff. One question that is like a theme is
when is GenAI stuff going live on PDI? Currently,
GenAI stuff is not going live on PDI, but keep keep informed
in the ServiceNow community that could always change, but currently
that is something that's not available. But we are also trying
to make it more accessible through events and through things like the CreatorCon
India event as well that are coming up. So, I would say
stay plugged in on event news as well. Also for PDIs, I saw a couple of
questions of when is this going live? The Xanadu release on PDIs. Today is EA, historically it has been made available
for PDIs on EA day. I will try my best on LinkedIn to also, make note of when Xanadu
is officially available on PDIs. So, keep your eyeballs
on LinkedIn as well. We had a question about, ServiceNow
Studio as well. Is this replacing the traditional studio? The answer is no, not at the moment. You can use both. And that related to another question
that I was starting to see a theme about regarding,
GitHub or source control integration. I was told by the product team
that's not scheduled to be available in Store Release two,
which is the first official release of ServiceNow Studio,
but they are working on that. They do recognize that is a gap
and a popular one as well. So as a workaround for now,
you could always import your code through the traditional studio. Both will be available
and then work on it in ServiceNow Studio. If you wanted to gain
some experience with that. Next topic. All righty. Well, with that, I'll be kicking the ball off to Pranav
and our next special guest as well. All right. Thanks. Lauren and Earl and Chuck,
those two were amazing topics. But I have one thing that is
I feel like it's a game changer. But before that, let's
hear it from our guest. Hello, my name is Brad Tilton and I'm a former developer
advocate here at ServiceNow. I know reporting
can sometimes feel a bit tricky, but we've got some exciting new things to
share in the world of platform analytics. So here's Pranav to talk about some of the new features
and analytics generation, thanks. Thanks, Brad. And Brad mentioned
about analytics generation. If I have to explain you in simple now you can utilize text
and just create reports through it. When I saw this thing for the first time,
I was surprised. And. But I have recorded a quick demo for
you, so let's go into it now. All right. For the purpose of this demo,
I created an empty dashboard. Now we're going to ask
Now Assist to add data visual to it. For our first use case. I would like to see all the incidents
in a bar chart format grouped by category. So now let's click on the Now
Assist button in the navigation bar. It opens up a dialog box. I'm going to open this up. Now I'm going to click on this create a data visualization button. Now I'm going to give it a prompt of bar
chart on incident table. Now you can see it has given us an option to specify
a breakdown field for our report. In our case it will be category. And here you go. It just created us a visual. Now we can click on this add to dashboard
button to add it to our dashboard. And let's resize it. All right. For our second use case
we're going to try it on a custom table. You might have seen me and other advocates
join different developer meetups. So to track those meetups I have created
a custom table called Developer Meetups. Now for our visual, we like to see a list
of all the developer meetups. So let's ask Now Assist to do it. Firstly,
we're going to reset this conversation. Now let's click on create a Data visualization. And I'm going to ask Now Assist now a list of developer meetups. And there we go. Our list is now ready. Let's add it to our dashboard. And you can see now we have a list. Now for our final use case we're going to
utilize the same custom table. And we're going to create a pie chart
of all the developer meetups grouped by region. Let's clear this conversation again. And I'm going to click on create a Data visualization. Now I'm going to ask Now Assist to create a pie chart
on developer meetups. It has asked us to specify a breakdown
field. Let's specify it. Region. And you can see it has generated as a pie
chart. Let's add it to the dashboard. And there you go. We were able to generate
three different types of visuals using Now Assist
in a matter of few minutes. And that's what I have for you
in analytics generation. Now I'm going to pass it back to Lauren
to show us App Generation. Awesome. Thank you so much Pranav. But we cannot start, of course,
without another fantastic piece of hype, So I'll kick it to Jeremy. Hey, friends. What's up? It's Jeremy Duncan here. For those who don't know me,
I'm a senior solution architect on the Workflow Design Studio
team here at ServiceNow. And I've had the privilege of helping
Chuck host over 26 episodes of TechNow, over the years,
I've been an evangelist and a lover of this platform for over 13 years now,
and I've seen the speed of development. I've seen the quality of content
coming out of the platform just increase
exponentially over the years, I've seen developers of all levels be able
to build their dreams on our platform. I've been able to help
hundreds of customers realize their dreams are even possible
on the platform. And it's because of that
that I get to introduce the rocket fuel coming in Xanadu,
which is Now Assist for Creator. So back to you, Lauren. Awesome. Thanks so much, Jeremy,
for being the perfect hype man. Now, as I mentioned earlier,
we're adapting. We're changing. So TechNow is adapting
and changing as well. The store releases allow developers
to receive the most consistent, steady flow of improvements
throughout the year. But sometimes, let's admit it,
later store releases might sometimes allow us to let things
slip through the cracks. So allow me to spotlight one of the biggest enhancements
of the Washington release, and of course, sprinkle in the improvements
that Xanadu has made further upon that. Of course, as Jeremy said, I'm
referring to the Now Assist App Generation capability. So let's see what we got going on. Showcased as one of our key highlights
in the CreatorCon keynote. App Generation is finally here
by thoroughly describing an application and answering some prompts
in the Now Assist panel. ServiceNow is now capable,
through the power of generative AI, of creating entire applications
on your behalf in App Engine Studio. It can fulfill the needs of both
boilerplate applications like this. You know, normal, employee time off
tracker, and wild fantasies alike. Like this app I made to track my bichon's
various grooming tasks. Those who upgrade to the GA
version of Xanadu will be happy
to find a whole host of improvements. Firstly, the context switching between
the Now Assist Panel and App Engine Studio has been made much more seamless,
both in the loading time department as well as the inclusion of transition
animations. In addition
to this, a whole repertoire of UI indicators have been created
to help enforce best practices. While a powerful tool,
all generated content should be reviewed by human developers
prior to deployment. So now not only are all of the generated
assets clearly marked, but developers will also be prompted
to perform these reviews prior to pushing their new applications. And that is not all. Store release two of Xanadu has another
big wave of exciting refinements. Chuck just showcased one of them,
the next frontier for app development: ServiceNow Studio and I'm really excited
to say that App Generation will be made accessible
from this new IDE in the upcoming months. In addition to this, an App Preview tab
is being added to the Now Assist panel. Here, Now Assist will clearly itemize
all the application files that will be rendered per your request,
as well as create a visual estimate of how things will look
and feel prior to execution. This will allow developers
the ability to better fine tune their apps prior
to pulling the trigger on creation. Finally, up
until this point, app generation has only concerned itself with building
brand new apps. Therefore, I eagerly await
this upcoming store release as with it comes the ability to harness
AI to improve upon existing applications. What specifically it can change
and improve upon will of course roll out in waves,
but it will start with the ability to create tables both from scratch
as well as through extension and the ability to create new metadata
as well. Well, ServiceNow is moving
full steam ahead, obviously with harnessing
AI to improve your lives as developers. So in addition to preaching
about all these awesome tools, I would also like to plug
some very helpful resources to kind of get you started with AI,
as I myself am doing. One huge highlight, my colleague
Earl has spent the entire month of July, (JulAI) creating countless, prompt generating, an entire prompt library with alongside of the developer
community here at ServiceNow. In this prompt library,
they have created things to do things in ServiceNow outside of ServiceNow. On his LinkedIn profile, he also kind of created the top
five prompts from this effort. So I highly, highly encourage you to check it out
using that first QR code on the list. Now if you're like me,
if you're more of a reader, the middle QR code will take you to the Now Assist
for Creator Docs page. Obviously, the docs page
is the unsung hero of a developer's life. definitely one to bookmark. Finally, if you would also like to get
your hands a little bit dirty and start playing around more with Now Assist,
we also have the Now Assist essentials on the Now learning website,
so please enjoy those, learn a bunch and start diving head straight into your
AI journey as well. Now on to you Earl for our next
big highlight of the day. Thanks, Lauren. again, I get to I got to demo all the
really fun stuff that I really like. So one of the things that I've constantly
been saying to our internal product teams and saying is like,
we need a way to be able to prompt... thanks Lauren, for the plug, by the way... Prompt our LLMs ourselves. And so I'm happy to demo Now
Assist Skill Kit. But first, again,
another intro from one of our guests. Ready? Hey, folks. I'm Jace, I’ve been working on ServiceNow
since forever, pushing the boundaries
and doing all sorts of other fun stuff. This year have been building a lot
with generative AI. Speaking of generative AI,
let me bring up Earl Duque. He's got something to tell you
about Skill Kits and prompting. Okay. Thanks, Jace. Hi everyone. It's Earl again. So one of the things that I wanted to show off for you today
is something that I'm very excited about, especially any of you that have been playing with Gen
AI in or outside of ServiceNow. But the thing that we're gaining access to
in Xanadu is the Now Assist Skill Kit. And in here we are able to finally prompt our large language models, entirely with the prompts
that we want to build ourselves, instead of using the generic summarization
skills and all that kind of thing. So you can see here on the screen I'm
creating my own prompt right now. I'm creating my own Now Assist Skill,
and I'm able to do exactly what I want it to do. I'm able to tell it
how long I want it to be. I'm giving it the exact information
that I want from the incident record. I am formatting it in the way
I want it to format. And then the fun part too
after I finish typing in, the description and the priority
that I want to have it summarize is that
I can actually have fun with it, too. So one of the visual indicators
that I like to have in these summarizations is an emoji. Just so I know, when I saw that emoji
I remember this case kind of thing. I remember this incident. So from within the skill kit,
the Now Assist Skill Kit I can actually run my prompts
and actually test them against incidents
that we have inside of our instance. And you can see it worked right here. it provided the summary
as I described it. And gave me emoji like I asked for it. And so to continue with this demo, I can name the prompt
how I want it to be named. So it can show up inside of the Now Assist
admin panel. I can also show
up, as you'll see here, when we get to UI actions. But for
now I'm going to go ahead and save it and go ahead and finalize this prompt
so that I know that I've finished editing it
so that other people won't break it. And then I'm going to jump into skill
settings. in the skill settings,
you can see here is where I would also do processors,
preprocessors and postprocessors. So I can actually take the
the results of what the prompt gave me and then change it to something else
before it gets to the user. And then I'm going to go ahead and plug it
into one of the Now Assist workflows. And then I'm going to say, hey,
I want to create a UI action for this so I can access it
directly from the classic UI. So I'm going to create that UI action,
and then I'm going to publish this skill. Now I'm going to go ahead and jump into our Now
Assist admin panel. And activate that skill. And I'm going to find it as checked out because that's what I named it
for this webinar. And I'm going to turn it on for everything
so I can see it and everything. But next I want to show you
what it looks like on the incident side. Since I did make this an incident skill,
I'm going to go activate it for that and then jump back to. And then jump into the incident table. And then I'm going to go into the incident and activate it. I'm going to go into the UI actions
I mean, and activate it. And then also update this, placeholder info message and actually insert
the result into the work notes. And save this. Jump back to my incident in question and use that new UI action for now. And let's see if it works. My emoji and then my description and priority. And there you go. Now Assist Skill Kit. Before we move into the next section,
let's quickly hear from our guest. Hi I'm Kreg Steppe, and over the years
I've been part of more than 70 TechNow episodes, talking about a lot of random
cool features and some interesting topics. Well, today
I'm excited to turn it over to Pranav. He's going to talk about a lot of new,
fantastic features in the Xanadu release that I'm sure developers will really love. Thanks, Kreg. So now here are some of the random stuff
from the Xanadu release that we were able to find for
you all. And let me go through in a lightning
round the O.G way. So for the first one, previously, developers could utilize ECMAScript 2021 only if it was enabled
for a scoped application. Now, now they can use it
even for applications that use ES5 standards
or the compatibility mode, by just selecting the turn on Ecmascript
mode from the individual script record. And you can now utilize the arrow syntax
and everything in your global applications also. Talking about mobile platform. This feature was requested by many,
including myself. Developers
now has the ability to set or autofill the value of one or more fields based on the user
input from the other fields in mobile app, for example,
based on the impact and urgency, the priority fields
should be automatically populated. Another cool update from the mobile app
mobile department is now you can utilize user criteria
in your mobile app. If you're wondering what user criteria
is, user Criteria helps in dynamically controlling the access or visibility
based on specific conditions such as location, company, department,
and other stuff. Do you remember access analyzer
from like two releases back? So it has got a new trick in its bag. Access simulator is the newest addition,
which lets developers simulate access changes
before they make the actual change. This enables the developers
to verify the effectiveness of change and ultimately reduce the risk. This is my personal favorite,
to be honest. Like this one. And the studio. These were the two main things
that I really liked about this. Moving on. We have a new type of ACL called deny
unless ACL. If you are on LinkedIn,
you might have seen it like people were sharing from the current
release notes that was released. so coming to this, particular ACL, this will be evaluated
first and will deny the access by default. So if the deny ACL denies the access,
the data will be filtered out from the results. So if you combine the OG ACL that allow ACL with the deny
unless ACL you will be able to create powerful and flexible access
control on the platform. We have all seen like GenAI can write an update
text that saves us a lot of time. I use it all the time. I use ChatGPT
for all my writing and everything. So as an agent, like when they are
working on a particular case, they have to respond to the,
cases quickly. So Now Assist can help them, help
the agents reply to those emails quickly so they can easily elaborate or shorten
a particular email with just a click of a button. This feature will increase agent productivity
and improve the overall service quality. Another useful feature for the agents
is the ability to create knowledge articles from multiple cases. Currently we had an option to create,
knowledge article using Now Assist for a single case. But with the Xanadu release,
they can now create like a knowledge or resolution article
using multiple incidents. This particular thing will be super
helpful during major incidents or cases when you have to review multiple incidents
or cases to create a comprehensive knowledge resolution
article. And catalog item generation. I saw a question about catalog items
generation that somebody has seen it. so yeah, you have surely seen it because
this was actually released in the May 2024 stories. But I wanted to point this out and mention
in this particular webinar, because I have built so many catalog items
throughout my career, and some of these catalog
items had over 40 plus variables. So I kind of understand the pain
of creating a catalog item. So with Now Assist
you can now easily generate catalog item with just a single prompt. And let's see if you can see on the screen
I have added a prompt. And now as soon as the prompt is processed
you can see a catalog item is generated. And that's pretty much... that was amazing
when I tried it for the first time. I was thinking like why ServiceNow didn't release it
when I was on the developing side? Anyway, that's all we have for you
from the Xanadu release. Now let's look into some of the
questions if we have. Earl, did you saw any questions? Yeah. So thanks, Pranav. And, All right, everyone, now we're getting into our Q and A time. Make sure to stick around
till the end, though, because Chuck
will be giving us the last message. But for now, you all have been submitting
a million of questions, and we love it. we've been doing our best
to answer your questions live. especially shout out to Derek, Hillary,
and Kristy and all of our, TechNow support team behind the scenes. They're answering questions along with us
this entire time. We're going to answer
as many as we can live now. But if we don't get to your question,
remember, don't worry, because we do indeed go through and answer
all of your questions. eventually,
and we post them on the TechNow blog. Just give us like a week or two, though,
and then we'll get all those questions answered, because some of these questions,
we're not ignoring you. We just don't know the answer. And we don't want
to give you the wrong answer. So what we usually do
is we talk to our product management, our internal engineers,
and we ask them those specific questions that you have
because they're all great questions. we just need some time
to get to actually answer some of those ones that we don't know
top of our mind. Okay. Particularly that's the let's kick it off. Also, I would say that particularly when you see a very,
high amount of questions regarding like, will this require a plugin,
will this require me to do X, y or Z? Xanadu came out for us today too,
so we're not quite sure. So on those in particular, we'll follow back with the
the product team's advice on that. So thank you for the patience. All right. Let's kick off the questions
that did anybody have one right. Right away I have like a few. But I'll let someone else
answer a question first. Yeah I think I see this question
like couple of times. And like,
can you create multiple catalog items at the same time
using the catalog item generation? So what I try when I try it. So you can only generate
one catalog item at a time. If you have to generate multiple, it's like you have to put the prompt
and everything in a different way. And I don't I don't find a use case
where you have to create multiple catalog items from just the same prompt. So yeah, you can create just one that's got when you have like 20 people asking, can the ServiceNow
Studio be integrated with GitHub? Yes, it's all sitting there. so ServiceNow Studio,
the SDK, the ServiceNow IDE, all that has source control
integrated throughout it, and especially with the SDK and stuff
like that, you should be using source control
for that stuff. We're going to need to that. One of the roles was like,
I need to double check that one. I was told by the product manager that the first release of the Studio
will not include source control. So when that's coming out in Store
Release two, so they are working on that, but that will be in the studio,
ServiceNow Studio. Yes okay. The SDK definitely is source Control then. So and also another question
someone had is can the SDK be used outside
of the ServiceNow IDE and that's yes, you can use
SDK in your own Visual Studio Code. That's right. That was a Washington
release as well. Yeah. Now I
got one that says there's so many studios. I'm now getting confused. Can you summarize which ones are intended
for whom and what? That is a very valid question,
and one that we throw to the product teams as well. Like,
hey, here comes another one. What's the message on this? So we've got App Engine Studio, we've got Workflow Studio,
we've got the original studio, we've got now ServiceNow Studio,
and we've got Creator Studio. There's a lot of stuff in a nutshell,
Creator Studio, very simple request apps,
catalog item table, pretty much done. Think of it that way. Great for your
no code developers to get a request out and divert some of your IT backlog. to citizen developers, as it were. The traditional studio is still there. You can modify everything
from a UI action to a UI policy to a table. Lots of stuff happening
there. It's not going anywhere. If you're familiar with that, you're
welcome to keep using it. The Workflow Studio is the new generation
of flow designer and process automation designer, and a lot of these things
that are automation oriented put into one. So if you're dealing with automation,
that's where you would go as workflow studio. A lot of that I should go back to, App Engine Studio,
which came out about 3 or 4 years ago. That was our first attempt
at a low code environment, and it is still available as well. Requires additional licensing. Talk to your account team there. Put my footnote in
and the new one ServiceNow Studio is our first foray to answer
a lot of this and consolidate it. Why are we going to one browser tab four workflows in one browser,
tab four tables and one browser tab for. Let's bring it all together
into one consolidated environment. So think of that as the new dev studio from Legacy Days going back to Geneva
or Helsinki, whatever it was. And including many of the features
from App Engine Studio and incorporating Workflow Studio into that same shell as it were, even update set management,
as I briefly demonstrated earlier. So did I miss any team? I think you nailed it. I think that was perfect. Okay, good. Hope that clears it up. Bookmark that. Next question. I think we have time for
maybe 1 or 2 more. I think so. Another question
that I think like I'll take this one. so somebody asked like access simulator available from store
or part of the Xanadu release. So basically Access Simulator is part of the store app called Access Analyzer. So if you have the stored up access
analyzer installed in your environment, you will be able to access the access
simulator. So many access in it. So I hope that answers it. Another quick one. A lot of people are asking if external libraries are available
in SDK. Yep, it's very specific ones. so a lot of the more commonly used
ones are available. This was actually in the last release, but
I'm getting we're getting this question a lot. Yes.
You can use external libraries. just very specific. Not very specific. all the common ones are available,
which is really fun for us
that use external libraries all the time. One more quick thing
that I just want to cover. this is my last
TechNow, as was announced earlier, 98 episodes,
I think I missed one somewhere Dave and Kreg
had to cover for me on one of them. And then there was that Washington thing
where I just appeared at the end. I don't know if I count that or not. but thank you for everything over the last 14 years, everybody has made me feel very,
very special. I am humbled to be treated
with such reverence. In my opinion. I put the dishes in the dishwasher and comb my hair
the same way everybody else does. Nothing special in inside
my chest beats the heart of a developer, and I really, really appreciate
everything you've done. I also ask that you give, a follow to the, developer advocates that are on this webinar: Earl,
Pranav, Lauren, and Kristy. Don't forget, Kristy, please
go over to your favorite social media platform, look them up and follow them
so you can stay up to date on things. I may still post here and there
and peek in on webinars and podcasts. I'll still be watching from afar. but again, thank you. I will miss you all terribly. I think we're done. Oh, no. I have one more!
I have one more slide. And that is the call to action. Oh, the emotions almost crept up on me. a quick call to action. Today is early availability day
as we record this August 1st, 2024. Upgrade your PDI. You'll see
if you go to developer.servicenow.com and there's Manage Your Instance button
I believe it says. You'll see Hey, Xanadu is now available. Give it a few minutes. It'll do its thing
and you'll have the Xanadu features. Of course, you know, many of the Now Assist features that we showed,
App Generation, Analytics Generation... the AI stuff not available on PDIs yet. Hopefully coming soon.
We're working on that. Don't forget to check out the docs:
docs.servicenow.com I believe all of these are in the resource
panel, and I will include them in the description
on the YouTube video as well and start exploring. There's a lot of cool stuff out there
that we haven't even explored yet. I look forward to seeing what, you know,
some of the people in the community come up with and go:
Look what I found in Xanadu. There's this new tool, or there's
this new button or new system property. That's what we used to cover in
90 slides in about 35 minutes. We gave you some deeper demos this time. Hopefully you enjoyed that. Let us know in the comments
and the feedback. We'd love to hear your feedback on
how we can make this better in the future. But that brings us to the top of the hour.
Thank you Earl. Thank you Pranav. Thank you Lauren. Thank you everybody who’s working
behind the scenes to answer the questions and get this going. It has truly been a blessing and an honor. Until next time, take care. Thank you. Bye! Yay, bye everyone! See you episode 99!