all right um hi everyone good morning um good afternoon good evening wherever you are in the world welcome to this edition of live on service now for now assist in service catalog yes so before we dive into the details of our discussion today I would like to draw your attention to our safe H notice just to take this away as we explore potential strategies spal operations and sped outcomes just keep in mind that these are based on our current beliefs the assumptions that we have and information available to us today so why we're excited about all of this um like everything we be discussing today it's just important to know that these are forward looking statements and they inherently involve risk and certain things so with that context in mind uh we'll be proceeding with the rest of the presentation all right so today's um session is part of our live on the service now Series where we create an open conversation to discuss relevant topics in the service now ecosystem and the goal of this is to supercharge your productivity and deliver value for you and your business um so if you want to take a minute you can scan the QR code you can see on the screen on the right and to link you to like our future events and you can register and attend the link will also be shared in the chat for folks that are not able to scan the QR code at this time all right so we me on the call today is um Kik Kik is an inbound product manager at service now um managing service catalog and um anurag is a manager on our software engineering team and I am tosin I outbound product manager for S catalog as well all right before we go into the meid of the conversation we wanted to run a poll to get a sense of where we all are today um so if you um can take a minute can you tell us which of the below options best describes your role at your organization there should be a poll on your screen right now uh where you can respond one two three or four e okay it looks like we have about 70% participation on the poll uh from the curring results most people on the call are service business or product owners and that's about 46% and then coming in second are service now developers then catalog admins coming at toward that's interesting to note um let's TR one more question we got answers for all all three oh I see all right I think lot of them are still evaluating now just use cases all right my all right and we wanted to also prev SL this we want want to also get a sense of um what uh what you want out of this session so if you could quickly use the um the annoted tool um it should be at the top of your Zoom app depending on what platform you're using and you can just write out on the screen um what you want out of this session I think we got the answers to those so I think we can move forward okay that's fine um thank thanks Kik uh so I'll be hand carik to take this away all right thank you so much Tren hey everyone I'm KK uh as toen introduced me I'm the product manager for service catalog catalog Builder and conversation catalog uh so the agenda for today is that first uh we'll have a demo of the catalog item generation using now syst and Catal builder then we'll talk about the best practices around that and then we'll have a demo of the Now assistant conversational request submission that is the conversation conversational catalog and then we'll talk about the best practices around that so without further Ado let's let's head straight into the demo for uh for text to catalog to start with we'll launch catalog Builder because catalog Builder is where we have uh the text to catalog so to start with let's start a new catalog item select uh template this is usual catalog builder stuff and when you have the nist app installed the first step that you would see is the now assist where you can actually provide the text Chom to create a catalog item so so I have a uh text prompt copied already so let's let's go to the prompt and see how how nist would would be able to generate this so I I let's say I want to generate a travel visa request uh as I want the employees in my company to apply for uh Visa whenever they are uh visiting uh a different country either for work or for customer visit or any conference so so how how I would give this as an as an instruction is that I would say I want I want employees to submit a request for travel visa the form should ask for uh travel type uh and notice that I'm I'm I'm presenting the options like intern extern customer visit with customer visit being the default value so here I'm specifying that what should be the default value then travel start date and passport number which are mandatary country of birth and Country traveling two are M mandatory Fields where which are references the core country table then mandatorily ask for business justification as it is very important and finally add a reference variable to the S user table at the beginning of the form to know who is who the request is for so this is a uh Simple Text promp uh you can make it even simpler if you just want to say create a request for uh travel visa uh it would automatically generate with with some set of questions if you if you already have some set of questions in your mind you can describe those like I have done here so let's ask NIS to generate this is use the power of llm to generate the item take a little longer than expected usually it's does not take this much time oops don't have let me try it once again if not I'll have to refresh and see this time it Let me refresh P always happens when I demo this time thank God that worked okay let's see the preview of this let me put it on a different tab all right so we see that the item has been generated the travel type uh was asked and we have the customer visit as the default the travel start date it currectly took as a daytime field the passport number is a mandat field so are the countries country of birth and Country traveling to and the business justification so it it it generated the questions that we wanted now let's uh all we need to do is go ahead and submit in case you want to make any changes you can do so and anything that the AI generated would be shown up with an AI tag now make sure you check the uh the text for accuracy and if you want you can go ahead and edit each of these each of these questions like you would normally do at this point right now we will only generate questions we haven't uh yet given the ability to generate UI policies or dynamic Behavior which will be coming in a future release so let's quickly let's go to settings High attachment button let's go to fulfillment and add a fulfillment flow to it and I am good to submit the item before that if you wanted to CH make a change to the item you could come here and then retype retype The Prompt or change the prompt and hit the generate button again it will generate the item again for you but let's now go ahead and submit this would uh submit the item and that is how you you create a catalog item using just simple text DRS it's it's as simple as that this would help you in not only uh creating the item faster but also allowing you to democratize the catalog maintenance so that now your business owners also can use the text to catalog to generate catalog items let's now talk about the best practices around this so ensure that you give uh detailed and precise descriptions of the catalog item including it purpose features and any other specific configurations the more detailed thatp put the the better is the output as we have seen with any gen related related uh uh uh creations and clearly outline any mandatory Fields help text type of question options and default value so if you want something like a help text to be generated do mention that if you want a specific type of questions uh do mention that even if you don't give the LM will will try its best to uh to to guess the correct type uh it will come up with uh uh options helpful suggestions and and default value uh uh but if you if you if you want it you can mention that explicitly and when you mention that the llm does a good job of of creating those uh given the instructions then uh stick to Industry standard terms uh if as far as possible avoid Jon uh it might confuse uh the AI right or and also the users and users who would eventually be using the catalog item and for questions uh especially the reference questions do right now do specify the exact table name uh in a future release we would uh we would want to get get to a stage where you wouldn't need to give the exact table name but there are certain limitations in the in the first release uh due to which you would have to provide the exact table name for example in in in in the example that I show I put in the uh core country table but in uh uh in in in in your case it could be says user or or any table going forward in a future release we would want to get to a stage where you could just have to uh provide the information and it should automatically get the table name but right now you have to give the exact table name and for a record producer you have to specify the exact field name to which you want to map the question so that would uh then map the question to that particular field and always review the gener catalog item to ensure accuracy and completeness U after all it is AI it can make mistakes you uh though uh We've trained it so that it makes less and less mistakes but but there is chance of it making mistakes always to viw all right so now that we have created the item let's go and see if it got published yep the item got published so let's look at the item let's now look at how we can request it so first let's let's now look at the the conversational coverage dashboard to understand uh understand how we can you can use that to see if an item is conversational or not so we can click the view conversational details button this will open the conversational tab we are lucky that this particular item does not have any entities that would make the item uh non- compromisation but in case it contains something non cational we would see it here so let's go to the homepage and see if there are any items which are not nonc conversational so there are a few and you would this would provide you uh the complete picture of the conversational catalog over you that is how many items in your system are conversational how many are not and what are the uh top reasons for which it is not conversational and it will also give you what are the popular channels the items you see here are uh in the desending order of their request this this data corresponds to the last six months so it'll it'll give you a sense of what is what are the most popular items and you can actually see among the most popular items how many are conversational and and not and do remember that the data here is uh uh is refreshed every once a day uh there this uh schedu job which is running running in the background which will update this data once a day let's look at why this particular item is non-con conversational all right so this particular one has uh at least one question with pricing applications that is uh uh it has a choice based pricing so this choose colors has pricing and hence this item is non conversational the reason uh being we don't show pricing in ba today and since we don't have that we don't show that information uh it may not be complete information to the requestor hence we don't make the item conversational we are trying to add more and more features to our conversational catalog so in a future release you should see that this also uh will be supported in VA but right now since we don't support you see that this item is not conversational so let's go back and see some other items all right let's let's check create incident so create incident is not conversational because it has unsupported question types specifically custom questions are not supported uh reason is obvious because they are custom we wouldn't know how to uh how to handle them in in VA we are trying to uh see if you can solve that but for now if a catalog item contains any custom question then that item will not be conversational similarly we have addressed a lot of these issues uh in case you've already used or uh or you've already tried it out and you'll see that a lot of items are non-c conversational the suggestion from us would be recommendation would be to update to the latest uh latest uh version that you can uh depending on your family version update to the latest uh Store app because uh the the latest one has all the uh all the updates that we have done so we've been adding support for all these entities a lot of entities uh in every release so uh if there is an update available please go and check the plugin if there is an update available please please to update to that you should see that the conversational percentage go up but this is a uh helpful dashboard it it gives you a view of how many items are conversational and how many are not and if the item is not conversational what are the reasons you can go to the item and then make make changes if for example it if it contains a custom question if you want to uh if you want the item uh to be conversational then you would you might want to make the custom varable inactive or if it contains pricing information you might want to you want to remove that if you want if you want that to be conversational in VA so at least it gives you uh information about what makes the item non- conversational so now that we know the item that we created is uh conversational let's see uh how we can request that in VA so let's go to employee Center and I'm going to request just let me open that here next this is the form let's see how it how we can requested now what I can do is I can provide additional information while I'm searching so let's say I want uh the un uh uh X purpose right and on right so what I have done is I have mentioned uh I've already answered a few of the questions that appears here oops [Music] as first I hope it takes it takes it out this time divided uho understood that I want to travel visa let's get started let's see if it is able to pick up the first October as the date just give something [Music] St so you might notice that United States was not selected even though I had mentioned that in my in my search that the reason for that is because this is a reference field and uh reference field uh we do not support slot fill at this moment so reference field would have to be be selected I want to travel [Music] for right okay so we see that the travel date has been uh correctly uh slot fill the rest of them selected now so so in a way what you can uh do is you can actually enter the give all the information and with one statement you can place the request so you see the power of uh of conversational catalog that you can you can fill the entire form with just one sentence so in case there is a request form that you that you generate uh quite often uh right which is a very very often used one and it has five or six questions you can have a have a you know sentence ready and you can use that to quickly go in uh to VA and place that request so so that is the power of uh of conversational catalog but uh let's let's say you want to make a change so let's say I want to change I want to change change Trav TR to say interal and the uh start dat to the fth of October so you can actually uh provide multiple answers when when you want to change so you see that the traval type has has been changed to internal and the travel date time has been changed to 5th of October so you can you can you can use that and in in place of date you can also say something like next Monday or next month uh first of next month or tomorrow or things like that it is a conversational way of of filling the form right so so so that is the power of conversation catalog so now that the form is fill let's go ahead and submit and we should see that the item would be submitted and we get the RM that was created so that is how you could use conversational catalog so we just uh generated the item and it it took uh it took like seconds or or perhaps uh less than 5 minutes for us to to generate the item and get the get the item published and then we we used conversation catalog to request the same same item right so that is the demo let's now talk about the best practices around conversational catalog all right so uh the best practices I've broken down two two sets one is to improve the coverage of uh conversational items so uh to increase the coverage uh limit the configurations that are not supported and to know what are support and not you can visit the official documentation uh that that contains the the entities which would make an item non-con conversational uh but in so custom variable would would make an item non-con conversational so instead of using custom variable it is suggested that you can use out of out of the box variable types such as restt labels requested for ETC if it makes sense uh we've seen that a lot of lot of the times custom variables are used in place where R textt labels need to be shown so in such cases we recommend that you you you change the custom variable type into a r text label we do realize that there could be cases where custom variables are important and are necessary and there is no out of the boox variable type uh in in which case it becomes uh it would the item would be non-c conversational right now the the other one is uh instead of using Advanced client or your your policy Scripts use no code features like autop populate or default value if it makes sense in that case there could be cases where client script is necessary U policy scripts are necessary uh in which case we do support uh a good number of methods in in client scripts and policy scripts but there are some methods which are not supported and uh especially something like Dom manipulation if you're trying to do Dom manipulation then that item will not be supported uh conversationally in VA so our recommendation is not to do Dom manipulation and use the out of the box features no code features like autop populate and default value as much as possible but if you want to know what methods are supported for client scripts on U policy script you can you can see the official documentation that provides a list of supported methods the the other aspect is about the user experience itself right so uh uh to to ensure that you get the the maximum out of conversation catalog have the product names description and questions as detailed as possible the more data the better it is for conversation catalog because it is llm which is powering it so so when you have the questions uh make sure that you you don't use one or two words perhaps you can you can you can use one or two words but which makes sense use help text whereever possible that will help uh the llm to rephrase the questions in a proper manner and if you don't want an item to be conversational you can then you can go to the items uh record and check the box for make the item non- conversational in VA there could be some items where you can you might see a lot of times the llm is hallucinating or it is not providing the right paraphrasing or it is not able to understand the users responses uh that that well it can happen uh ultimately it is llm there could be cases where llm might go wrong we have seen that especially when uh when when uh user is trying to provide answers for a uh single line text or a multi-line text where the the question and answer is open-ended we have seen that LM sometimes hallucinates so if if it is happening a lot then you can choose to make the item non conversational in which case it would be shown as uh either a popup or a or new tab in the portal form if the catalog item contains sensitive information then you might you might not want to send the data to llm uh in that case select the turnoff now assist for conation for this item checkbox so so turning this off would ensure that it will not send the data to llm instead it will use the nlu version of the topic block this might make the item non-c conversational but this will definitely ensure that the the data is not sent to llm so if the if the item contains any sensitive information which you don't want to send LM then you can use the che this check box now while service catalog offers a lot of dynamic capabilities the trend now is to move to smaller and more granular items so so instead of having a super complex item we recommend that you you create granular item then there are multiple reasons one is fast adoption to multi Channel experiences especially virtual agent and mobile uh the more complex the item the the more challenging it will be for the the conversational catalog to to render it uh and and and also in Mobile the more complex the item the more UI policies and client script that it has to run it becomes difficult for someone somebody using the mobile to request Ed uh to to follow along the second Advantage is discoverability uh searching and browsing for specific specific item specific uh product of specific service is far more easier uh than one catalog item which can Encompass a multitude of use cases the third Advantage is it is a step toward delegation in uh with catalog Builder our ende is to uh is to allow the central ID teams to delegate the simple items to be created and maintained by the business owners or product owners themselves so if you have granular granular items it makes it easy for you to delegate and the final last two points are pretty very important when it comes to the user experience for conversational catalog as much as possible try to avoid U policies and client scripts taking ction on a preceding or an already answered answered variable that is uh a variable with a higher order value taking an action on a variable with a lower order value so the the problem in a form in in Portal because you can see all the questions it it it should it wouldn't matter much but in in Virtual agent when you're answering questions one after the other when when the action is being taken on a question which is already answered it can confuse the user because we would be asking that question again and it can confuse the user as to why we are asking that question again so as far as possible avoid UI policies and client scripts which take action on a preceding variable on in a similar ve avoid adding a field message to a preceding variable uh today we don't show the a message on a proceeding variable unless the variable itself is cleared and made mandatory we don't show the field message on a pre preceding variable uh in a form again it is because all the questions are visible it makes it easy for someone to see uh if a field Mage is added to a preceding variable but it is difficult on on VA because we are going one one question after the other so these are some best practices uh and one more thing which I already mentioned which I have not put here is avoid Dom manipulation as much as possible uh any D manipulation will result in the item being non- conversation so that brings to the next question that uh we want you to answer like now that you have seen the demo we would want to know what is a feature that you would want us to add next so I'll start the poll right you should see pool on your screens please go and tell us what features you would want us to add next if there is something if if if you don't have anything of not yet uh started planning to started working on NES which is is also okay if there is something that that that comes to mind or you have not seen if you would like to see in the next uh coming releases please do let us know we would definitely take the input and work on it and just give another 20 seconds let me see if there are any questions in Q&A which have not been answered interesting that this created the country Feld has drop down L normal recommendation is that drop downs not be created for list having more than elements does your company have only few countries uh no Andrea like so the the the the list contains more than 25 25 items and uh it is I'm not aware of this recommendation the recommendation is usually for list collector when you have a lot of uh uh items uh sorry uh to select select box uh when you have a lot of items there but 25 need not be uh need not worry worry you if it has a lot then the select box would would be a problem but in this case uh I'm not sure how many countries it have it would be somewhere in the uh 150 200 range which case it should not be a problem but usually the recommendation is to use uh reference reference fees uh in which case you can uh you can mention that in in the prompt uh that you give for licensing what is required for narsist uh the all the narsist features come with the Pro Plus uh so you should have Pro Plus skew and uh and the uh all the all all the features uh will have uh will have the corresponding uh pricing separately [Music] how can you find the best practices for your friends uh we we we'll share this uh deck with you so uh you will you will get that uh so so you so you should get the best practices that I've listed down in in here I've listed down most of the best practices so these are with this deck you should have it with you does SSS work for Creator or can be used for cat try I'm not sure what mean if I uh I think uh you're asking if you you would need NIS for Creator in which case yes nais for Creator license is required uh and and then you could use it in catalog Builder to generate catalog items and the example show for travel request how does the know passport number country are default fees if our prompt we want some custom Department how do you write the catalog so Gregor you can provide uh uh you can say that okay add a question for Department and it should uh probably point it should be reference field pointing to uh CM department and uh it should have a default value of uh so and so let's say development or software whatever right so and the and the llm will honor that so if you don't give uh give questions then llm will try to uh come up with its own question its own questions but if you give uh uh if if you give us a set of specific questions then llm will honor that and create those questions for you see more questions prompts available multiple languages yes we do support uh uh multiple languages uh so uh we have a plugin using which you can uh you can use this in uh multiple languages can we recording of this session uh I believe this would be recorded and posted to YouTube uh Christina is that is that right yes and I already placed the link on the chat okay thank you so much it possible to enable catalog Builder personal developer instance catalog Builder comes out of the box uh so uh your your uh instance should al already have catalog Builder though what I'm not sure is if you can you enable nowes for catalog Builder that I'm not sure I'll probably get back to you on that uh if you able to uh install Naes then you should automatically and and this particular feature comes with the na now assist for Creator SK so text to catalog is part of the now nist for Creator so uh if you are able to uh install that on your personal Dev instance you should be able to uh able to get the now and C build as well I could any other questions this can be used to select between insulin CM enhancement KV Etc uh I'm not sure if you if you mean that from a request point of view if somebody's able to select an incident uh or you're referring to the uh the content item in case of KB uh okay from end user point of view Thanks constin for for for that clarification for from an end user point of view yes AI search should take care of uh and distinguishing between what is the intent of the user so when user is typing that okay I want to report something then uh it should understand that it is you want it to it has to go to an incident and if there's a catalog item for for that utterance it it'll go to the catalog item uh similarly if there's a KB it'll it will fetch you a summarized answer from that KB so so uh so so that should be taken care by by by AI search uh so the the uh recommendation is that you you make you you give the you make the description uh as descript as possible for for AI search to be able to ingest and point to the right uh entity like catalog item or article right hey guys it was uh great talking to you all uh thank you so much much and I hope you had a great time please do leave your feedback you'll get a survey after this uh please do fill that we would love to hear