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Easily create end-to-end digital workflows with Workflow Automation
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Conference Sessions
Hybrid Automation: The AI-Powered Next Chapter for Flows and Playbooks
SES6725
Your existing workflows are great, but the future of enterprise process management is hybrid. See the exact, replicable steps we took to integrate Now Assist skills and AI Agents into core business processes, moving beyond simple automation to intelligent, adaptive systems. We’ll demonstrate how AI agents can handle complex, edge-case scenarios your current workflows can't. Walk away with the proven framework to supercharge your service delivery and accelerate time to value.
Build new flows with Flow Designer diagramming
CCB1070-K22
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hey there. And welcome to this session. In this video, we are going to be talking about Flow Designer and how to build flows with the new Flow Designer diagramming view. My name is Brian Bimschleger. And I am the product manager for Flow Designer as well as a few other workflow automation products here at ServiceNow. I've joined ServiceNow about two years ago. And since then, I have worked exclusively with our workflow automation products, notably Flow Designer, Process Automation Designer, and a few of our new automation builders that we are working on. Currently, I'm working extensively with Flow Designer diagramming as well as new workflow automation products that are unannounced. In this video, we're going to talk about three things. The first is the goals of Flow Designer Diagramming. Then we'll show a demo of Diagramming in action. And then finally, we'll give a preview into what's coming next for Flow Designer Diagramming. This is the current view of Flow Designer that many of you know and hopefully love. Over the course of its implementation, we've heard a lot of feedback from customers about how we can improve Flow Designer, specifically as ServiceNow caters to more of a citizen developer and low-code audience. There are several things that we can improve upon here within Flow Designer, notably logic, how we visually represent sequence and logic in a flow; obviousness in terms of placing your finger at the top of a flow and tracing your way to the end. This is a big issue in the current implementation of Flow Designer as certain pieces of Flow Logic, like an IF statement, are not as intuitive as we would have hoped in terms of communicating to the end user what their flow does next. And then finally, for Diagramming, we had a third goal of clarity. If there is ever a possibility where your flow can have multiple paths, we want to make it as clear as possible how the user advances down those paths. Here's the same flow that we just looked at in a diagram view. If we look at how we visualize sequence and logic here, we can see that our IF statements have a different shape, a different color, and have different paths that come out of that. Additionally, if you were to place your finger on the record updated trigger at the top, you would be able to successfully trace your way through the diagram to the end. And on our IF statements, since there are multiple paths, you can see that we have labels that indicate to someone who's reading the flow how you take each path. Well, Flow Designer Diagramming is a new version, a new view of Flow Designer. We've received a lot of positive feedback from our early adopters of this product. One of my favorite quotes is the term gentle on the eyes keeps coming up. It's very approachable and really easy to see what I'm doing. I like this quote for a variety of reasons. One, it's obviously nice praise from a customer who has been using this in a real environment. But secondarily, it's because this customer was someone who was previously critical of some of the usability and performance of the Flow Designer product. So seeing how she has viewed the diagram view very positively that was great feedback for our team and good indication that we were progressing forward well. Now that we've talked about the goals for Flow Designer Diagramming and generally what Diagramming View looks like, let's see a demo of it in action. All right. Let's see how Flow Designer Diagramming works. First off, in the San Diego release, once you enter Flow Designer, you'll notice this toggle in the top right. When I click on the toggle, that is how we switch into the diagram view. Once you're in the diagram view, a lot of the diagram view functions exactly like you would expect if you're familiar with Flow Designer. We can click to add a trigger. And when we select a trigger, that trigger gets added to the canvas and we are then able to modify the details of the trigger just like we would in standard Flow Designer. What's nice about this panel on the right hand side it is it allows you to configure details of the item on your canvas while still understanding what comes before that trigger or action and what comes after. Now let's actually try and add something to our Canvas. In this example, we will go in and add a log. We can still use our pill picker to use data that was generated by previous steps in our flow. And in this example, we're going to grab the short description from the incident that was created. Once we click Done, we can navigate back to the standard Flow Designer view, click on the log, and see that our data pill that we added in the diagram view is now visible within the standard Flow Designer view as well. Let's go back to our diagram view and continue building. In this example, we may not want our log anymore. So in the diagram view, we support the ability to delete content as well. Now let's say we want to perform some logic within our diagram. In this example, the first thing that we're going to need to do is we're going to need to look up some data. In this example, we'll reuse the table from our trigger. And we will add a condition that says we're going to look up any incidents that were created by the person who created our initial incident that kicked off our flow. Now just for fun, we'll navigate back to our standard view real quick. We can see that all of our configurations are still here for the lookup record. Now let's say hypothetically we wanted to loop through these records that we just found or we want to perform some action on all of these records at the exact same time. In the San Diego release, we are supporting a limited set of Flow logic. And if you attempt to add any particular flow logic to your flow that's not supported by the diagram view, if you attempt to navigate into the diagram view, you'll receive a little tooltip warning that informs you you cannot enter the diagram view right now. And it also tells you why. There's an unsupported flow logic type present. Within documentation online, we have a list of the supported flow logic types as well. In this example, do the following in parallel is not supported yet. And once we remove it, we can see that now this toggle to go into diagramming is re-enabled. So if we're in Diagramming View, now let's see what type of Flow logic is supported. By going to Flow Logic, we can see what's available for me now. And it's a more limited subset. For this demo, we are going to add an IF statement. Now what we're going to do is we're going to route our flow based on how many records we get back from step one. So we'll take our lookup record step and the count of records. And if it's more than 10 records, we're going to do something. Once we click Done, you can see that our condition for our IF statement is represented now on the body of the card. If I want it to be a little bit more human readable, I can come in and edit the condition label. And once I do that, you can see on the canvas on this component the text has been updated to make it easier to understand what is happening. Now in this example, if someone creates an incident and they have more than 10 previous incidents, we are going to want to send an email. Don't worry about the configuration for now. But we can see that once we hit this logic point, if there are more than 10 records, we advance down the true path and we send an email. If you're familiar with the standard Flow Designer product, you know that if we just have an IF statement and then perform an action, this is how we represent that content. The standard view of Flow Designer doesn't force you to define what happens if your IF statement is not true. It's kind of implied. Once we got into Diagram View, specifically since this is targeted at citizen developers or lower code users, and one of our principles is obviousness and clarity, we wanted to make sure that there was a false path even if the user didn't define the ELSE statement. But what's nice and what we think is pretty handy is that as soon as I add in any action onto this false path, if we go back to our standard view here, the system is automatically populating your flow with the ELSE action. So even though you didn't manually add in that step, the flow is building in a way so the flow itself will run properly and allow you just to get on with building your flow. Now that we've seen what's possible within Flow Designer diagramming for the San Diego release, let's talk about what's upcoming. In San Diego, it was our initial release. We are supporting all actions, all subflows, and most flow logic out of the gates. In the Tokyo release, we're specifically focusing on support for Service Catalog. This includes the service catalog trigger as well as the ability to add, remove, update flow stages into your flow in the diagram view. In the Tokyo release, we are focusing on additional types of Flow logic, specifically do the following in parallel and make a decision. And then after the Utah release, we have several items in consideration, including the ability to add annotations in the diagram view, supporting error handling, and building subflows as diagrams. Thank you for attending this session today. I hope you enjoy building with Flow Designer Diagramming. And if you have any questions, feel free to post on the community. And I am always listening for feedback on Flow Designer Diagramming. Enjoy the rest of Knowledge.
Easily create end-to-end digital workflows with Workflow Automation
SES2042
Business is moving faster than ever before. Organizations need to empower employees with the tools to produce high quality work at speed. In place of manual and time-consuming scripting, workflow automation from ServiceNow® supports seamless integrations, faster performance, and time-saving reusability. Join this session to learn how the new Workflow Studio vastly simplifies automation experiences and increases productivity with a single, intuitive interface for end-to-end workflow automation so you can build, monitor, and optimize workflows with no-code.
Playbook Questionnaires: collect arbitrary workflow data without custom tables
CCE1330
Come learn how you can leverage the new questionnaire activity to handle collecting arbitrary workflow data. Our experts will provide a feature overview and then engage in Q&A to empower participants to take advantage of this awesome feature!
Playbook Questionnaires: collect arbitrary workflow data without custom tables
CCE1507
Come learn how you can leverage the new questionnaire activity to handle collecting arbitrary workflow data. Our experts will provide a feature overview and then engage in Q&A to empower participants to take advantage of this awesome feature!
Ask the Experts: AMA with the Flow Designer team
CCE1378
Come one, come all! Are you a new Flow Designer user, looking for tips to get started? Or a power user looking to squeeze out every last drop of power, customization, and automation from Flow Designer? Or maybe you're a Workflow user who is thinking about making the jump to Flow Designer? No matter your skill level, come on by and ask the Flow Designer team your questions.
Amazing automation: Get the most out of Flow Designer, Playbooks, and Decisions
CCE1580
Want to learn how to get started with ServiceNow automation products like Flow Designer, Playbooks, or Decisions tables? Or are you already a pro and are looking to squeeze every bit of power and customization from the platform? Either way, join this session to learn, ask the experts any question on your mind, and learn the best ways to get the tools to work together to achieve incredible outcomes.
Accelerate productivity through agentic workflows
SES3214
AI agents are disrupting the ways we work. Organizations are tapping into the power of agentic AI to realize massive productivity gains through reduced resolution time and accelerated time to value. Join this session to learn from our workflow automation product team what is in the roadmap for Workflow Studio, and how we are transforming workflows through the power of AI agents and operators using flows, subflows, and actions.
The safest harbor: Behind the scenes of Product Management
CCB1104
Join us for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Product Management at ServiceNow. We'll explore how we gather and use feedback from the community, idea portal, surveys, and more. Discover our meticulous process that ensures our products meet the highest standards and resonate with users. We'll highlight 2-3 standout features that made it from feedback to implementation. This session is a must-attend for anyone interested in product management and the collaborative efforts driving innovation at ServiceNow. Don't miss out!
Playbook questionnaires: Create guided experiences and add ad-hoc automations
CCL1323
Join this session to learn a whole new way to implement dynamic workflows! The questionnaire activity lets Playbook authors collect arbitrary data that can be used in decision branching to guide users through a decision tree. Combined with our new guided layout experience this feature offers a whole new paradigm for guided troubleshooters. You can also collect arbitrary data to pass along to existing automations reducing the need to create activity definitions. The possibilities are endless!