The 2019 Attivio acquisition has been re-platformed into the Quebec code base and it brings a new “consumer like search” experience to our customers. Attivio was the market leader in cognitive search using AI capabilities such as Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to enhance search. We’ve taken the best of Attivio and the best of our platform capabilities and created the AI search product. Customers who upgrade to Quebec will have a choice to stay on Zing or move to AI Search.

In this article I’ll speak to three key reasons why you should consider switching to AI Search.

Reason 1 – A Consumer Like Search Experience

As consumers we expect a Google or Amazon search experience where we are presented with personalized relevant search results. AI Search brings that consumer like search experience using Natural Language Processing to predict the users search intent and takes into account how users searched in the past to return the most relevant search results for the user.

So when a user enters “iPhone” (figure 1) we return the top result as a Genius Result (1). The Genius Result returns the search object with the highest relevancy score for our search. The relevancy algorithm prioritizes catalog items over knowledge articles as the intent is to order an iPhone. AI search uses a search result improvement rule to promote the latest iPhones in our catalog (in this case it’s an iPhone6 - trust me my catalog has iPhone4 & 5's in it). In addition, the Genius result includes an ability to take action on the search; in this case the action is a request button (2) which can use any API on the ServiceNow platform to kick off a workflow. Finally, the user can click on the filter facets to include or exclude results from different search sources (3).

(figure 1) Genius Card and Top results

Let’s break down the iPhone search from the developers Search Preview (figure 2). For starters our relevancy engine is predicting the relevancy scores (1) to determine what order to return the search results. Relevancy scoring also takes into account the end user’s past interactions with AI Search. In (2) we executed the “Deprecated iPhones” improvement rule (2) to only show the latest iPhones in our catalog and our NLU intent matching predicted the search intent to be “catalog find” (3).

(figure 2) Genius Results relevancy ranking

Reason 2 – Search any Source

I’ve been in many meetings where my customer will say “we have our knowledge articles not just in ServiceNow but in SharePoint and other sources, can you index and search those as well?”

Absolutely, AI Search enables the platform to index and search external sources. In (figure 3), we can index and search any table within ServiceNow. AI Search will leverage integration hub to natively deliver integration to SharePoint Online in Quebec with more integrations to follow. If you need to integrate to additional external sources such as Adobe, Atlassian, IBM, Oracle, SalesForce, MSFT Teams we have a partner that has built 45+ AI search connectors that can be used in a paid engagement. Notice AI search can be used in mobile, portal, and Virtual Agent.

(figure 3) AI Search architecture

Once you’ve integrated to your search sources AI Search leverages the Entity View Action Mapper (EVAM) to control how to display the search results from multiple data sources back to the user, see (figure 4). EVAM helps us grab snippets of knowledge articles that are the most helpful and displays them back to the end user, so they don’t have to read the entire knowledge article.

(figure4) – Entity View Action Mapper

Reason 3 – Actionable Search

Because AI Search is part of the platform, we can use the search results to deflect incidents before end users create a ticket. AI Search Assist uses AI search on the Service Portal and ServiceNow Mobile to help with incident deflection. (Figure 5) shows a rendering of what this will look like on mobile. AI Search Assist is part of the incident record producer and when configured provides search results with a button to take you to a catalog item to resolve your issue without raising a ticket. If you’d like to learn more about AI Search please reference our Quebec documentation.

(figure5) – AI Search Assist