hello and welcome everybody to our platform Academy session yes you're correct here this is not virtual agent Academy but I am joined by our uh virtual agent academy uh host that is Victor today um thank you so much for joining me today I thought we'll start yes I thought we'll start a little series and on and off try to do some Better Together uh crossover academies because we have so many amazing platform products that work together really well if you know how to connect them so today is kind of our kickoff for this and we want to show you how to connect virtual agent and flow designer how to reuse your existing flows or subflows or flow actions from virtual agent to empower your conversations that are bot driven and also maybe with agents later so if you would um no I think we'll do the uh intros first so hello and welcome my name is Lisa I'm an Avon product manager I live in Germany I've been with service now for about four and a half years and my main topics are workflow automation tools so flow designer decision Builder process automation designer these kinds of awesome stuff and then Victor over to you yeah so uh like Lisa says you've probably heard my voice and the virtual agent academy uh I've been working on Virtual agent for the past couple years a little bit of generative AI now that that's happening and I've been with the company for also about for a little over four and a half years that's awesome thank you so much then we can get into some housekeeping items uh this one's the one that you always know it's an evergreen in just in case that we might be hitting on any topic that is future looking forward looking statements any products that we're currently working on please don't make any purchasing decisions based on what we tell you today and then the next one is our housekeeping for the academies as mentioned before this is one of a couple of different Academy series I will have another slide at the end to list all the links for all the other academies if you signed up for this through our larger sign up page you will have seen that there's a mobile app academy one for next experience one for conversational interfaces another one for uh platform analytics and so on so I encourage you to check those out as well my colleagues are doing amazing work and I would really love for you to check out their sessions right I think with that I can hand it over to Victor great thank you very much so um this is our agenda here uh I'm gonna start with introduction to Virtual agent and we'll talk about flows in the virtual agent designer and then we'll show you some exercises and some demos so um I because I'm not going to make the assumption that all of you you know know a virtual agent is since you're not in my Academy I figure I just kind of start by showing off what it is and what it's all about so you know let's walk through an example use case here uh well let's say that you know Sarah has an issue with her email and she can use the virtual agent to resolve her issues uh the virtual agent knows her name and you know uh what the right workflows run and you know before she can log an incident the virtual agent first provides relevant knowledge-based articles right that's in order to it's all about self-service and deflection of tickets but that's what we don't want we don't want phone calls or trying to avoid live agent chats or ticket login right so we you know we provide uh information such as workflows and knowledge base articles but let's say the knowledge article doesn't help with Sarah's issue if knowledge article isn't helpful then yes within the virtual agent you can directly help create an incident and view it without having to navigate anywhere else so you know in summary the the goal of the virtual agent is focused on incident and case deflection on the most common it HR CSM issues right and that's to increase productivity on both the employee and agent side and reduce resolution times all this leaves a happier users happy users are the best users and no service is the best service because it's faster yep absolutely so you know in terms of how the virtual agent works right so the the one the first thing to note is that the virtual agent lives where your users are so not only is it in Portal but it's also it's also in your favorite messaging app whether it's teams or slack you can access it via you can interact with it via email and you can even interact with it via phone via interactive voice response or ivr right and the advantage of virtual agent over say another chatbot uh you know service out there is that it's native to the now platform it uses your data your users cmdb knowledge base service catalog right and as an intelligence layer to provide personalized service Automation and answers so the virtual agent can connect to your current servicenow apps and workflows which is you know we're going to see in a bit later it could uh you know these are the things the workflows you've already invested in so you don't need to rebuild them and it can integrate with any third-party enterprise system via integration Hub again something that we're going to uh relate to later on so this provides cohesive and Enterprise experience via a single chat interface and with with minimal need for integration so you know you don't need to embed your Bot Into the Now platform or anything like that it is the now platform and let's say where the where the virtual agent is not able to resolve an issue the conversation can be routed to the right live agent with intelligent routing and again that is also native to the now platform there's no need for Integrations or bringing in a third-party chat service or agent service there as well so it's a very powerful conversational capability that is available to you today uh for those of you who are on a pro or Enterprise SKU it's available for you uh to use that's so amazing I think we'll have another question around this later but we'll uh first uh check out the next couple of slides yeah I just had one more slide on the virtual agent so you know how do how how does how does how do you set up a virtual agent it's you know we've made the setting up the virtual agent as fast and as low code as possible um we have low code tools such as a conversational integration integration home page like a a low-cost setup page that gives you step-by-step options you have the ability to um you know uh find recommended topics they can use to activate and we actually do that analysis for you and then uh you don't have to build your own topic we provide you know 70 we just provide over a hundred out of box topics for you to use across it HR and CSM and if you did want to edit or build your own topics we provide with provide you a low code designer that again uses drag and drop to build those topics and I think time permitting we'll we'll see a bit of that uh in in a bit and then you know we you're able to again embed your virtual age in in any uh in in many different uh user interfaces of your choice to provide a rich and engaging experience whether that's again teams or even natively in Mobile and of course you can't measure or you can't improve what you can't measure so we also provide again an interactive actionable dashboard that measures the effectiveness and the usage of your virtual agent so all this is included for you and uh you know we try to enable this to provide with you again fast time to value with minimal need to uh to build anything just use and utilize what we provide for you out of the box so I have brought you two uh small use cases so uh you will be witnessing How I build VA topics in front of Victor who is representing it every week in his Academy and and articles and other content I hope I don't go wrong but we will find out how this goes so I brought two use cases let me quickly sketch them out the first one is the very simplest one I have created a very very simple tiny flow action that calls a remote API it's a fun random cat fact API and all it does is give us a random fact about cats what I want to show you is how to use that action from virtual agent and then surface the results to the user that is using the conversation in the Second Use case this one's a little more complex I created a small custom app in that app I have a custom table extended from task I have created a record producer that is there to create a new record with two inputs I have also created a little flow and will show you the flow in a minute that makes a decision and then does something with that decision info and that is what we'll use in Virtual agent but you'll see that live so without too much Hadoop I will take over sharing and show you the cat API because cat facts are amazing and we all love cats don't we uh so I don't know if you can see this uh but this API just uh returned a random cat fact I have created a custom action in flow designer I do not need a credential for this one it's just the cat fact ninja um URL and I'm calling the slash fact API that's all it does and this one's published so if we go to Virtual agent you can get here from uh conversational interfaces virtual agent and then designer I created a new topic and I will use the action uh utility which allows me to then give it a name get random cat fact I will invoke a flow designer object with the choice between an action and a subflow in this case I want an action I use my I choose my spoke or scope that is a tongue twister and then I can choose my get random cat fact this one does not have any inputs because I don't need any inputs but I do get a couple of outputs that we are familiar with from flow designer and that's all I had to do for this flow to run now I do want this output to be surfaced to the user that will use the bot so I will use one of the bot responses in this case a text one we have a couple of choices here and you can find out how all of them work if you look at the Academy or go check out the documentation but this one is very easy so I will return a cap fact my response message can have some formatting so I can go ahead and type some text but then also use outputs of previous steps in my virtual agent topics so here a can fact for you I can have a line break I could add a link I could add some lists or some other things but I just want my cat fact so I will go with my pill picker it looks a little different but it is similar to how it works in flow designer I can pick the input of variables and I can find my cat fact right here and that's all ready all we need to do for this one so let's test it if I hit the test button I will get a new window um and luckily because I'm sharing the screen and not just uh the window itself you should hopefully see the pop-up do we see the pop-up yes we do awesome all right so uh my debugging VA window will tell me that my flow was called so that is a success I could go ahead and view my execution and flow designer for debugging person purposes this will not be shown to the user that is calling the a from service portal or mobile or any other place this is only when you test it and it returned a random cat fact here's a cat fact for you a female cat is called a queen or a Molly I did not know that that's awesome lip show up show off hands who knew that they're called Paige knew they were called a queen I want to know who else knew that or not you know that put that in chat that's awesome okay so we got a random cat effect do you want another we'll get one more let's see what happens we get another cat fact and it is about 37 of American homes today have at least one cat that is a lot it's amazing all right so ah we have our first use case and we now know more about cats only about 20 of those know they have a cat that is very true Josh sometimes the cat chooses you all right so we're ready for the second uh for our Second Use case I think so the first one was very simple we only had two uh activities in our VA topic the second one is slightly very very slightly more complicated I haven't created a custom task called Workshop task it has a category field that I defined with a couple of choices and then I also have a catering option with a couple of choices and I have a reference field to the location as tasks usually do this is designed to talk about workshops that may happen in office remote outside of the office or some of these options and for my use case I have built a decision table because I want to figure out based on the workshop task inputs if the category is in office and the location the country is in the way USA or not then we get different decisions for our ongoing process so for our task I have already used this in this scenario in other academies but if you want to learn more about decision Builder I will post the link to the decision Builder Academy in a bit but it's a very very useful topic we have an input in this case our task and then we can make decisions based on any kind of Criterion on my of the inputs and I can also Define different outputs the outputs the results can be choices emails strings whatever you need and you also get a default result so using this I created a subflow with some inputs the location in the workshop category and what I want to get out of it is the catering option and the email address to reach out to something that is currently not possible in uh VA is to make use of a record producer and that's what I did here you can in VA may do simple uh create update or I think even delete record actions but you cannot go more complicated in than that so if you wanted to make use of other logic you would want to choose flow designer so I'm doing this I am also making a decision with the decision table I just showed you so I will input my workshop task to get an output that output I will then use to update my workshop record and assign to my subflow outputs so they will be available to my VA designer that was a lot of talk to set up the use case but the important part now is we can use this in VA so I will go back to the VA overview page filter this to my own topics and then move over to the work workshop catering options just as before we can see that there's always a start and an end button so whenever you have a conversation you can greet people ah welcome and you can also say uh goodbye you can add whatever you need here but I just wanted to quickly show you this option as well I did prepare a little bit beforehand I already set up two user inputs so the big feature of va of course is that it's not just automation but that your users can give input or replies or make choices upload files or um decide things at runtime so whenever you use one of these blue bullets this is a user input so the user that is talking writing interacting with the virtual agent bot can make user inputs the orange ones are the responses that you can send back and the dark blue ones are utilities so for the inputs here we have a dynamic Choice input we can make use and this is something that Victor pointed out earlier right we can make use of all the data all the tables that are available in your platform already so in this case I ask the virtual agent to populate the choices from the location table because I want to make my list a little shorter I added some conditions so that it's not a huge list but I can pick quickly the second one is a choice field so I decided to add the choices that we will need later for our record so far so good the next one is again our action utility this team this time we will call a subflow um from our repository it is the same spokes earlier it takes a second to load and 2023 there is my I want the catering VA this time different from earlier we do need some inputs so as we saw before in flow designer we have inputs and the flow won't do much without them so we want to map the location and the workshop category that we uh got from the user in the previous steps so we use the pill picker again and navigate to the right Fields so this one is the category that we want and the outputs are the ones that we just saw in flow designer as well always save save Venus good and now we do want to return something again and we for for simpleness sake I will use the text one again return catering info and I will craft my response you my response is you have the following data rain option for this one I will use the response the the output for the catering option to set things up please send an email to this address I think this one needs a comma and then I can add the other field that was output by my subflow all right I think this should work fine we will test it this looks good so let me make this a little bigger so that we see the question uh the first question is where is your Workshop um I Define this text in the activity in the input I do have the choice to filter here so I don't have to scroll through all of them so in case I already know the street for example I can filter this one down this makes it a lot easier to pick the right answer uh I will enter this one the second question is what kind of Workshop is it and since I entered three choices I can now pick one of these and we'll choose offsite and we should get a result in a second first of all the flow is being triggered and we can see that that happens and the text and the text that gets displayed is concatenated from the data pills you have the following catering option delivery and to set things up please send an email to this email address just to confirm we entered a location in the US and we chose offside so if we check with our decision table we have an offside and the us and we have delivery and the catering us email address so this worked just fine I call this a success I did not expect for the demos to run this nicely but they did I am happy so what do we do now all right let me see if there are questions we have some questions that have already been answered uh Victor do you think any of those are uh interesting to all everybody so we should call them out um not really I think we're okay I am trying to type a um answer to Nick's question so it's taking me a while maybe I'll address it live first pay some documentation but Nick asks is it possible to is there a secure way to add a URL to the chat client or to the chat window to other portals email signatures maybe you embed it to a new UI page and the answer is yes you can embed the virtual agent into any site uh internal or external for your users to use you can also um add single sign-on to it so that um if a user is logged into their servicenow account then in another site they can also use it to um access their servicenow information otherwise anyone by default is um is just logged in as a guest user so if you have public facing topics you can use that it's you know customer service use cases does that a lot um or you know otherwise again you can use SSO and I'm going to paste a link to that documentation and then this is an interesting question I'm not sure if we can address it right here uh it's a forward-looking uh uh statement I guess do you uh so the question is about chat Deputy or other generative AIS yes so I'll give the easy answer and then I'll give the complete answer yeah the easy answer is uh yes you can connect not chat you can connect large language models to Virtual agent right GPT three or four right via an API that's available via open a or Azure open AI but that's a lot of work and there's a lot of nuance in terms of the calls and responses from the API in the in moving forward you know servicenow is providing a integration a low code integration point for large language models such as those provided by open a and Azure open AI so you can have a chat GPT experience in Virtual agent and we are building our own uh large language models as well um I mean we have been for a while but you know they they put they pushed our hand and we'll play it and so that is going to also be coming down the pike very soon as well so um being on the lookout for that you might have seen whether it's at knowledge or whether our press releases we've seen um you know other uh you might have seen some of some ideas of our plans so uh continue to be on the lookout for that that's very exciting there's so much happening in this in the space and of and of course we're uh seeing where it makes sense in which parts of our platform we want to use generative AI in a useful and productive manner that will help you with your use cases we have one question in the Q a that is the perfect segue to go back to our presentation and talk about some guidance where and when we would use flow designer when creating virtual agent topics yeah you want me to take the screen share yes or okay let me do that yeah in terms of guide it's like when should I use x and when should I use y when should I use Virtual age and when should I use flow designer right so virtual agent um if you need user input between steps and if your logic is relatively simple uh I would I would use a virtual agent especially for more conversational experience uh you you know you have more you have control in the uh in the tone of the of the agent the uh branding and the looks and feel of the agent right to ask these sorts of questions and then provide uh workflow steps uh obviously if you're if if the users if you're trying to you know create self-service mechanisms that can be powered automatically by your knowledge existing knowledge articles or catalog items you want to use Virtual agent um you know if you already have existing utilities that cover use cases as like geology what Lisa showed we have a drag and drop action node that can pull your flow designer flows and you know uh Etc directly to intervirtual agent and then we also have existing topic blocks uh these are like mini topics basically that uh accelerate topic building all that is available on the virtual agent so that if those benefits benefit what you're trying to do then I'd go to Virtual agent right in terms of flow designer flow designer has its own um out of box of flows and subflows if those already exist or maybe you've built one or your pre or a predecessor built one you should you know stick with stick with what you have right um some there are some things that virtual agent uh can do but you need some to do some scripting whereas in flow designer Dave might have they may have built um some shortcuts some um some automatic out of box flows already that reduce the need for scripting so if you see that in the uh some you know transformation scripts for example so if you see that in flow designer already by all means use it right um again flow designer has some specific actions that aren't available as a virtual agent designer utilities uh you can trigger Integrations with third-party systems with integration Hub so this is uh again A Better Together story right virtual agent how can how do I use Virtual agent to look up my leave hours and workday or look up my expense report status and concur Etc and so on you use a you use the float you use the flow designer to connect to those third-party systems and then you use the virtual agents uh designer to call that flow to call that integration and and use and and collect inputs and then display outputs right and then um you know virtualization that doesn't have a native decision table maker that's in flow designer so if you need uh the if you need a system to make a decision uh in terms of the logic there use flow designer and then like what Lisa just showed you call that you can call that in in the virtual agent and the display and display the results for the virtual agent so it's amazing you know conversational experience you know lean on the virtual agent whether when it comes to flows and flows and Logics and third-part Integrations you lean on you lean on Flow designer and then together again everything we're talking about is in is in the is in the now platform we have not you know you we're not using any external tools or whatever uh you know all that's available to you to build those uh workflows that you're thinking of building yeah that's right the that's the the beauty of what we're showing here is the better better together story and to uh make use of other tools to speed up your uh your uh implementation uh one thing that I was just thinking about while we were talking about these um so our main driver right here is the virtual agent which is the user end user conversation so it's generally an end user a requester that will chat with the chatbot an end user can also be an employee for any employee workflow products or a customer if you're if we're talking customer workflows uh some of you may be familiar with a product called process automation designer we also have a similar distinction when we say okay uh we need user inputs between steps but if this is targeted not at a an end user but add an agent that is working a process or working a more complex workflow you might want to look at the combination between flow designer and process automation designer so uh just to give this distinction really based on the Persona and the target audience of what you're building one is the agent side one is the automation side and one is the end user side I think I think that's a good distinction I will check if there are more questions but it does look uh pretty quiet I am very happy with what we've seen today it worked the demo gods were nice to me which is always good demo gods were on my side today I will do one more thing I think you can go on one more slide so I can call out the other academies again and do my wrap up so first of all Victor how was my designer building very very good you should you should take over my virtual agent Academy Ah that's so kind all right so speaking of uh conversational uh interface Academy is the last point on this slide so you can use one of these handy dandy shortenings to get to the other academies as I said platform Academy that's this one analytics Academy talking everything platform uh analytics ah that is dashboards or indicators kpi composer dashboards reports and new also next experience dashboards so uh be sure to check those sessions out mobile Academy of course talking Everything Mobile app builder next experience Academy is very important because the next experience is the new experience of your platform and we want you to be uh on uh in the know how it works how to activate what to consider and so on then we also have the AI Academy so if you're interested in gen AI topics this is probably one to follow going forward I am pretty sure there will be new sessions uh when we're getting closer to our next release which is Vancouver sometimes in Q3 this year um and then of course the conversational interface Academy to give you a small Outlook over the next platform Academy sessions uh today uh we had this first of hopefully many Better Together stories um the next session in two weeks uh Ashley Snyder would join me again uh we had so much content to talk about Knowledge Management that we had to schedule a second session uh so that is scheduled for uh this session on July 20th uh I'm still working out the details on the sessions in August but I have a couple of really cool topics lined up in August we will also enter the phase of Early Access for the Vancouver release so um definitely make sure to check the content published by the developer Advocates uh you can find The Blog on developer.servicenow.com there will be a new technol uh episode to give you all the highlights of uh platform and creative workflows and automation engine uh features that will be released with Vancouver and then in September which is probably when our Vancouver release will be generally available and that is when most of our academies will set up some what's new in Vancouver sessions specific to their topics so that's kind of the outlook for the next uh couple of months and oh there you go thank you Mark yes so the tech now episode about Vancouver is on August 3rd which is really soon so I'm very excited uh for you all to learn about the Vancouver um Vancouver features and there are some really really interesting things coming that we cannot talk about yet because it's not August 3rd so if I may I want to give a quick plug to uh our next conversational interfaces Academy which is next Tuesday July 11th 8 30 Pacific 11 30 Eastern and you know there's so much more to uh to conversational interfaces than just virtual agent right we also have agent chat we have sidebar we have nlu so uh for example for instance next week we'll talk about how to integrate a sidebar uh with agent chat and teams together so it's another Better Together story there so if you're if that is interesting to you feel free to register sidebar for those of you don't know is our agent agent collaboration tool that's the reap that's a replacement of the older connect chat tool that we had since uh you know replaced so I've been looking for that and hope to to see you there as well thank you that is that is very exciting I think the uh the cool part about sidebar is that it natively it's natively available in the con uh con configurable workspaces like the um service operations workspace for example so this is a way to um to coordinate internally uh with uh with regards to specific uh tasks right yep workspaces it's even available in the platform view although yeah workspaces the best is the most direct way to to use it and if you're ever wondering about oh well can I you know chat between teams and sidebar this next week's Academy is Microsoft teams and sidebar then this Academy next week is for you awesome I uh we had one more question come in uh regarding the Techno episode and I posted the chat uh the link in chat and in the Q a panel um that is definitely something to to sign up for uh Chuck tomasi and his colleagues are uh developer Advocate colleagues with Lauren and Earl they're always putting up a great show going through the most important features in the next release they're always the first like they they go right on EA day I always do my sessions a little later all right I think we're um so far we have covered everything that we wanted to show um thank you everybody for joining I hope you uh got a good impression on how to combine VA with flow designer I encourage you to check out the backlog of either of our academies we have many many more other sessions um linked in YouTube in the in the community if you have ideas of sessions that you would like to see in the future or have any other feedback please put that in the survey that will pop up once I end this webinar awesome thank you everybody thank you so much for joining us uh thank you Victor for joining me today and for supporting this uh Better Together effort and you all have a wonderful day and a lovely weekend goodbye bye everyone