Self-service is one of the key features powering the ServiceNow platform’s ability to resolve issues quickly and deliver superior services. To further scale improve performance, accuracy, speed and customization, ServiceNow introduced AI Search, a new feature of the AI Search Assistant. AI Search improves the efficiency  IT, customer service, or any other users by predicting and providing information with improved user experiences across various ServiceNow supported communication channels. 

Understanding the Significance of AI Search

AI Search allows customer service representatives and other ServiceNow users to effortlessly uncover information in a portal. For example, customer service representatives can use AI Search to access catalog items, Knowledgebase articles, or other information across departments to resolve customer issues instantly. Similarly, users can access related Knowledge articles to solve issues by themselves without reaching out to IT staff, ultimately reducing IT Service Desk time.

AI Search provides tailored answers that are contextual to the user request. AI Search studies user search patterns and adjust outcomes accordingly. To understand the user intent, AI Search uses ServiceNow NLU. AI Search delivers consistent user experiences and engagement across portals, Knowledgebases, mobile apps, and chatbots. Especially in the competitive, digital workplace, where delivering consumer-like experiences to employees is critical.

The Analytics and Reporting solution helps AI Search administrators analyze search query traffic trends, review indexed records and configuration settings, and preview search query results. 

Figure: ServiceNow AI Search Index

To improve search, AI Search maintains a search index that holds platform data, external content sources, technologies, and various ServiceNow applications like the portal, mobile apps and virtual agents. Businesses can configure searchable content by configuring the AI Search index.

Administrators can plan the search experiences by customizing the search profiles. The search profiles describe the sources from which the search has to be carried out and linguistic search request characteristics, which includes autocorrections to search words or keywords. Here, every search profile characterizes a distinctive experience or specific user on ServiceNow. Admins can create search profiles, link to various sources, customize and publish. To understand and deliver appropriate search results, AI Search uses effective search query language. Using the auto-complete feature, AI Search can automatically show recommendations while the user is typing based on user search history, trending search queries, and intent predictions. Admins can alter the autocomplete to remove unwanted suggestions.

Admins can analyze search trends, number of indexed sources, configuration settings, search results and associated analytics through interactive analytics and reporting dashboards.

Figure: AI Search Analytics Dashboard

AI Search supports English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. To further enhances search recall and to allow users to discover information in different forms, AI Search supports lemma and unicode normalization for all these languages. AI Search strictly adheres to security operations standards and makes sure information is only sent to authorized users.