The ServiceNow Virtual Agent platform provides user assistance through conversations within an intelligent messaging interface. Design and build automated conversations with an out-of-the-box system that help your users quickly obtain information, make decisions, and perform common work tasks with Virtual Agent.

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Virtual Agent benefits

User satisfaction

Provide better self-service by helping users and customers get what they need quickly with always-on, omni-channel experiences. Enable your users to get immediate help, day or night. Boost user and customer satisfaction by offering a personalized Virtual Agent experience, whereby user information is remembered and applied during the conversation.
Increased productivity

Deliver great experiences for your users, as well as your agents and technicians, by deflecting tickets and reducing call volumes. Drive productivity by providing a virtual agent on familiar channels, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Messenger, and Workplace.
Automation support

Scale your support organizations and free your agents and technicians to focus on more complex user issues by automating common support tasks.
Empowered service owners

Enable service owners to deliver and refine AI capabilities quickly without data science expertise.

Virtual Agent features

Personalized experiences

Virtual Agent uses the full context of the Now Platform® to deliver intelligent, personalized, and meaningful conversations that actually get things done. Admins can set up custom chat experiences for users from where they run Virtual Agent.
Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

Enable Virtual Agent with NLU to understand the intent of what people are looking for and provide them with more relevant answers. Everyone can get what they need using simple, everyday language and conversations precisely tuned for ServiceNow® workflows that you can easily evolve over time.
Pre-built conversational topics

Quickly deploy AI‑powered chatbot conversations using customizable templates for the most common enterprise IT, HR, and customer service scenarios.
Virtual Agent Designer

Build and test conversations without scripting or advanced skills. Drag and drop elements on the graphical canvas to see the entire flow. Go further with branching, looping, and scripting.
Live agent hand-off

Seamlessly transfer the entire conversation history and context to the right human agent so they can quickly address any escalations and resolve user issues.
NLU Workbench

Create and tune sophisticated models that are specific to your organization’s vocabulary and acronyms without writing a line of code. Enable anyone to define intents and map entities to your Now Platform data by entering sample sentences.
Channel integrations

Connect to where your employees and customers already are—in web portals, Now® Mobile apps, and collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Messenger consumer app, Workplace from Facebook enterprise messaging app, and any other popular chat or messaging app.
Notifications

Deliver real-time alerts and status updates to employees, including actionable notifications and SMS notifications. Deliver notifications via all supported channels, including web, Slack, Workplace, and SMS. You can quickly collect feedback for critical decisions and resolve requests faster.
Multiple NLU providers

Use the native, built-in NLU engine from ServiceNow, or optionally connect IBM Watson Assistant or Microsoft LUIS for intent and entity recognition across additional languages.

Virtual Agent operational impact

Virtual Agent helps solve ordinary issues and delivers results for common requests. When Virtual Agent handles the general, everyday tasks and requests, your agents and technicians are free to focus on more complex user issues.

Virtual Agent converts the time your agents and technicians spend handling low-impact user requests, such as password reset, request for leave of absence, or information about a recent order, into an impressive, intelligently managed interaction. Turn your high-volume ordinary interactions into an elevated user experience.

Virtual Agent solves common issues, improving self-service, deflecting incidents, and providing faster resolutions for customers. Plus, it's available 24 hours per day.
Virtual Agent is available to support organizations throughout your enterprise, including IT Service Management, Customer Service Management, and HR Service Delivery. Virtual Agent helps support these organizations with the following tasks and more:
  • Answering FAQs
  • Providing tutorial, "how to" information
  • Querying or updating records, for example to get status on cases or incidents
  • Gathering data, such as attachments, for the live agent
  • Performing diagnostics
  • Resolving multi-step problems

Components

The Virtual Agent platform includes the following components:

Virtual Agent conversational (client) interface

With Virtual Agent, your users interact with a virtual or live agent through various messaging services. You can configure the web-based chat client available for Service Portal and Apple iOS and Google Android environments. Your users can interact with a virtual agent through the Now Mobile app, as well as through the ServiceNow integrations for third-party enterprise messaging applications: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Workplace from Facebook. You can also configure the Virtual Agent interface for Facebook Messenger, a consumer messaging application.

In addition to the clients supported by Virtual Agent, you can create conversational custom chat integrations with other chat providers. These custom chat integrations enable your end users to engage with Virtual Agent and live agents through other chat channels.

Virtual Agent Designer

Use Virtual Agent Designer to develop, test, and deploy automated conversations that assist your users with common issues or self-service tasks. Virtual Agent Designer is a graphic tool for building the dialog flows of conversations, called topics. A topic defines the dialog exchanged between a virtual agent and a user to accomplish a specific goal or resolve an issue.

In addition to topics, you can also build reusable topic components, such as topic blocks that perform certain functions or custom controls (user interface objects), for use in your conversations.

You can build conversations that are based on keywords that your users enter. Or, you can apply Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models, which enable your virtual agent to understand, process, and respond to what users are saying during a conversation.

Pre-defined topics and topic blocks are available for various ServiceNow applications, such as Customer Service Management (CSM), HR Service Delivery, IT Service Management, and more.

Live agent support

Give users the option to switch to a human agent for assistance during bot conversations. Virtual Agent integrates with live chat to offer a seamless transfer from a virtual agent to a live agent. Your users can request a live agent transfer at any time during a virtual agent conversation. You can also initiate a live agent transfer through custom conversation flows that you build.

Virtual Agent and Virtual Agent Lite

The Virtual Agent platform is available as a professional subscription or in a limited version that is automatically included with the Now Platform®:
  • Virtual Agent (professional) — Provides all the core functionality for creating and deploying virtual agent conversations to your Virtual Agent clients. Includes the following features, which are automatically installed with the Glide Virtual Agent plugin (com.glide.cs.chatbot):
    • Virtual Agent Designer (supports Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in Virtual Agent conversations)
    • Virtual Agent web client
    • Virtual Agent notifications
    • Conversational custom chat integration framework
    • Conversational Interfaces console for admin configuration
    • Topic Recommendations (ServiceNow Store app)
    • Conversational Analytics (ServiceNow Store app)
    Note: The initial installation of Virtual Agent via the Glide Virtual Agent plugin automatically installs the Topic Recommendations and Conversational Analytics apps. Subsequent updates of those applications must be downloaded and installed from the ServiceNow Store.
  • Virtual Agent Lite — Provides a limited (trial) version of Virtual Agent for ITSM standard customers. Used with ITSM Virtual Agent Conversation Topics Lite, which offers several pre-built conversations for common IT support requests. These keyword-based conversations run in the web chat client and also in Virtual Agent messaging integrations for Slack, Microsoft Teams, Workplace from Facebook, and Facebook Messenger.

Virtual Agent components

Virtual Agent for IT Service Management
Empower your IT technicians to concentrate on more challenging, demanding user requests and incidents by deflecting the most common, simpler incidents to a virtual agent. ITSM Virtual Agent enhances both the IT technician experience and the employee experience by addressing IT-related queries immediately.
  • Guided setup for Virtual Agent and Live Agent
    Walk through the steps for configuring your instance with Virtual Agent or Workspace Agent Chat (Live Agent). Setup instructions are customized to streamline the configuration process.
  • Issue Auto Resolution
    Proactively deflect some of the most common ITSM incidents to ITSM Virtual Agent through Actionable Notifications. Issue Auto Resolution enables ITSM Virtual Agent to proactively resolve incidents through a conversation on the user's preferred chat channel.
  • Actionable Notifications
    Send interactive messages to an employee through Virtual Agent, based on pending tasks or alerts. Deflect some of the most common ITSM incidents to ITSM Virtual Agent, reduce incident volume to the service desk, and help employees discover ITSM Virtual Agent as a resolution channel.
  • Topic Recommendations
    Use the Topic Recommendations app to identify pre-built Virtual Agent topics that can be quickly implemented in your organization. Topic Recommendations uses Intent Discovery to analyze data from your organization and to find relevant pre-built topics that your organization can benefit from, and new topics that would be useful to create.
  • Integration
    Integrate with other Now Platform applications, such as, AI Search. Add automated workflows, built in Flow Designer, to conversation topics. You can extend these workflows to access many third-party services through pre-built Integration Hub spokes. For example, enable your users to initiate a  WhatsApp chat conversation with a virtual agent by using the  Conversational Integration with WhatsApp (powered by Twilio) application.
  • Manage Microsoft 365 Group conversation flow
    Manage a Microsoft 365 Group using a pre-built set of topics. With this conversation flow, you can add or remove users from an existing Microsoft 365 Group, create a Microsoft 365 Group, and more.
  • Manage Microsoft Active Directory Distribution List conversation flow
    ITSM Virtual Agent helps admins manage an on-premise Microsoft Active Directory distribution list using a pre-built set of topics. Admins can add and remove users from a distribution list, create distribution lists, and show Distribution List details.
  • Custom greetings and promoted topics
    Provide custom chat experiences for your end users based on their context, such as the service portal from which they initiate Virtual Agent chats. For example, users can receive different greetings from Virtual Agent or see different promoted topics that are shown at the start of a conversation.
  • Topic categories, conversations, and topic blocks
    Leverage numerous pre-defined ITSM Virtual Agent topic conversations that are contained in several topic categories, including: ITSM Fulfiller, ITSM IT Issues, ITSM Self Service, Setup Topics. Create and reuse topic blocks and templates to perform common functions in ITSM Virtual Agent conversations. Customize the conversational experiences for your end users based on the context (environment) in which they run Virtual Agent.
Virtual Agent for Customer Service Management
Predefined Virtual Agent topic conversations enable your customers to get the customer service help they need quickly and efficiently. Integrating NLU models with your virtual agent topics enables chatbots to analyze, understand, and navigate the user to the right topic based on the inferred intent.

Integrate Customer Service Management Virtual Agent with Facebook Messenger to enable virtual agent conversations in the messenger.

Virtual Agent for HR Service Delivery
Virtual Agent enhances the employee experience by addressing HR-related queries immediately. At any time during a virtual chat, employees can request to interact with a live HR agent. The base system provides numerous predefined Virtual Agent topic conversations designed to help your employees complete common self-service HR tasks.