ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello and welcome to TechNow, the web series for admins, builders and developers of all skill levels on a wide variety of topics. This is exciting. This is our Vancouver kickoff, and we are so excited to bring it to you today. Thank you for watching. Before we begin, I do want to let you know that this is early availability, early access date, recording this on August 3, 2023, and as such, we will be mentioning some things that are a little forward-looking. And remember, don't base your purchasing decisions on this. Now let's get on with the show. My name is Chuck Tomasi. I am a Senior Developer Advocate with ServiceNow. I've been with the company since 2010. I was a customer for a couple of years before that. So had some experience in the trenches, much like many of you as well as doing implementations for many of you as an employee and a long history that goes on far, far beyond that. Without delay, I'm going to turn it over to Lauren for her introduction.

Hey, everybody. My name is Lauren McManamon. Similar to Chuck. I was a customer for 2 years prior to joining ServiceNow itself, which ironically in 4 days, I will be start liberating my sixth anniversary, which I'm very excited and very grateful to have here. In my personal life, I love photography of all angles, whether that's aerial photography or drone or underwater photography. I also have a 3-year-old [indiscernible] who also likes to frequent a lot of our content. And that's it for me. Kicking things over to Pranav.

Hey, everyone. My name is Pranav Bhagat, and I am also Senior Developer Advocate here at ServiceNow. I have close to 8 years of experience. I started my career as a software engineer, moved into consulting, did it for a couple of years. And just prior to joining ServiceNow, I was working with the customer and was helping them with their implementation. I'm also certified technical architect and an ex-MVP. And in my free time, I like to walk, do box and play video games. That's about me, passing it to Earl.

Hi, everyone. My name is Earl Duque. I am also a Senior Developer Advocate here at ServiceNow. I actually celebrated my second year anniversary yesterday here at the company. But before that, I was doing ServiceNow development, mostly higher across multiple companies before joining ServiceNow proper. I was also a previous developer MVP for Hackathon finalist, winner, lead, [indiscernible] knowledge, everything that's about building fun stuff, weird stuff, creative stuff inside ServiceNow that's kind of the name of the game for me. I'm a proud contributor to womennow.sn, check it out. And if you catch me any time outside of work, it's probably playing games, board games, fantasy, football, creating silly videos, anything having fun. So that's it for me.

Okay. Back to me real quick before we turn into the content, some housekeeping things. Our agenda, I'm not going to read it to you. We've got a lot to cover today. Just a couple of notes. If you see a dollar sign in the top right of a slide, it means that there's a paid option for this. A lack of icon means that the feature is included with your general platform pricing. And a house icon or store, if you like, you can interpret it however you want may indicate that there -- it's from the store and there may be additional licensing amplifications for that. Well, the tongue is just working great today, so we're going to keep talking. Quick plug for our podcast. We do have a ServiceNow developer podcast called Break Point, Lauren McManamon, who's on this call with us today and I go through various topics around product features, career stories and even nontechnical skills to help you be a better person in the ecosystem. You can find Break Point wherever you find all your favorite popular podcasts. One more. I think before we get started -- Oh, 2 more. First of all, quick announcement for app engine users. It's the choice for low-code application development and custom workflows. So won't forget that. We're working to gather your peer reviews for ServiceNow App Engine. And it's super important. You can kind of think of this as the Yelp for Software. Very, very simple process. You just use the QR code that's on the screen or the short link, if you prefer devlink.sn/g2review, you spend 5 to 10 minutes to write a review and to make it even better, you get a $25 Amazon gift card. We very, very much appreciate that. And this is an overview. This is not a comprehensive look at all the Vancouver features. Man, that would be like a 6-hour TechNow, which we're not going to put you through. We are covering just App Engine, Automation Engine and a multitude of the platform features for developers and admins. We do not have time for demos in this, sorry. Think of this more as a table of contents of what's to come because we will be doing some deeper dives into many of the topics covered on this video with live streams and videos and blogs and podcasts, it's all coming in our Vancouver content that you can find on our grand old Vancouver content calendar at devlink.sn/vancouver. And before anyone asks, this always comes up, we will not be discussing pricing and licensing. If you have questions about that, please reach out to your account team because if we say in here, it's kind of on the Internet forever, and then we could be held liable for something. We will be taking Q&A breaks periodically through the webinar. So please put them in the Q&A panel. We'll get to as many as we can. But if we don't get to yours, please note that we will answer this offline after this in the next few days, you'll get an e-mail that puts you to a link right back to the community with the answer. So it works out very, very well. But enough of the housekeeping items. Let's turn it over to Pranav for the start of our Vancouver features.

Thank you, Chuck. All right. Let's move on to Automation Engine. For those of you who don't know about Automation Engine. Automation Engine can be part of a combination of Integration Hub, RPA Hub, Stream Connect, Document Intelligence and Automation Center, which binds them all together. First up is Integration Hub. For people who are hearing about Integration Hub for the first time, Integration Hub is used to integrate data and automation -- automate action in modern API enabled system. Here is the list of the new and upgraded spokes, which will be coming in the Vancouver release. Moving on to the first feature. Spoke generator, it's a guided experience to build new spokes. It significantly reduces the trial required to create spoke by [indiscernible] open API specification, it automatically converts operations into action steps and maps the inputs and output accordingly. Moreover, it supports the bulk creation of action further streamlining the process as a developer, this feature will eliminate the need of for manual coding and eventually speeding up the development process. Next up, external triggers it will allow developers to conditionally trigger flows while external sources in an even-driven manner. As an example, let's consider a scenario where the issue ticket is created in Jira. In this case an event will be triggered, which our ServiceNow [indiscernible] will be actively listening for. And based on our specific configuration, this event can initiate a flow in ServiceNow. Out of the box, we are supporting Jira and get hub triggers as of now in future, we'll be bringing up a framework for developers to build their own triggers. Moving on to Integration Hub import enhancement. Those of you who don't know about Integration Hub import, it simplifies the process of importing data from external sources and transforming into ServiceNow table. You can configure, run and schedule your data imports all through a single interface. In Vancouver, developers are now able to add multiple target table to map in the Map to Target page. Next up is Checkmark Indicator. Prior to Vancouver, developers were not told which source field were mapped. They would have to scroll through their mapping to validate. In Vancouver, on the source field, a checkmark indicator is added, that clearly shows the source field is mapped to some target. Lastly, developer can now choose a sheet from the sheet named drop-down menu that displays the files contained within the uploaded Excel. Developers had to manually enter the sheet number prior to Vancouver, which was prone to mistake. That's all from the Integration Hub department. Let's move into Stream Connect. Stream Connect plug-in on ServiceNow platform lets you produce and consume data at scale between ServiceNow and other business processes. In Vancouver, you can create and delete topics from ServiceNow engines. And as you consume a lot of data from a lot of different sources, some streams of data have higher prioritization. So we have added relative weight field to help you with the prioritization and tuning of your data input. That's all from the Stream Connect department, passing it to Earl, who will talk about Gen AI controllers.

All right. So generative AI controller -- generative AI, it's the talk of the town, right? So generative AI will be appearing throughout this presentation as most of you are probably expecting. It's going to be part of the platform throughout future releases. But to kick things off, we're going to be talking about the generative AI controller because it's the controller that will enable you to build Gen AI capabilities into your own applications. The controller works by connecting your instance to a third-party generative AI provider then use the controller's actions to drive your solutions within ServiceNow itself. So right now, you can connect the controller to open AI, Azure open AI, but since it was built as a framework when future AI providers are released, you'll be able to easily switch the connection to a new model like NVIDIA models, Google Bard, maybe even ServiceNow created model [indiscernible] safe harbor. The controller comes with several out-of-box capabilities, so you'll be able to summarize, you'll be able to generate new content. You'll be able to use a generic comp, which is kind of an experimental action in this release. And then there's the Q&A capability, which is -- that is specifically for AI search. A good benefit for the controller is that moderations are built into the controller. So it will prevent your API keys from being inadvertently disabled if any of your end users try to abuse your Gen AI services. So those moderations are actually built in, which is great. And remember how I said it's built on as a framework, it's expandable. So you can make your own capabilities and then it shows up throughout the platform to be utilized by your other developers and creators and builders on your ServiceNow instance. And again, when I say across the platform, I mean that it's usable pretty much everywhere across the platform. You can use it in scripting, you could incorporate it directly into Flow Designer, which Lauren will talk more about. You can incorporate it into robotic process automation, which Pranav will be talking about and you could utilize it inside Workspaces, which Chuck will be talking more about later. The controller really was built for the developers, the creators, the builders on the platform. We'll be able to see this permeate throughout the platform and helping us build whatever we dream utilizing generative AI. And it's even going to be built into familiar UIs that you're used to, making it even easier for you to get started with some of those custom components. So as you can see here on your screen, virtual agent designer has the capabilities built directly into its UI. So you can simply drag and drop these actions right into your virtual agent Designer Flows. And then I'll kick it back to Pranav to talk more about Automation Engine.

Thanks Earl for showing us the new Gen AI Controllers, I'm so excited to try them. Let's look into RPA. For those of you who don't know about RPA. RPA, robotic process automation is a form of business process automation where bots are used to extract data from systems that do not have API. The Vancouver release brings a lot of AI-powered RPA Hub enhancement for accelerating your RPA deployment. Starting Vancouver, RPA developers can leverage ServiceNow's AI framework to access cognitive skills like data translation, image classification, sentimental analysis within the RPA desktop design studio. Let's consider an example where a customer have numerous knowledge articles showed in a legacy system. They wish to migrate these articles to ServiceNow, but require a translation before the transfer. This is where RPA comes to rescue. RPA can retrieve each article, utilize a translation machine learning model through the Invoke capability component and store the translated version directly into ServiceNow engine. This process enables seamless and automated translation of knowledge article during the migration process. Quick note, there are some prebuilt cognitive skills that are ready to use or you can build your own by leveraging ServiceNow's AI framework. Moving on, RPA developers can now use AI model to generate codes by entering a prompt, as you can see on the slide. Now a person like many who has little idea of C-Sharp can have a starting point to begin with. Combination of AI and RPA can be compared to Tony Stark wearing and iron man suit, people who are Marvel fans can get that. If you're a DC fan, you can think of it as Bruce Wayne and Batman. Moving on to code quality checker. Code quality checker in RPA provides you with the ability to set guardrails that ensure high-quality automation and uniform coding standards across the enterprise. We have added expanded -- we have expanded the capabilities of RPA by adding the ability to invoke Flow Designer action from within the RPA robot. In addition to that, we have enabled the search option for invoke flow and invoke subflow method. You can easily search the flow or subflow, which will significantly improve the usability of these methods. And here are a couple of more quick things from the RPA department. Now you can create and edit schedule in the robot calendar. We have added a few more RPA templates for our developers to consume. RPA templates are prebuilt automation that enables you to kickstart your RPA initiative. If anyone is wondering what exactly it is. That's from -- that's all from the RPA department, personally speaking, I'm super excited about the invoke capability component. I have played a bit with it, and it certainly is a very powerful feature. Moving on to Document Intelligence. For those of you who don't know about Document Intelligence, a human assisted document passing application to replace manual work. Who want the first update? Our developers have expressed the need to extract various data elements such as dates, numbers, amounts and currencies. However, before Vancouver, we extract the data as string and we need to perform some post transformation on it to normalize it. This was a pain point for our developers. So in Vancouver, we are providing out of the board support to transform common field type into normalized format. And we have implemented multiple performance improvements for our ERP use cases, specifically focusing on invoices and purchase order. These enhancements aim to enhance experience and outcome for our agents. Moving on to the last update from Document Intelligence and also from the Automation Engine department. Let me introduce you to our newest application, document classification. It's a unified extraction and categorization experience. You're using AI to efficiently classify incoming document and route them to the appropriate processing workflow. Let me give you an example on how it will help. You get an e-mail from a customer with an attached document, which can be a form, invoice, identity document or something else. Right now, agents need to look into it and route it to the appropriate workflow. With document classification, we are trying to remove this manual step, which will make the end-to-end automation feasible plus reducing the MTTR in the process. I hope you got some clarity about the application. We'll be deep diving into this application in our future episode of live coding happy hour on our ServiceNow developer program channel, so make sure you subscribe to it. That concludes the feature that I wanted to cover about -- regarding Automation Engine. Based on the reaction I witnessed, it seems that you all love these features. Now it's time for a Q&A break.

Yes, I had a question for you, Pranav. Someone was asking how is external trigger different from a regular SAPI trigger? Or is this a replacement for Webhooks?

Exactly. It's like -- it's kind of like a webhook, right? Rest API is something you have to call on a schedule base, right? So in this -- with these external triggers, ServiceNow will be listening to it throughout. As soon as the trigger is done like -- and even this trigger then ServiceNow will be listening to it. And then based on the -- like the flow or configuration that we have done, it will be like -- it will trigger the flow in ServiceNow. I hope that answers.

With all of these new automation features, do you see -- where would you want to direct somebody that was looking for automation best practices to guide them across the platform? Where would they get started?

I would say like on our ServiceNow community site, we have an Automation Engine space. If our product managers go there and they try to put all the best practices regarding RPA, Document Intelligence, or integration up. So make sure you check that space, you will be able to find a lot of these guidelines there.

Does anybody else on the team see any other questions you want to throw out there? We can also answer more questions at the end.

Yes, let's save the others for the end. There's so much more to get to. Thanks Earl, and thanks Pranav.

All right. And with that being said, coming back from our little Q&A break, I have the pleasure of walking us through the overall enhancements and improvements made to both Flow Designer and Process Automation Designer or PAD, as I'll be calling it for the sake of time. For our newer audience members, Flow Designer is a platform feature and it allows developers the ability to build multistep automated flows from reusable components in a codeless fashion, right? It's now for several years. So if you're not using it yet, Vancouver has some very convincing reasons to give it a try. PAD sits on top of Flow Designer to allow business process owners the ability to create an organized flow designer content in a more unified, digitized, cross-enterprise process way and these visualizations and these executions are called playbook. So those are the kind of the [ Lexicon ] I will be using for my section. To kick things off, let's start with the overall quality of life enhancements for Flow Designer. First and most obvious will be that Flow Designers theme has been updated to match the new ServiceNow builder theme. So you saw that Chuck has changed his bot eye color, I am wearing electric green, now ServiceNow is as well. So say, bye, bye to the past tells. In addition to this, Flow Designer previously had a few extra API calls that were happening behind the scenes. They made certain aspects of Flow Designer slower than optimally. So some of these were removed entirely. Others went through a pretty complex optimization exercise to reduce these overall call times. The results of this exercise was a 60% reduction in load time, a 98% reduction in the time to add subflows to flows and a absolutely staggering 99% logic optimization time reduction. So I will no longer have to blame bad conference WiFi. What I'm [indiscernible] at 4 Flow Designers. So give a bunch of hearts to that my stake in particular. Now in addition to those users of the flow engine reporting system will also be happy to know that the previous 5 tiers of options have been simplified to 3, and they have each been more thoroughly described in the documentation than they were previously. And finally, in the vein of bringing newer features to full parity with their predecessors power users of the subflow aspect of Flow Designer will be very happy to know that they can now be utilized in the diagramming view and stages are enabled within them. So it kind of brings everything up to par. Now on to the big flashy new stuff. Obviously, the theming changes I mentioned before will catch people's eye very quickly, but so will the new homepage revamp debuting in Vancouver. This simple alphabetically organized list of flows has been replaced with a much more dashboard-like experience that you see throughout the platform. So in a single pain, you'll be very easily be able to pick up on what you are most recently working on, but also see the progress that your team has been making and track the execution status of your hard work through reports. Not only that, we will also be easily accessing resources for assistance, similar to how we did for app engine studio. So you know how long we have to go traversing through dozens, if not hundreds, of flow artifacts to find what you are reasonably working on nor to provide help to your team. Now the term dot walking is a phrase I haven't mentioned yet. It's used a lot on the ServiceNow space and our first is the process of navigating through related objects to get to a needed value. When this is done in Flow Designer, it creates a nice little data pill that can be dragged and dropped throughout the interface. Previously, once it was created, that pill wasn't editable. So if you need to change it, the field had to be accessed, you'd have to repeat the entire process to create a new one. In Vancouver, in both the standard and diagramming view, you will now be able to double-click into a pill and edit it, which will ultimately save you a tremendous amount of time. In addition to editing pills, you will now have better control over your dynamic variables. So these dynamic inputs allow flows and actions to dynamically generate the required input for the use case based off of any other parameter. These ad hoc forms have been enabled within flow inputs to support use cases where dynamic forms are needed. So for example, if I have a flow that creates a catalog item, I would also need to author the specific inputs for the specific catalog item. These are very common in the integration space where the table would dictate which form fields are needed. So overall, this will reduce the amount of duplicative purpose-built actions and flows that you might be only using for that 1 specific integration. Now we've seen AI come up as Earl has already teased, but not in the context of Flow Designers. I'm happy to reveal that one of the biggest showcases of the CreatorCon keynote is here with the Now Assist recommendation. So as you build your flow, generative AI's large language model will predict and suggest which actions should be used next, guiding you in the best direction. Now this is where a lot of conversations would end, right, and end with the big flashy Gen AI thing. However, what if I told you there was 1 more feature for Flow Designer, something that people have been asking for, for years and something I was so excited about. I nearly leaked it a month ago and got a lot of trouble. So ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to say that Flow Designer has a go-back action. This newly implemented Flow Logic allows you the ability to jump back to and rerun the flow starting at a previous action without having to also integrate really complicated do until loops as you had to before. So not only does it do all of this, but it prevents you in the UI from also making simple errors as well such as jumping forward, right, and skipping necessary steps of your flow or jumping into a branch of logic that you haven't properly been evaluated. Especially when I was in sales, I heard this as a #1 reason for why people really still clung to workflow editor. So it brings me so much joy to say that this is now available and can help people move on to Flow Designer. Now on to PAD. As we started with Flow Designer, let's kick things off in the same fashion with quality of life enhancements. First of all, to enable ServiceNow the ability to deliver features on a more flexible release schedule, PAD has been moved to a store app. Not only has it been moved to a store app, but it's also not accessible in the logic tab of App Engine Studio. That means that within the processes of the selected app scope you can also see them and be creative for that app scope as well. This will prevent you from having to go back and forth, back and forth between app engine studio and process automation designer when designing your applications. And then finally, for the enhancements list, playbook agents will be very happy to know that they have the ability to interact with their playbooks on their mobile app instead of just in the mobile browser. This will help you quickly interact with issues regardless of your location or your device, and it utilizes the already existing ServiceNow mobile app that you're probably already making use of today. And now for the big new feature, administration. Previously, the only way to cancel a Renegade process execution was to use a background script. It was just called canceled playbooks by parent record. While this work, it would stop all processes associated to that specific record. And it also never really properly notify the users what it happened, why it was canceled and what they should do next. For some [indiscernible] major canceling a process that's currently on a live production instance, you shouldn't have to depend on background scripts and employ a more kind of horseshoe level accuracy method. So canceling a process, if you think about it, it should follow a process of its own and be controlled through the UI of the platform predominantly. So without bearing the lead any further, we've released a way within the UI for admins to cancel individual processes -- process execution, excuse me. The new script method was also added. So you can just cancel what it's called canceled Playbook, an execution of either of these follow various specific guidelines and showcases what has been informed in the UI to the people that are most impacted by this cancellation. Thank you so much, and we'll toss things over to Mr. Chuck Tomasi for next experience and UI builder. Chuck?

Well, thank you very much, Lauren. I think you almost broke the reactions on that one with the Flow Designer and Process Automation Designer stuff. The hearts and applauses were just flying up the screen. It was wonderful to see. I get the venture into the territory of next experience, in UI builder, and there go a few more. I forgot to mention the reactions earlier, I apologize. If you like something, let us know and we get a kick out of it, and it's kind of bragging rights if who gets the most, we'll figure that out later. Okay. First, we get back to guided tours. These have been around for a while. And the good news is it's no longer a blocker for those organizations that we're trying to get their uses onto the new UI. The tours you previously created for the next experience will all work and actually all of them will all work. So good luck with that. That's a lot of fun. Next, we have the e-mail client in workspace. It's been updated in a few ways. First, you can now compose an e-mail directly from the activity stream. Very happy about that. You can also create messages easier than ever with drag-and-drop capabilities in the To and CC fields. And finally, you can add attachments when forwarding e-mails that already have attachments. So much easier to do that as well. And since 2023 seems to be the year of generative AI, and my colleagues have already spoken about it quite extensively. I too have some amazing things that are coming out as well. We'll be introducing a capability to summarize a case in workspace. This is helpful if you or a user needs a quick synopsis of what's going on. Now I should point out, this is limited availability in Vancouver. So look for widespread distribution of this in future releases. And also, Gen AI can help you quickly compose an e-mail based on the details of the case. Click a button to compose the e-mail with AI, you give it a quick review and send your message. I love living in the future. It's so great. Again, this is also limited available in Vancouver. Now on to some UI builder enhancements, and this one only makes sense to start with. It's a what's new model. It comes up when you're starting up UI builder and it gives you a tour of what's new. I like to think of this as release notes that come to you. You don't have to go read the release. No, it's in Vancouver. They'll show you what's new, and I'm going to show you some of what's new as well. I find this one personally appealing the styling in UIB just got really easy with visual representations of many of the commonly used features. I can't tell you how many times I've confused CSS margins and paddings. And I know there's a number of you that are laughing right now, but it's always the wrong one. Displaying it visually like this will help people like me who have attention deficit on CSS. Is that -- would that be ADHD CSS, too many letters. Moving on, back to UIB goodness. We've got custom layouts for pages. And this take you away from that problem of trying to do proportional columns with containers. And just by adding layouts first, it aids to that best practice of doing layout first then adding your components, makes sense, right? And we've always known that building models in UI builder was way easier than the core UI. We've had those for a while, and now we've got an alternative with pop overs. The main difference is that pop overs -- pop overs, I can't say that. They don't lose focus. This gives you, builder, the developer, the opportunity to choose what type of experience to offer your users when you need to display that additional information. Now testing pages in UI builder got a little bit easier with Vancouver with the new preview. And in the past, you either had to test your page as that user that met variant conditions or god forbid you got to change those conditions. With the new preview, it lets you preview the page you're working on directly without modifying the variant conditions. More reactions are going by, I love it. As you configure your pages in UI builder, you can now undo the changes using the undo feature or keyboard shortcut. You can go back up to 20 steps. And of course, you can also redo -- I think I clicked the wrong slide. Let me back that up a bit. There we go. No, that was preview. Now I'm all over the place. So why we have editing later. Of course, you can always redo something that you've undone. And here's a cool thing. If the change is in a panel that's not currently displayed like the data shelf down the corner, when you do and undo, it redisplays that right stuff so you can make adjustments as necessary. And for what it's worth, the Mac and Windows key bindings apply. So control, shift, Z or whatever you're used to. Now in the cases where you need to create a new dashboard or tab quickly, there's functionality how to duplicate the work you've already done. You can add a new dashboard from the menu in the upper right or you can replicate everything on a specific tab just by using the drop-down menu next to the tab name, copies all the components and configuration and all that good stuff. I love it. And just like in the core UI list, admins can build predefined filters in platform analytics. This is something we don't talk about very often, but we wanted to mention it here. This makes it easy to display, just the right information for just the right users at just the right time resulting in fewer requests for new visualizations, dashboards and tabs. Few other nice things about platform analytics while I'm here. First, you can assign specific roles to enable your power users to create dashboards and visualizations. We've also added recent and shared options to that dashboard drop-down. Additionally, each dashboard and tab has a unique URL, making it possible to do things like bookmark a specific view. And finally, the card view has a recently viewed information, such as an example on the lower left, you can see that this was most recently viewed last Wednesday. So we get an indication of its usage or lack thereof for better management. All right. I'm going to toss it back to you, Pranav. Oh, wait, we're going to do a Q&A break first.

I was like we are. We're going right back to Pranav.

All right. Questions are flying in. We -- a lot more questions that I can go through, anybody seeing ones that we want to highlight.

There's a significant amount of questions about Gen AI in general. I will say for our team, we haven't gotten our hands too deep into this yet because the PDI like that don't update until today. So I think we'll have a much more comprehensive view of Gen AI on ServiceNow in the coming weeks. So I would encourage you to follow our YouTube channel for more in-depth content on that as well.

You want to pull out, Earl? Or should we move on?

Yes, let's keep going and then we'll get to a lot of these general questions at the end because they are flying in even if we're not...

A lot more to go. So now I'll toss it over to Pranav for platform security.

Yes. Thank you, Chuck. And thank you, Chuck, for showing us new features of next experience in UI builder. I haven't tried a lot with UI builder, but seeing all these updates is really tempting me to give it a try. Now let's switch our focus to platform security. When we are talking about platform security, how can we escape ServiceNow Vault. It's our suite of security enhancement products intended to provide additional layer of security and [indiscernible] capability for the Now platform. It consists of 5 key elements: Platform encryption, data privacy, secrets management, log export service. In Vancouver, we are adding a sixth product to our suite, we call it Zero Trust Access. Today, ServiceNow platform provides the same level of access to the user irrespective of the network, location and device they're using to access the platform. Developers want to reduce access to engines for the privileged user based on the log-in context and environmental attributes. Hence, there was a need to support adaptive authorization model, which can dynamically reduce user privileges. With this feature, we are providing you with the ability to reduce user privileges based on the log-in context and environmental attribute. There are 2 main plug-ins to it. One is the zero-trust location-based access, and one is the zero-trust policy-based access, which I'll talk in a minute, zero-trust location-based access gives you the ability to use users geolocation to enforce various security control using the adaptive authentication policies. It works in conjunction with IP address, role, trusted devices and authentication methods. You can now allow or disallow access to the engines, enforce MFA and dynamically reduce the user privileges. So we are listening to you guys. You asked for it, show us the love by clicking on the reaction button. Let's look into an example on how user geolocation will impact users' access. So if you can see on the slide, based on the location filter, we can now either deny access to the user completely or enforce MFA. Let's move to the second part of it. That's like zero-trust policy-based access. It gives you the ability to dynamically reduce the privilege of user in a session based on the policies defined by the security admin, roles that are directly assigned to user or inherited using the group membership can be reduced when the policy condition evaluate should route. For now, we support policy-based reduction of roles only for the web session. Let's look into an example. So you can see on the screen, based on the security policies that we have configured. We can reduce the users' privileges. Moving on, in Vancouver, like we have made some updates to our data discovery features. Basically, data discovery gives you the ability to discover sensitive data within the platform and take action on it. In Vancouver, we are providing you with 4 out-of-the-box data patterns, credit card numbers, social security number, U.S. phone number, e-mail ID and also the ability to create and test your own customer data pattern, which will help you discover sensitive data. Lastly, you can now scan up to 10,000 records in a single time. Moving on to the last update from the Vault department. Until now, developers could only encrypt their phone number and e-mail address field by creating column with a string data type. Now developers can encrypt and protect their phone number and e-mail address using the column level inflection enterprise. Isn't that amazing? So that's pretty much it from the Vault department. Let's look into other security updates. First up is Access Analyzer. During my time as a developer, I have experienced the frustration of trying to understand why a specific user despite being part of the group is unable to access a certain record. It sometimes made me pull my hair out. Access Analyzer helps you answer the question, who has access to what in simple, it provides you with the overall picture of access permission without a doubt. If this tool existed back in the day, it would have made my life as a developer easier. Show us your reaction guys if you love this thing. Moving on to the next feature. I've lost count of times when in complex ACL script has made me face-palmed in a complete disbelief. Security attribute is a significant achievement in addressing complex ACL scripts. A security attribute is a highly configurable piece of information about a subject, for example, a group or a user when used in access control or data filters enables fine grain security configuration in a noncomplex way. Please note, it's not designed to eliminate scripted ACL. Instead, its purpose is to minimize the complexity of scripts and make them more manageable. Everyone likes a manageable script. And this is a comparison between how and out-of-the-box HR scripted ACL looks like and how it can be implemented using security attributes. Coming to the last update from the Platform Security Department, you can now configure independent logging experience for web and native mobile app. That's all from the platform security department. Now I'll pass it to Chuck to show some of the new updates from Search.

All right. Thanks, Pranav. And yes, Search isn't something we have covered in a while. So it's very exciting to see it back on the dock and getting some love from our developer teams. Now when configuring search, we've had a new check box that's available to change the behavior of the search results rather than showing attachments as individual search results, they're listed underneath the parent record. So when you check this, it says show parents. You can get up to 5, and if there's more than 5, there will be a more [ dot, dot, dot ] thing, standard stuff that your users are used to. I find this very handy and easier to digest. Also in Vancouver, we've added counters to the tabs in search to make it easier to identify the number of results on each search source, in next experience and in service portal. And if there's no results, well, it's great out in next experience and flat out omitted in service portal, making the user experience even better. They don't have to go click, nothing there. That's annoying. Now let's face it. There are times when your users want to do their search criteria or together rather than traditional and such as looking for incidents assigned to software or hardware, it's not such a thing as you're getting both in that case. The type field in the search facet configuration has a new option to enable you to choose multi-select or -- and the field will appear as a series of checkboxes indicating contains any selected. I absolutely love this. And there's even validation of the data types. For example, if you try to use this on a date field, a warning message shows up because it doesn't make sense and it's not going to allow you. And finally, there's a couple of new options in the service portal theme record to enable you to configure the search result, styling so that it matches the rest of your branding. Where has this been all my life. I love it. And now I turn it over to Earl and Lauren for a lightning round of some pretty darn cool stuff.

Awesome. Like Chuck said, we're going to do a bunch of different random stuff now just because they didn't really fit into our previous categories. And Lauren and I lovingly call it, our lightning round. And to start off the random stuff, we're going to talk about Geo Point. So before Vancouver, you would have to use 2 columns to store geographical data like Longitude or Latitude when integrating your ServiceNow instance with like stuff like when you have maps inside of your portals and stuff like that. But in this release, we're introducing Geo Point data type, which will allow you to store that data all in a single column up to like a precision of like 6 decimal places or something.

Next is decision table. So it is now possible to test a decision table without creating and triggering a flow. So that will be located in the upper right-hand corner. So now you will see it bright Purple, I guess, Purple Blue test button where you can choose the values to your inputs and see the results. It gives you a higher degree of confidence in your tables before they are deployed. This, I will add as an [indiscernible] will be available in the Vancouver store 1 release, which is scheduled for this month, so scheduled for the month of August. Sorry about that. Additionally, for decision tables and for the testing of them, we have added support to the publishing process of them. A decision table can be both enabled or disabled for publishing during creation. So it's very similar to flows in that regard. Only published versions are available for execution and only users with the roles listed on the screen have the ability to do so. This too is expected for the Vancouver store 1 release sometime this month.

All right. Thanks, Lauren. The next thing that we're showing is the App Manager. The homepage has been redesigned. We'll see clear categorization of apps like licensed apps that are available specifically to you, installed apps, updated apps, a section just for updated apps. We can now manually hit an app sync button to ensure we're getting the latest app updates. We're going to be able to see all the descriptive details for apps like the summaries of plug-ins, the release notes, key features, dependencies, license status, locked install reasons, et cetera, all of them are going to be able to be viewed in a single place, and now we don't have to be jumping through documentation, community, Google, just to find all these things in one place. The dependencies are going to be clearly visible so that we are aware of its state and other licensing details and we will be able to perform installations, updates and configurations from the respective details page, making the overall experience for the Application Manager much better. And my favorite, and finally, multiple installations can now be queued and run in the background so that you don't have to wait for 1 installation to complete before starting the other. The activity log will provide summary of in progress, completed and successful and failed installations so that you can view all of those things without having to leave the page.

Man, lots of love for the Redesigned App Designer -- App Manager. So over to me for Virtual Agent newness, Virtual Agent, ServiceNow's chatbot. I also got a few upgrades in Vancouver. The first concern is conversation. So previously, conversations pervaded throughout all portals or were abruptly closed if you -- if the end user engage with more than 1 chat client in another portal, it's like on mobile or something. Now you have the ability to hold multiple conversations from the same user that take into account the location and context in which they began. There have also been enhancements made to virtual agents natural language interpretation capabilities. So for the people from the Midwest that use a lot of joiner words or stuff like that, it benefits us all. You now have the ability if you make a mistake as well to go back and change previous answers and the agent will, of course, correct the conversation to your intended results.

Let's talk about App Resource Limits. So fun story, one company had multiple internal development groups or what we call tenants, and each tenant owns several scoped applications in their production incidence and one of those tenants accidently hogged all the resources of the entire production incidence and took prod down. And thus in Vancouver, we have to read source limits for scoped apps and admins will be able to set percentage limits to scoped apps on things like API transactions, system events, browser interactions and even scheduled jobs. And finally, in the spirit of making sure things keep running the way you need them, most devs and admins in ServiceNow know how fast the system events table can fill up with acute events. And in Vancouver, we will now have the ability to make sure critical events are always prioritized. Yes. Wow, that was a lot of the lightning round stuff, and I think that's all.

No, no, no. I've got one more thing. One more thing, and I'm going to close with one more Gen AI thing, this is really cool. I couldn't wait to try this myself. In Vancouver, you'll be able to generate JavaScript from text. Great for the low-code capability people or if you want a starting point. The first time you visit this in one of our 233, I was told, 233 script fields, you'll have the option of taking a guided tour to learn more about how this is used, and the keys you can hit, but I'm going to tell you anyway. My cursor just locked up, I'm hoping that's not a sign that I'm offline.

You're still here, I just switched the slide for you.

Okay. I'm not seeing it, but I'll go anyway. So what you do is you type in your comment whatever it is. I built this one because I didn't like the example I was given. I said, "I'm going to try something even harder and make it go." So we've got that when you get -- you hit tab -- excuse me, you hit Command, Enter, Control, Enter on Windows and a way it goes. I think I've got control again, Lauren. So thank you very much. It gives you a preview of the code that you get and from there, you hit tab and it fills it in. Again, you can always go and adjust. I was amazed at how well this worked by doing the glide aggregate and a glide record and group buy and returning an object. That's what I put in the comments. So pretty slick stuff that makes it all go. Very impressed with this, and I look forward to experimenting with some more. Perhaps we'll do a live coding happy hour and hack away on that, you never know. Just a quick reminder that you won't find this on your PDI when you upgrade to Vancouver right away, at least -- it will be closer to general availability, which is coming out later in Q3, I'm allowed to say. So with that, I invite you go over to developer.servicenow.com and upgrade your PDI that should be available some day -- some time today as we record this August 3. I know last time, people were jumping all over and going, I don't see it, I don't see it, I don't see it. Wait a minute, wait a minute. We do these in batches, so it will take some time to get that updated. Also, while you're waiting for that, you can check out the release notes on docs.servicenow.com. And don't forget you can always explore more about Vancouver. We do have many more of these on-demand webinars. So take a look at those. We're going to jump right into any last minute Q&A that we've got.

All right. Time for Q&A. We have a lot of different things. One of the main questions that we have been getting throughout is, will there be public availability for Vancouver for PDIs? Did anybody want to answer that? I know the answer. Did anybody else want to answer that?

Public availability...

As and when can we get access to Vancouver for our PDIs?

Very soon, hopefully, starting today. .

The plan is usually today and then general availability for all instances is usually in a few weeks. We had a question for Pranav regarding dynamically reduced access. Someone asked, is the reverse possible dynamically expanding access?

So you can -- right now, you can configure the policies to allow or disallow access, if that's what you're asking.

We had some questions about -- oh, we had a lot of questions about ServiceNow large language models. So to clarify, the Generative AI capabilities in Vancouver will generally be connected to open AI if you choose to integrate with open AI. And then in future releases, I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say of those kind of things, but ServiceNow large language models or homegrown models and stuff like that are planned for the future and being able to integrate with other open AI model -- or not Open AI, but any other large language models like Google Bard and NVIDIA ones and stuff like that is also planned for it. And so a lot of that is yes, but in the future, a lot of those homegrown large language models are planned. Throw in any questions if you see any?

One question I keep seeing is, is there some sort of training path on Now Learning for Generative AI? I assume there will be. We don't have any confirmation at the different team, unfortunately, I would keep my eye on developer.servicenow.com and all the resources for upcoming training because there definitely will be the content coming out. I just don't know the specifics.

And I think one question I'm seeing is about Access Analyzer. So people are asking, do we need to impersonate to know the access? No, you don't need to impersonate. You have a module now, you go to a particular record, right click on it, and analyze access. That's what you click on it. So we are doing a life coding happy hour next week, I think. So we can -- you guys can join that if you want to know more about it.

We're seeing a lot of questions -- go ahead, Lauren.

I was just going to say you didn't -- we keep saying live coding happy hour. Could someone describe what that means to the people that might not have joined before.

I'll go ahead. So we've got a series of live streams and videos that come out. We mentioned the content calendar at devlink.sn/Vancouver, I should probably do one of these here. We typically do live coding happy hour on Friday. It's unscripted. I like to call it the antithesis of a well-polished demo. We go in with a mission. We go unarmed with some information about how a particular product or feature capability works, and we do our best. You'll see us skin our knees and bang our heads a couple of times and go through that thought process that developers and architects and admins do as they implement some of these things. So very fun to watch, unscripted. We never know if we're going to win or lose, but we make a good effort of it.

And then you want to describe Creative Toolbox while you're at it?

Creative Toolbox is on the other end of the spectrum with more of a pre-canned demo with typically one of our product managers who is behind that. For example, we will be doing the decision builder features that Lauren talked about earlier, we'll get Julia Perlis back to talk about publishing and testing for that and [indiscernible] will make comments and ask questions, and you are welcome to join these live streams and comment along.

Great. Thanks, Chuck. We have questions about when will this recording be available? We're going to -- we're aiming for next week on Friday, on YouTube. So you can find it there if you want to rewatch it or if you want to send the link to other people. I have questions. I've actually answered this question manually throughout. So I'll just answer it on here now. A lot of people are asking, "Hey, are there any new changes on automated test framework? And that's a great plug for tuning into breakpoint our podcast next week hosted by Chuck and Lauren. Next week, we'll talk about more in depth about certain features that we've decided are exciting in Vancouver for us. We even do a nice count up from 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 to our favorite features. And in Break Point, I'll talk about a new feature in automated testing framework about being able to automatically generate tests. So not just being able to interpret how and create tests like in previous release, but this one will automatically generate those tests for you, and it's one of the new features in Vancouver. It wasn't in TechNow because I couldn't find a pretty slide to show for everybody on it. But it is a feature that is part of Vancouver and I'm really excited about it. So there are enhancements to ATF in Vancouver, yes.

All right. I think that's a good stopping point and a great plug for the future content that's coming up. Thank you, Lauren. Thank you, Pranav. Thank you, Earl, for all of the hard work you've put in to making this happen. Again, is this everything in Vancouver? Oh, heavens, no. It's what we were able to find and consolidate as fast as possible to bring to you. I'm sure there's going to be some interesting stuff coming out, and I look forward to seeing what others in the community start to develop. But until we talk to you again soon, thank you very much. Stay safe and take care. Bye.