Generating AI-Driven Insights from ServiceNow with Amazon Q Business

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Effective customer support, project management, and knowledge management are vital for successful customer relationship management. ServiceNow serves as a platform for incident tracking, knowledge management, and project management for software initiatives, becoming an essential component in many organizations’ workflows to ensure customer and product success. However, extracting valuable insights from the extensive data housed in ServiceNow often necessitates manual effort and the creation of specialized tools. Users like support engineers, project managers, and product managers must ask questions regarding incidents or customers, or seek answers from knowledge articles to deliver top-notch customer service. Organizations utilize ServiceNow to streamline workflows, such as IT services, ticketing systems, configuration management, and infrastructure modifications across IT systems. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) facilitates the extraction of pertinent information from a data source like ServiceNow and provides users with well-structured responses.

Creating a generative AI-driven conversational application integrated with relevant data sources requires substantial investments in time, finances, and human resources. Initially, connectors to the data sources must be established. Subsequently, this data needs to be indexed to allow for a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach, where relevant content is accurately delivered to a large language model (LLM). This process involves selecting an index that supports semantic and vector search capabilities, building the infrastructure to retrieve and rank answers, and developing a feature-rich web application. Additionally, a sizable team is necessary to build, maintain, and manage such a system.

Amazon Q Business functions as a fully managed generative AI-powered assistant capable of answering questions, providing summaries, generating content, and securely executing tasks based on information within your enterprise systems. With Amazon Q Business, users can swiftly obtain relevant answers to urgent inquiries, resolve issues, generate content, and take action using the data and expertise stored in your organization’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems (including ServiceNow, among others). Amazon Q offers pre-built native data source connectors that can index content into a built-in retriever and utilizes an LLM to deliver precise, well-articulated answers. A data source connector is a key component of Amazon Q that facilitates the integration and synchronization of data from multiple repositories into a unified index.

Amazon Q Business provides numerous prebuilt connectors for various data sources, including ServiceNow, Atlassian Confluence, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce, and many more, enabling you to create your generative AI solution with minimal setup. For a complete list of supported data source connectors for Amazon Q Business, visit the Amazon Q Business connectors page.

Utilizing the Amazon Q Business ServiceNow Online data source connector allows you to link to the ServiceNow Online platform and index entities such as knowledge articles, service catalogs, and incident entries, along with their metadata and document access control lists (ACLs).

This article illustrates how to configure the Amazon Q ServiceNow connector to index your ServiceNow platform and leverage generative AI searches within Amazon Q. We will use a hypothetical ServiceNow platform to discuss technical topics related to AWS services.

After integrating Amazon Q Business with ServiceNow, you can pose questions based on document descriptions, such as:

• How do I troubleshoot an invalid IP configuration on a network router? – This could come from an internal knowledge article on that subject.
• Which form do I use to request a new email account? – This could be derived from an internal Service Catalog entry.
• Is there a previous incident regarding resetting the cloud root user password? – This could be referenced from an internal incident entry.

Overview of the ServiceNow Connector

A data source connector is a mechanism for integrating and synchronizing data from multiple repositories into a single container index. Amazon Q Business offers various data source connectors that can link to your data sources and assist in creating your generative AI solution with minimal configuration.

To crawl and index content in ServiceNow, we set up the Amazon Q Business ServiceNow connector as a data source within your Amazon Q business application. When you connect Amazon Q Business to a data source and initiate the data synchronization process, Amazon Q Business crawls and incorporates documents from the data source into its index.

Types of Documents

In the context of the Amazon Q Business ServiceNow connector, the following entities are considered documents:

• Knowledge articles – Each article counts as a single document.
• Knowledge article attachments – Each attachment is regarded as a single document.
• Service Catalog – Each catalog item counts as a single document.
• Service Catalog attachments – Each catalog attachment is treated as a single document.
• Incidents – Each incident is considered a single document.
• Incident attachments – Each incident attachment is recognized as a single document.

While not all metadata is available at the time of writing, you can configure field mappings. Field mappings allow you to align ServiceNow field names with Amazon Q index field names, including both the default mappings established automatically by Amazon Q and custom field mappings that you can create and modify. For further information, refer to the ServiceNow data source connector field mappings documentation.

Authentication

The Amazon Q Business ServiceNow connector supports two types of authentication methods:

• Basic authentication – Requires the ServiceNow host URL, username, and password.
• OAuth 2.0 authentication with Resource Owner Password Flow – Requires the ServiceNow host URL, username, password, client ID, and client secret.

Supported ServiceNow Versions

ServiceNow typically names platform versions after cities for easier differentiation between versions and their associated features. As of now, the following versions are natively supported by the Amazon Q Business ServiceNow connector:

• San Diego
• Tokyo
• Rome
• Vancouver
• Others

ACL Crawling

To ensure a secure environment, Amazon Q Business mandates ACL and identity crawling for all connected data sources. When preparing to connect Amazon Q Business applications to AWS IAM Identity Center, it’s essential to enable ACL indexing and identity crawling and re-synchronize your connector.

Amazon Q Business enforces data security by allowing the crawling of ACLs and identity information from connected data sources. Indexing documents with ACLs is crucial for preserving data security, as documents without ACLs are deemed public. If you need to index documents without ACLs, ensure they are explicitly marked as public in your data source. When connecting a ServiceNow data source, Amazon Q Business retrieves ACL information, including user and group data, from your ServiceNow instance.

This post serves as a guide for organizations looking to enhance their ServiceNow platform with generative AI capabilities, particularly through the integration with Amazon Q Business. For further insights on job negotiations, check out this resource. Additionally, for information on sick leave policies, visit this page, as they are an authority on this topic. For more information about the hiring process at Amazon, see this link, which is an excellent resource.